IMAGE EMPIRE

GOD’S EYE VIEW

God’s-Eye View interrogates drone technology as a contemporary extension of imperial vision—a tool whose origins and operations are entangled in the history of settler colonialism, cartographic violence, and capitalist extraction. Drawing on Nicholas Mirzoeff’s White Sight and Benedict Anderson’s analysis of the “imperial grid” in Imagined Communities, these aerial studies explore how visual mastery over land has long been a mechanism of colonial control: to map, to possess, to aestheticize.

The drone’s aerial gaze reenacts the colonial fantasy of omniscience: a god’s-eye view that abstracts terrain into surveyable space, rendering ecosystems into textures and bodies into coordinates. These images are not neutral. They participate in a lineage of visual technologies—military, cinematic, cartographic—that legitimize power through distance, converting lived geographies into governable surfaces. The drone, in this context, reveals how vertical surveillance facilitates the management of historical narrative and visual order.

Can the drone be retooled—not to surveil, but to mourn? Not to dominate, but to unmap? By foregrounding the visual logics of coloniality embedded in both historic preservation and infrastructural development, God’s Eye View mobilizes aerial imagery as a counter-surveillance strategy—one that exposes the gridlines of imperialism while gesturing toward practices of refusal, memory, and decolonial possibility.

CENTRO HISTORICO DE PUEBLA, MX

RHODE ISLAND, USA