Proxistant Vision

How the surge in aerial technologies, such as drones and satellites, influences visual culture beyond the screen.

The smooth flight from aerial overview to intimate close-up in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) exemplifies the concept of proxistant vision: a combination of proximity and distance, close-up and overview, detail and the big picture, in a unified visual form. In Proxistant Vision, Synne Bull and Dragan Miletic develop the concept of proxistant vision and trace its emergence as a visual paradigm of the twenty-first century. As exemplified by Google Earth’s digital swipe between globe perspective and street-level detail, proxistant vision currently proliferates across digital geography, computer games, architectural models, data visualizations, and CGI cinema. It is defined as the combination of proximity and distance in a single image, across a dynamic flight, or zoom.

Pointing to the surge in aerial imaging and remote sensing technologies such as drones and satellites, the book moves beyond the screen to include the kinetic architecture of rides and urban observation wheels. The key objective of this study is threefold: to trace the genealogy and understand the technical operation of proxistance as it traveled from periphery to center in the twenty-first century; to explore its alternative potentialities in contemporary art practices; and, finally, to reflect critically on the worldviews underpinning different modalities of proxistance in times of environmental crisis. The authors show how the powerful effect of combining proximity and distance, which was already in place with the earliest cartographic inscriptions, has taken precedence on and beyond our screens today.Introduction: A Paradigm of Flight between Proximity and Distance
The Aerial View In Motion
New Forms of Vertical Mediation
Super Cinema, Drone Cinema, and the New Verticality
Cartographic Cinema
Digital Geography
Vision And Visuality
Situating The Field
Methods and Chapters
Three Strata of Proxistance
1. The Wheel Before the Reel
The Great Chicago Wheel
Turning the Wheel of Wonder
2. London (Eye) Calling
The Proxistant Vision of London
3. Ferriscope (1893-2020)
4. First Person View (FPV) Dronematography
Drone Ethics
The Stars of FPV
Volumetric Territory
The 3D Model Flythrough
5. A Bird’s-Eye View Establishing Shot
6. Venetie 1111100110 (1500-2022)
Ranieri’s Proxistant Vision
Digital Venetie
Prologue (Pale Blue Dot)
7. Proxistant Earth Models
Latour on Powers of Ten
Google Earth
Cinematic and Cartographic Scales
8. Zoom Blue Dot (1990-2020)
Diagrammatic Proxistance
The Scale Consciousness of Aerial Art
In the Space of the Zoom Blue Dot
9. Afterthoughts on the Anthropocene“Tracking across centuries of technologies of perception, Proxistant Vision demonstrates how artistic research married to critical inquiry can yield both spectacular digital art and new ways of understanding the world we live in.”
—Scott Rettberg, Director, Center for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen; author of Electronic Literature

“Proxistance is a highly productive concept for the analysis of visual forms that both reflect and create our understanding of the world. This book generously enriches comparative and media-archeological approaches to various screen cultures. “
—Nanna Verhoeff, Professor of Screen Cultures & Society, Utrecht University, author of Urban Screens: Practices, Situations, Concept.

“Proxistant Vision offers a capacious conceptual framework and a generative analytical tool for understanding a definitive visual mode of the twenty-first century. Sweeping in its scope while remaining attentive to the operations of the various media in play, it will make a significant and enduring contribution to scholarship on camera movement, the aerial view, and the closeup.”
—Kristen Whissel, Professor of Film & Media, University of California, Berkeley, author of Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema.

“Proxistant Vision adroitly braids history, theory, and art to sharpen scale consciousness and make the case for its impact on human futures. A tour-de-force of art practice plus research, the volume fulfills the highest promise of interdisciplinary inquiry, of interest to a wide range of artists, educators, and scholars.”
—Meredith Tromble, Professor Emeritus, San Francisco Art Institute, co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art & ArchitectureSynne Tollerud Bull is Pro-Dean of Research at the School of Arts, Design, and Media at Kristiania University of Applied Sciences. She led the research projects Urban Ecologies, Media Seas of the High North Atlantic, and Re: place, and is the coeditor of Urban Images (Sternberg Press) and Screen Space Reconfigured. She is part of the award-winning artistic duo Bull.Miletic with Dragan Miletic.

Dragan Miletic holds a practice-based PhD from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. He is part of the award-winning artistic duo Bull.Miletic with Synne Tollerud Bull.