IF THE WHOLE SKY IS NOW A CAMERA, WHERE IS THE NEW FRAME?

January 22, 2024

Low Orbit is a wearable open source ai software designed to interface with satellites. As of January 3, 2024, 8,377 active satellites are now in various Earth orbits according to orbit.ing-now.com. Remote sensing introduces a new experience of being constantly observed by nonhuman sources for the first time. 

Historically, photography allowed us to choose how we were perceived. We could decide what was in the frame, and what was edited out. In a world under perpetual aerial surveillance, your whole self is surveilled. We are living under a sky that has become a camera, we are no longer the photographer, and we do not yet have control of how we appear within this new narrative. What does it mean to perceive ourselves through aerial images? How do we perform when the frame expands? How does the sky see me? 

Low orbit fashion is a response to this 45º shift in perspective from the horizontal to vertical.

What does this level of technological surveillance do to our understanding of living inside the frame of the image? What are the implications of having machines view us 24/7? How does it change our relationship with space/time? Sense of place? How do we move through the world differently? Is there a new psychological spatial orientation evolving? Behavior knowing we are being perceived even by nonhuman evaluators? Sense of safety? Ideas of identity? What is the impact / are the implications of removing the sky from our view in relation to our sense of orientation? How is replacing the sky with the camera / lens / seeing eye changing our daily behavior?

IF THE WHOLE SKY IS NOW A CAMERA, WHERE IS THE NEW FRAME?

  • Jewelry that alerts people when the satellites are above them

  • Clothing lights up when there’s a satellite passing over for a community experience

  • New “Find My Friends” - shift in perspective where you can now see your friends through satellite images

  • New “BeReal” - social experience where users could be pinged at the same time and their aerial images are captured as well