Table-Top Views

Abstract

High resolution aerial photography has become widely available in the twenty-first century. Already accustomed to consuming data-rich bird’s-eye views, we have eagerly adapted this scale of digital imagery for pleasure even while data analytics has emerged to treat such overviews as a new domain of research. Within a digital era proliferating with these images, we are aware that looking from an aerial viewpoint is not an entirely new practice; it was popular in many times and cultures before ours. Table-Top Views examines the persistent appeal of aerial pictures — the aesthetic allure that accompanies their historical and contemporary agency in urbanism, surveillance, war, and art. Elevated viewpoint images are studied through analogies to processes in related disciplines: cinematic methods like the aerial pan and the macro-to-micro zoom, the traditions of landscape painting in China and Japan, and image appropriation in digital image discourse. Table-Top Views then curates a series of images, a selection that confronts the world through an aerial viewpoint.