Satellite images have become increasingly prevalent in contemporary culture and are a privileged means of representing and understanding the changes that are taking place on our planet on a territorial scale. Yet their smoothness belies the complexity—not to mention the politics—of the underlying photographic apparatus capable of capturing, stitching, and disseminating such images. Taken to represent evidence for climate change, for instance, fields of pixels must be rendered into tangible information. While promising truth, these processes of interpretation lead to spaces of contestation.

Focusing on the evidentiary method of remote sensing, Samaneh Moafi presents Ecocide in Indonesia, 2016, an investigation into the 2015 fires in Kalimantan and Sumatra that consumed over 21,000 square kilometers of forest and peat lands. Hilde Brontsema presents Friends of the Earth Netherlands vs. Royal Dutch Shell, 2008–ongoing, a legal case in which four Nigerian citizens are taking Shell to court over oil spills that had polluted their fields and their fish farming ponds.

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