A View From Above (2025) by Kinnari Saraiya is an installation that poetically examines how infrastructures of artificial intelligence, mapping and atmospheric data shape perception and the politics of territory. At its centre is a 2.1 x 2.1 metre kite, fabricated in the form of early surveillance kites once deployed by colonial powers. This giant, winged technology, which the artist has test flown, requires the physical strength of men to keep it in the air, and is reconfigured here as both a sculptural object and a projection surface for a continuously shifting digital environment. The work draws attention to tactility across both digital and physical worlds, where touch, force and interaction remain central to systems often perceived as immaterial.
Audience interaction drives the digital system. Visitors enter the name of a country into a website, which is translated into coordinates via Google Maps’ API. These coordinates call live data from Open Meteo, including temperature, precipitation, pollution and wind. Each parameter is rendered within a real-time simulation in Unreal Engine. Light warms and cools with temperature; haze gathers and thickens with pollution; rain begins to fall with precipitation; the camera drifts, carried by the wind.
This digital artwork relies on APIs, such as those provided by Google, which structure how information is accessed, visualised and prioritised. Operating at the intersection of infrastructure and geopolitics, these systems quietly shape how space, movement and information are perceived. Because they rely on centrally controlled datasets and policies, they privilege certain territories, naming conventions and forms of visibility while marginalising others. Access can be restricted, priced or withdrawn, meaning that entire regions or communities may become less visible, less legible, less able to operate within digital space.
The projected world is never fixed. No single participant determines the outcome. Each input folds into those that came before it, producing a composite location that is always shifting, always shared. The environment emerges collectively, unstable and contingent, resisting any single point of control.
The work is felt through the body as much as it is seen. When a visitor calls rain into being, its sound begins to fill the gallery, surrounding the listener, dissolving the boundary between simulation and atmosphere. When the Northern Lights appear, they move quietly across the surface of the kite, a sudden and luminous event that feels both distant and intimately present, as though something vast has briefly descended into the room.
At other times, the sky discolours. Pollution gathers and the air thickens, dimming the light and flattening the horizon. A sense of desolation settles in. In these moments, the abstraction of data gives way to recognition; somewhere, at that very moment, this is not an image but a lived condition. Someone is breathing this air. The work moves between beauty and discomfort, holding both in tension, asking the viewer to confront how distant systems are entangled with immediate human experience.


​CREDITS
Unreal Engine Development: Muhammed Babatunde & Matt Hutchings
Weather System development: Harold Starr and Gabriel Langmaid, with support from The Mechatronic Library
Kite fabrication support: Pankaj Saraiya
Commissioned by University of Edinburgh in collaboration with Adobe