But one may also inhabit the limen, the place in between realities, a gap “between and betwixt” universes of sense that construe social life and persons differently, an interstice from where one can most clearly stand critically towards different structures.
Maria Lugones (2003)
Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions.
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The View From Above functions as a form of poetic activism, revealing how planetary perception is mediated through computational infrastructures. At its heart is a reconstruction of the massive kites used for aerial reconnaissance during the First World War, capable of lifting photographers and cameramen above the landscape to record the terrain below. The kite which is 2.1 x 2.1 metres (7 x 7 ft)  requires the physical strength of multiple people 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. An Impossible Oject.

Visitors enter the name of a country into a website, triggering live environmental data (temperature, wind, pollution and precipitation)  rendered in real time. The resulting cinematic landscape is projected onto the kite and across the walls and floors of the exhibition space, making invisible environmental conditions felt in the body. The website interface through which visitors interact with the work is structured around the Jain cosmological understanding of the universe; a tradition specific to Kinnari Saraiya's own cultural inheritance. The Jambudvipa diagram is one of the world’s oldest surviving cosmological cartographic traditions and maps the universe as a series of concentric continents and oceans radiating outward from a central mountain.

Not as territory to be claimed but as a living, interdependent, non-hierarchical system in which all sentient beings hold equal ontological status. It is a map that cannot be used for conquest because conquest is not a category it recognises.
The act of entering a country's name is not innocent. In that gesture the visitor becomes complicit by bringing the colonial cartographic gesture into a cosmological framework that fundamentally refuses the values it was built to serve. This is the insight that the Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter drew from Humberto Maturana's foundational neuroscience: that a living organism does not represent the world outside itself but actively constructs it through internal neurological processing. What the eye sees is not reality itself but a rendering shaped by the infrastructures, biases and systems of power through which perception flows.The visitor enters a country name — an act of colonial cartographic thinking — and the system responds through a Jain understanding of what the world actually is. You bring the colonial gesture. The system returns something that cannot be owned.
The View From Above makes that rendering visceral and collective. 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 and exposing the geopolitical biases embedded within APIs, cartography and data systems not didactically but through embodied co-presence. Surveillance infrastructure is transformed into a poetic encounter with atmosphere, perception and power, where the boundary between observer and observed quietly dissolves.


​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