False Color: Landsat 8 OLI Path036 10 March 2020
Artist: Leah Meisterlin
Location: Front Gallery
False Color: Landsat 8 OLI Path036 10 March 2020 is a series of twelve hand-embroidered multispectral maps. Together, they trace the path of the Landsat 8 satellite from the Arctic Circle to Mexico on 10 March 2020, the day before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic.
Each piece is cross-stitched to scale (1 stitch = 150 meters x 150 meters) and depicts a portion of North America captured by the satellite’s OLI sensor as it passed overhead. To create the series, the satellite’s data was analyzed incorporating portions of the non-visible light spectrum, before embroidery patterns were designed by reclassifying and composing the results within a forty-color palette.
Rendering shortwave infrared, near infrared, and green light reflectance, the maps span the continent’s climactic regions, its borders, and its multiple sovereignties—across both “the North” and “the West” and their territorial histories. The maps represent landscapes that are spectrally and perspectivally invisible to the human eye at a moment when humanity began to wrestle with the borderless globalization of disease. Some of the maps are recognizable, revealing features we can interpret as environments we have built and understand. For example, P036 R025 10 March 2020 includes the unmistakable geometries of (empty) airport runways. Others are more difficult to parse, requiring a visual adjustment to engage as maps, as representations constructed through political, economic, and environmental technologies.
The series both is and is not geoscientific. Rather, the underlying methodology speaks to the representational malleability of geospatial data visualization, the craft of information interpretation, and the quiet omnipresence of satellite surveillance. The resulting maps (sometimes psychedelic, sometimes eerie) ask what we think we see when we represent territories, environments, and their ground conditions. The works’ medium and format draw from the history of girls’ needlework-as-geographic-education to make manual and slow down the automated processes of data-derived analytics just long enough to consider the impact of our hands in our work. Through the process, the intention and hope are to defamiliarize and highlight the experiential and scalar mismatch between that impact and the planetary infrastructures that drive it.
Artist Bio
Leah Meisterlin is a cartographer, geospatial methodologist, and educator. Trained as an architect and urban planner, Leah’s work engages the relationship between spatial technologies and representation, in cities and across regions.
Leah leads Meisterlin Projects—a design, research, and consulting practice focused around cartographic analysis and the technologies of spatial representation. She is a Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Studies at Barnard College.