Uncanny Sensing, Remote Valleys
2013-2020

Uncanny Sensing, Remote Valleys is a project aimed at investigating ecology and post-natural landscapes. It is about the rise of the machine in the age of the Anthropocene and how we understand, perceive, and experience the environment using technology – giving us a view of a life-supporting Earth that is digital, synthetic, strange, uncanny.

Nonhuman photograph captured by motion sensor trail cam of a female wolf in the Fort McCoy Barrens State Natural Area, Wisconsin.

Through the use of autonomous aerial cameras, air-monitoring sensors, and sound detectors, I present media and data gathered in the field documenting animal behavior, plant cycles, waste, displacement, erosion, and other elements of the human-altered landscape. Some of this material I’ve collected myself, some has been appropriated from various sources: federal and municipal agencies, the US military, watchdog non-profits, university research groups, and from members of the public.

The title of the project is a reconfiguration of the terms:

remote sensing a method of data collection from the physical world via sensors and other remote technology and uncanny valley the cognitive dissonance caused by lifelike replicas of living things. First discovered by robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970, The uncanny valley is defined as a level of realism in which the human observer has a negative reaction. Any less realistic and we feel empathy; any more realistic and we can't distinguish that it's artificial. the valley in between produces repulsion, disgust, fear, etc.

Do we experience the uncanny valley when encountering nonhumans, those of flesh and blood or built in a lab?

Do other beings, sentient or not, experience the uncanny valley when encountering us?

Have we become undead to them?

Do they recognize our ruins and human-made devices when they encounter them in "nature"?

Compressed series of excerpted clips and captions for exhibition premiere installation at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum at the University of Oregon. Note: Captions are not part of the artwork and for reference only by the viewer of this excerpt reel. Imagery from the NASA Scientific Visualization Studio, used with permission and for informational purposes.

Uncanny Sensing, Remote Valleys is supported from a 2013-14 Creative Capital award and a 2019 Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.

Sites of fieldwork, interviews, sensor deployment, and location filming include:

Remnants of primeval forest and geologic-time resource exploitation (frack-sand, glacial till, aquifers) in Wisconsin

Industrial plants, sinking neighborhoods, synthetic airspaces, and doomed wetlands along the petrochemical Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana

Sites of refuge from global warming and direct action history in the Pacific Northwest

Techno-institutional landscapes of transhumanists / futurists in the Silicon Valley

Archival footage and sound recordings of extinct and critically endangered animals (Macaulay Library, Cornell U)

Interviews with climate change deniers (e.g. Florida, Washington D.C.)

Remote sensing laboratories at federal sites (NASA JPL, USAF, USNAV)

Geoengineering efforts at institutional sites (CALTECH, Arizona State)

DARPA supported robotics, autonomous tech, and artificial intelligence projects (Boston Dynamics, undisclosed private corporations)

Remote sensing sites at sea (various off west / east coasts)

The Arctic and Antarctic (Beaufort Sea, Alaska; Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica, Svalbard, Norway)