2025-26
Tectonics of Time
Tectonics of Time is an ongoing art-science inquiry that draws on millions of raw satellite images — captured by NASA's Landsat and ESA's Sentinel-2 missions — to construct a spatial cartography of the living Earth. It is an attempt to inhabit the planet's surface as a sensory field: to feel the slow rhythms of growth, seasonal dynamics, and annual transformation not as data, but as immersive spatial experience — where time becomes something you can move through and sense.
spatial cartography
At the heart of Tectonics of Time lies a fundamental reimagining of how we perceive change. The transformations that shape our planet —the slow recomposing of landscapes, the seasonal pulse of entire ecosystems — unfold across spatial and temporal scales that exceed ordinary human perception. We live within these changes without being able to see them. The project asks: what if we could?
The work proposes time not as a linear sequence of events, but as a dense, accumulative force — one that can be spatialised, entered, and felt. By compressing four decades of planetary observation into navigable three-dimensional form, Tectonics of Time makes duration inhabitable. The viewer does not observe change from a distance — they move through it, encountering its layered structures, ruptures, and tensions as direct spatial experience.
Central to this is the concept of “dense time” — distinct from geological deep time in its nature rather than its scale. Earth observation technologies do not record ancient strata; they record the relentless present, image by image, season by season. What accumulates is not depth but density: an
extraordinary richness of temporal information that captures transformation at precisely the register we inhabit, yet perpetually fail to perceive.
Equally defining is the project's relationship to multispectral seeing — which the work treats not merely as a technical method but as an epistemological proposition. Each wavelength reveals a different dimension of the same surface: what is dominant in one spectrum may vanish in another. Moisture, heat, photosynthetic activity, mineral composition — each occupies its own register of visibility. Together, they form a superimposition of perspectives, a plurality of simultaneous truths about a single place. This is, in essence, a multi-species way of seeing: the acknowledgment that the world looks fundamentally different depending on how, and with what, you look.
Tectonics of Time holds these ideas in tension — technology and sensibility, data and sensation, the measurable and the felt — to ask whether expanded temporal and spectral perception might deepen our understanding of the ecological systems we are part of, and so rarely see whole.
The project draws on four decades of multispectral satellite imaging — a mode of seeing that extends far beyond visible light, reading the Earth across infrared, thermal, and shortwave wavelengths. What it captures is not landscape, but planetary metabolism: the breath of forests, the drift of seasons, the slow recomposition of terrain across time.
From this vast archive, AI processes were applied to animate the sequential imaging data — transforming the accumulated record of captures into fluid temporal flows, making duration and change visible as continuous movement.
The defining act is one of translation. Through custom-developed computational pipelines, every pixel — encoded with its geographic position, its timestamp, and its spectral signature — becomes a voxel: a unit of volume in space. Millions of these units, assembled simultaneously, construct a four-dimensional spatial body in which place, time, and wavelength coexist as a single inhabitable form. Data becomes architecture. Measurement becomes sensation. Forty years of planetary transformation, rendered as a living spatial terrain you can move through.