Lilian Kroth

In residence: May - June 2025

Lilian Kroth is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Fribourg (CH), and works at the intersection of history and philosophy of science and art. In her current projects, she engages with vertical knowledge and remote sensing technologies, (“Seeing like a Satellite. Drawing as a Research Method to Investigate Icy Environments”, 2025; “Aerial Spatial Revolution”, 2024-2027; Swiss National Science Foundation).

Her PhD project at the University of Cambridge engaged with Michel Serres’s philosophy of limits. She was an associated researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin), at the University of Groningen, and one of the organizers of the CRASSH research network “Remote Sensing. Ice, Instruments, Imagination” in Cambridge. Prior to that, she studied Philosophy at the University of Vienna (BA, MA) and Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

During the residency at Artica Svalbard, Kroth will be working on her project ‘Seeing Ice like a Satellite. Drawing as a Research Method to Investigate Icy Environments.’ Kroth writes of the project, “‘Seeing’ through the perspective satellites has become part of our daily experience, from using Google maps, looking at weather forecasts, or reading so-called before and after satellite images of regions that have witnessed dramatic environmental changes. Particularly when it comes to the melting of ice and often hard-to-access cryospheric ecologies, the satellite’s view plays a key role in mediating data that exceeds the frames of human vision. However, the tendency of such ostensibly ‘photographic’ images to give a sense of unified objectivity can obscure knowledge about the processes which such imagery undergoes, how it relates to information “from the ground”, and how “seeing data” connects to our embodied vision – all of which are crucial and fundamental topics of climate change communication.

The aim of the project is to support and strengthen artistic approaches to satellite data literacy, in order to contextualise and make graspable the forms of technologically-mediated seeing. A better understanding of how satellite images are ‘made’ and what they show is made possible by drawing out, literally and metaphorically, the gaps and idealisations on which the composition of images are predicated; methods of temporal and spatial interpretation; or ways in which a line in the ice is assessed as shadow, crack, river, or border. Drawing can be a tool for ‘grounding’ satellite vision, for creating visualisations of the possibilities and limits of satellites’ perception – indeed, for making the invisible in satellite images visible, and showing the density of processes by which the visualisable becomes visible.”

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Instagram: @lilian_kroth
X: @KrothLilian