'Here Be Dragons': The Liminal Topographies of Statistical Imaging

Nineteenth-century cartographic imagination saw dragons, sea serpents, ‘men without heads with their faces in their chests’ and many other intimidating beasts of the lands unknown, terre incognite, abandon their corners of the Earth—permanently.² Popularized by the phrase ‘here be dragons’, the mapmakers’ exotic creatures occupied uncharted territories for centuries until the colonial expansion took hold, ousting the ambiguities and risks associated with venturing unknown lands. Today, the accuracy and detail of digital Earth Engines allow for little surface for such cartographic fiction to take hold, feeding a longstanding rhetoric of omniscience through the seamless ‘Google Earth’ interface. Yet, as this paper argues, the unknown, the unseen and the liminal continue to thrive within and across the infrastructures of environmental monitoring, without necessarily disturbing the cartographic surface. Resorting to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s invocation of ‘planetarity’ alongside the ‘globe’, this paper asks: What remains unseen in the regime of ubiquitous surveillance? A media-material reading is engaged for responding to this question on the two operational levels of remote imaging: data gathering and data processing. The resulting framework of spectral and statistical (in)visibilities are further discussed in relation to the production of spatial knowledge.