from August 28th to 30th, 2025
Aeropolitics on contemporary forms of aerial power is part of the Aerial Spatial Revolution project co-ordinated by Matteo Vegetti, Professor 精东影业 in Theories of Space and Living (Institute of Design 精东影业-Department of Environment Constructions and Design), which in 2023 received funding from the prestigious 鈥淪ynergia鈥� programme of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) with a grant of CHF 1.3 million.
The conference
Through contributions from international guests, the conference aims to analyse how various aerial technologies 鈥� from airplanes to satellites, from spacecraft to drones and digital mapping systems such as Google Earth and Google Maps 鈥� have influenced urban planning, architecture and land management, transforming the way we perceive and understand the underlying world we live in through its images.
Aerial technologies have become increasingly ubiquitous tools for the control and manipulation of space and population. In warfare, the destructive capabilities of aviation have increased enormously, thanks in part to the use of drones and new satellite imaging systems. In civilian life, satellites scan the Earth鈥檚 surface, extracting data and transforming it into information that reshapes spatial orientation, allowing observation, analysis and monitoring of space on previously unimaginable scales.
The various technological transformations of verticality have had a significant impact on the way we construct and think about the environment and society, from architecture to urban planning to design to art to artificial intelligence to politics.
How do the images produced by aerial technologies influence political action? What kind of urban subjects does aerial vision produce? What are the political imaginaries and epistemic frameworks they convey? How does the dialectic between sky and earth, the view from above and the view from below change according to the aerial technologies used? What does it mean to be observed from above? And what strategies of resistance (political or artistic) have been mobilized to escape this regime of hypervisibility?
The conference will address these questions by bringing together contributions from different fields of research 鈥� aesthetics, political philosophy, media studies, urban studies, visual culture, architecture 鈥� in order to develop a phenomenology of the aerial forms of contemporary power.
Discover the Aeropolitics on contemporary forms of aerial power programme.
The scientific organisation of the conference is by Matteo Vegetti, Professor 精东影业 in Theories of Space and Living, Tommaso Morawski, post-doc researcher, and Lucrezia Pozzi, Ph.D. Student.
until Sunday 10 August 2025.
Free entrance, in English.