The numerous large-scale interrelated autonomous remote sensing systems operative in the present have long genealogies in military research and development and remain influential in military, civic and corporate spheres. In fact, as these spheres have merged and blurred over the decades from the end of World War II to the present, the deployment and actions of these systems often become means for delineating the differences between these spheres and their priorities – this despite their being composed of the same sensor-based platforms of software and hardware regardless of deployer. Smart Dust, for example, constitutes the basis of polyscalar computer systems of remote sensing at micro-levels and relates to ubiquitous computing, ‘pervasive networks’ and ‘utility fogs’ as potentially transmitting endless streams of ‘real-time’ or stored data. Developed initially for DARPA, the technological R&D arm of the US Defense Department, Smart Dust started with work by Kris Pister and his team at UC Berkeley, who refer to the project as ‘autonomous sensing and communication in a cubic millimetre’ (Pister et al.). In a glimpse at the not-too-distant future, Hewlett- Packard intends to distribute a trillion of these micro-sensors from the bottom of the ocean and up into space in a project they are calling ‘the central nervous system for the earth’ (Hewlett-Packard website).

The history of remote sensing is the history of media generally, especially electric and electronic media. Remote sensing is implied in all tele-technologies and thus finds its earliest imaginary possibilities in the age of telephony, telegraphy and radio, along with the attendant avatars of subjectivity capable of experiencing sensorial phenomena at a distance. Science and technology reconfigure the imaginaries such that they can decontextualise the observing subject from the time-space constraints of the corporeal body, thus repeating Heidegger's famous dictum that the essence of technology is nothing technological: it instead resides in the immaterial, the noetic influences that render the world possible and malleable. The physical constraints of nature become those areas that certain forms of techno-scientific inquiry wish to erase or turn to their advantage, as made manifest in remote sensing systems deployed by various militaries most especially but not exclusively through opto-electronic devices operating at a distance and overcoming space to operate in a real-time of control.