NWOxs grant for "Terraforming from Above. Digital Methods for Colonial Aerial Photography"
Between 1920-1949, Dutch pilots systematically photographed Indonesia from above, creating an unprecedented aerial archive of the colonial landscape. I’ll develop an AI-powered method to analyze these photographs at scale, examining the sweeping transformation of the Indonesian environment through plantations, mines, roads, and other colonial infrastructure. But this isn’t just about colonial power. Analyzing at scale also reveals persistence, adaptation, and resistance by indigenous communities—patterns that individual photographs might miss but become visible when you look at thousands of images systematically. The project essentially turns tools of territorial control into sources of historical understanding. These aerial surveys were designed to facilitate extraction and administration, but they also captured environmental realities the colonizers didn’t necessarily intend to document. What (hopefully) makes this approach valuable is its potential to be applied to similar photograph collections worldwide. Many colonial powers created aerial archives across the Global South, and digital methods offer new ways to study environmental transformation at unprecedented scales.
