Seeing in Verticality: From ‘Vertical Gaze’ to ‘Figuring Out’

In this theoretical chapter we explore the novel visual grammar that seems to be emerging in the contemporary city. The view from above, we argue, is being significantly reshaped as a result of the triangulation of digital locative technologies, platform-based algorithmic sieving and, increasingly, AI applications. The new media topologically reshape the urban experience by providing a digitally mediated way to embody vertical vision into both virtual and actual trajectories that are constantly prompted, multiplied, traced and tracked, twisting and tilting the socio-material plane of the city, questioning motives and guiding desires. As a result, from the classic cosmographic dream of modern maps, but also from the modern aeronautical-cosmonautical mode of seeing from verticality, we have moved to a stage which may be approximated as ‘seeing in verticality’, where classical verticality is both perfected and superseded. Intersecting images and text, we try to make sense of this immersive, enveloping condition, so as to make it both more legible and more ‘sensible’.