Remotely Sensing Affective Afterlives: The Spectral Geographies of Material Remains

Remote sensing is an important geospatial technique employed across the discipline, yet it remains tangential to the conceptual and empirical concerns of cultural geographers. A modified understanding of remote sensing can, however, inform cultural geographical research into the persistence and circulation of spectral geographies. Revisiting a specific episode of Arctic exploration—the 1897 Andrée Balloon Expedition to the North Pole—provides a vehicle through which to substantiate this claim. The remains of the expedition, including objects, diaries, photographic film, and human remains, were found on a remote, ice-covered Arctic island in 1930. Over time these remains have become generative of a spectral afterlife: a distributed field of affective materials that circulates through specific configurations of object, text, and image. Moving through this field can best be undertaken as a modified kind of remote sensing, where remote sensing is understood not so much as a technology of distanced, elevated image capture but as a set of mobile and modest techniques for sensing the unsettling geographies of the spectral. Enacting this process of remote sensing, however, requires the cultivation of distinctive modes of narration, demonstrated here through the dispersal, scattering, and ongoing return of the question, “Where is Andrée?”