Lilian Kroth

In residence: May - June 2025

Lilian Kroth is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), working at the intersection of the history and philosophy of science and art. Her research explores how we come to know and see the world through mediated technologies, with a focus on vertical knowledge and remote sensing. Her current projects include “Seeing like a Satellite. Drawing as a Research Method to Investigate Icy Environments” (2025) and “Aerial Spatial Revolution” (2024–2027), supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Kroth’s doctoral research at the University of Cambridge examined Michel Serres’s philosophy of limits. She has held research positions at the Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin), the University of Groningen, and was one of the organisers of the CRASSH research network Remote Sensing: Ice, Instruments, Imagination in Cambridge. She previously studied Philosophy at the University of Vienna (BA, MA) and Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

During her residency at Artica Svalbard, Kroth will develop a drawing-based research project that investigates how we ‘see’ icy environments through satellite imagery. From Google Maps to climate visualisations, satellite images have become a key part of how we perceive remote or inaccessible ecologies. But these images, often mistaken for direct representations, are the result of complex data processing and interpretation. Drawing—used here both literally and metaphorically—becomes a method to explore the distance between the visible and the visualised.

Working across abstract and figurative modes, Kroth will draw spectral data, composite image stitching, the tools of remote sensing, and the metaphors used to describe satellite vision. Her media spans pencil to cold needle etching. Through this process, she aims to foster artistic satellite data literacy—making visible the layers of mediation behind climate imagery, and grounding remote sensing in embodied ways of seeing. Drawing becomes a tool to reveal how the invisible becomes visible, and to question what it truly means to ‘see like a satellite’.

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