Remote Sensing: Touch at a Distance

Today's remotely operated sensors extend and restructure geographies of feeling. While media theorists often claim that these sensory transformations result from recently developed machinery, this essay theorizes "remote sensing" in such a way that the phenomenon can include technologies pre-dating networked digital media. I use the well-known Pearl Manuscript (BL Cotton Nero A.x) as an example of a premodern textual artifact designed to manufacture a geographically extended tactility. My contention is that thinking about purportedly futuristic remote sensing more broadly lets us consider touch at a distance as a long-standing aesthetic and technological phenomenon.