BY KYRIAKI GONI
orbital sensing plant metabolism ancestral forecasting human body
Sensing the Heat is a decentralized media installation that investigates how planetary heat stress is detected, modeled, governed, and felt through orbital and technopolitical infrastructures. Synchronizing live Sentinel-3 Earth observation data with physical matter, language, and algorithmic models, the work approaches heat not as a climate image but as an operational condition. It also anticipates the future role of ESA’s FLEX (Fluorescence Explorer) mission, scheduled for launch in 2026, which will be the first satellite specifically designed to measure solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF)—a faint light emitted by plants during photosynthesis that changes under heat and water stress before visible damage appears. Designed to operate alongside Sentinel-3, FLEX will provide unprecedented insights into plant stress at a planetary scale.
At the center of the installation is Pearl Millet (Cenchrus americanus), one of the Sahel’s most resilient staple crops. Stretching across Africa south of the Sahara Desert, the Sahel is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, experiencing rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, desertification, and increasing pressure on agricultural systems. Pearl Millet has become a key species for climate adaptation due to its exceptional resilience to heat and water scarcity. The plant appears simultaneously as a uranium glass sculpture and as an unstable point-cloud digital twin. The glass body fluoresces under ultraviolet light in response to real-time thermal conditions, while its digital specter reveals heat as algorithmic inference rather than direct representation. While uranium glass fluorescence and plant fluorescence originate from different physical processes, both involve the emission of visible light in response to absorbed energy. The installation uses this parallel not as a scientific equivalence but as a poetic and material analogy between planetary sensing, plant stress, and luminous response.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
An anomaly only exists relative to a recognized reference state. As climate systems become increasingly unstable, maintaining confidence in what constitutes a normal season, a healthy plant, or a predictable thermal regime becomes as important as detecting the anomaly itself. The installation therefore asks not only how thermal stress is sensed, but how different knowledge systems establish baselines, recognize change, and determine when a signal becomes significant enough to demand action. In this sense, the work reflects broader questions of climate governance and decision-making: how observations become evidence, how evidence becomes knowledge, and how knowledge becomes intervention.
At critical thermal thresholds, a heated interface translates distant climatic conditions into bodily sensation. In selected activations of the work, a performer assumes a ritual role of thermal mediation, carrying the heated plate through the installation and inviting audiences into a shared encounter with a remote environmental condition.
The work ultimately forms a system of relations between plant, heat, satellite, model, language, and body, suggesting that observation is never neutral and that every form of knowledge carries an accompanying responsibility of care. Drawing on emerging discourses on thermo-cultures and operational images, the installation foregrounds how thermal conditions become knowable through processes of sensing, modeling, and algorithmic inference, transforming heat into an operational category of governance rather than a merely visible climate image.
Rather than positioning satellite observation as a detached instrument of climate governance, the installation reimagines sensing infrastructures as relational technologies. By bringing together orbital observation, plant metabolism, ancestral forecasting practices, and bodily experience, the work proposes a shift from extractive modes of knowledge toward forms of attention grounded in interdependence, ecological attunement, and care.
As heatwaves become longer, more frequent, and more intense across many regions of the world, heat is increasingly emerging as one of the defining conditions of climate change. Unlike storms, floods, or wildfires, heat often remains difficult to perceive at planetary scales, despite its profound effects on ecosystems, agriculture, infrastructures, and human bodies. What does a heatwave look like to a satellite, to a plant or to a human body? Through this question, the installation explores how thermal stress becomes legible across different forms of intelligence and observation. What appears as a temperature anomaly to a satellite may register as metabolic distress in a plant, as a shift in ecological indicators for pastoral communities, or as bodily discomfort on human skin. Heat emerges not as a single climatic variable, but as a condition interpreted, sensed, and lived through multiple systems of knowledge and care.
Images courtesy of the artist.
orbital sensing plant metabolism ancestral forecasting human body
Sensing the Heat is a decentralized media installation that investigates how planetary heat stress is detected, modeled, governed, and felt through orbital and technopolitical infrastructures. Synchronizing live Sentinel-3 Earth observation data with physical matter, language, and algorithmic models, the work approaches heat not as a climate image but as an operational condition. It also anticipates the future role of ESA’s FLEX (Fluorescence Explorer) mission, scheduled for launch in 2026, which will be the first satellite specifically designed to measure solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF)—a faint light emitted by plants during photosynthesis that changes under heat and water stress before visible damage appears. Designed to operate alongside Sentinel-3, FLEX will provide unprecedented insights into plant stress at a planetary scale.
At the center of the installation is Pearl Millet (Cenchrus americanus), one of the Sahel’s most resilient staple crops. Stretching across Africa south of the Sahara Desert, the Sahel is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, experiencing rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, desertification, and increasing pressure on agricultural systems. Pearl Millet has become a key species for climate adaptation due to its exceptional resilience to heat and water scarcity. The plant appears simultaneously as a uranium glass sculpture and as an unstable point-cloud digital twin. The glass body fluoresces under ultraviolet light in response to real-time thermal conditions, while its digital specter reveals heat as algorithmic inference rather than direct representation. While uranium glass fluorescence and plant fluorescence originate from different physical processes, both involve the emission of visible light in response to absorbed energy. The installation uses this parallel not as a scientific equivalence but as a poetic and material analogy between planetary sensing, plant stress, and luminous response.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
An anomaly only exists relative to a recognized reference state. As climate systems become increasingly unstable, maintaining confidence in what constitutes a normal season, a healthy plant, or a predictable thermal regime becomes as important as detecting the anomaly itself. The installation therefore asks not only how thermal stress is sensed, but how different knowledge systems establish baselines, recognize change, and determine when a signal becomes significant enough to demand action. In this sense, the work reflects broader questions of climate governance and decision-making: how observations become evidence, how evidence becomes knowledge, and how knowledge becomes intervention.
At critical thermal thresholds, a heated interface translates distant climatic conditions into bodily sensation. In selected activations of the work, a performer assumes a ritual role of thermal mediation, carrying the heated plate through the installation and inviting audiences into a shared encounter with a remote environmental condition.
The work ultimately forms a system of relations between plant, heat, satellite, model, language, and body, suggesting that observation is never neutral and that every form of knowledge carries an accompanying responsibility of care. Drawing on emerging discourses on thermo-cultures and operational images, the installation foregrounds how thermal conditions become knowable through processes of sensing, modeling, and algorithmic inference, transforming heat into an operational category of governance rather than a merely visible climate image.
Rather than positioning satellite observation as a detached instrument of climate governance, the installation reimagines sensing infrastructures as relational technologies. By bringing together orbital observation, plant metabolism, ancestral forecasting practices, and bodily experience, the work proposes a shift from extractive modes of knowledge toward forms of attention grounded in interdependence, ecological attunement, and care.
As heatwaves become longer, more frequent, and more intense across many regions of the world, heat is increasingly emerging as one of the defining conditions of climate change. Unlike storms, floods, or wildfires, heat often remains difficult to perceive at planetary scales, despite its profound effects on ecosystems, agriculture, infrastructures, and human bodies. What does a heatwave look like to a satellite, to a plant or to a human body? Through this question, the installation explores how thermal stress becomes legible across different forms of intelligence and observation. What appears as a temperature anomaly to a satellite may register as metabolic distress in a plant, as a shift in ecological indicators for pastoral communities, or as bodily discomfort on human skin. Heat emerges not as a single climatic variable, but as a condition interpreted, sensed, and lived through multiple systems of knowledge and care.
Images courtesy of the artist.
Kyriaki Goni is an artist, who for ten years now engages with diverse media to explore the political, affective, and environmental dimensions of big tech. Her focus encompasses extractivism, surveillance, human and non-human relations, as well as alternative networks and infrastructures related to care and community. Employing websites, textiles, ceramics, drawings, videos, sound, and text, Goni's installations construct alternative ecosystems and shared experiences by bridging the local with the planetary and intertwining the fictional with the scientific.
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BY KYRIAKI GONI
orbital sensing plant metabolism ancestral forecasting human body
Sensing the Heat is a decentralized media installation that investigates how planetary heat stress is detected, modeled, governed, and felt through orbital and technopolitical infrastructures. Synchronizing live Sentinel-3 Earth observation data with physical matter, language, and algorithmic models, the work approaches heat not as a climate image but as an operational condition. It also anticipates the future role of ESA’s FLEX (Fluorescence Explorer) mission, scheduled for launch in 2026, which will be the first satellite specifically designed to measure solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF)—a faint light emitted by plants during photosynthesis that changes under heat and water stress before visible damage appears. Designed to operate alongside Sentinel-3, FLEX will provide unprecedented insights into plant stress at a planetary scale.
At the center of the installation is Pearl Millet (Cenchrus americanus), one of the Sahel’s most resilient staple crops. Stretching across Africa south of the Sahara Desert, the Sahel is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, experiencing rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, desertification, and increasing pressure on agricultural systems. Pearl Millet has become a key species for climate adaptation due to its exceptional resilience to heat and water scarcity. The plant appears simultaneously as a uranium glass sculpture and as an unstable point-cloud digital twin. The glass body fluoresces under ultraviolet light in response to real-time thermal conditions, while its digital specter reveals heat as algorithmic inference rather than direct representation. While uranium glass fluorescence and plant fluorescence originate from different physical processes, both involve the emission of visible light in response to absorbed energy. The installation uses this parallel not as a scientific equivalence but as a poetic and material analogy between planetary sensing, plant stress, and luminous response.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
An anomaly only exists relative to a recognized reference state. As climate systems become increasingly unstable, maintaining confidence in what constitutes a normal season, a healthy plant, or a predictable thermal regime becomes as important as detecting the anomaly itself. The installation therefore asks not only how thermal stress is sensed, but how different knowledge systems establish baselines, recognize change, and determine when a signal becomes significant enough to demand action. In this sense, the work reflects broader questions of climate governance and decision-making: how observations become evidence, how evidence becomes knowledge, and how knowledge becomes intervention.
At critical thermal thresholds, a heated interface translates distant climatic conditions into bodily sensation. In selected activations of the work, a performer assumes a ritual role of thermal mediation, carrying the heated plate through the installation and inviting audiences into a shared encounter with a remote environmental condition.
The work ultimately forms a system of relations between plant, heat, satellite, model, language, and body, suggesting that observation is never neutral and that every form of knowledge carries an accompanying responsibility of care. Drawing on emerging discourses on thermo-cultures and operational images, the installation foregrounds how thermal conditions become knowable through processes of sensing, modeling, and algorithmic inference, transforming heat into an operational category of governance rather than a merely visible climate image.
Rather than positioning satellite observation as a detached instrument of climate governance, the installation reimagines sensing infrastructures as relational technologies. By bringing together orbital observation, plant metabolism, ancestral forecasting practices, and bodily experience, the work proposes a shift from extractive modes of knowledge toward forms of attention grounded in interdependence, ecological attunement, and care.
As heatwaves become longer, more frequent, and more intense across many regions of the world, heat is increasingly emerging as one of the defining conditions of climate change. Unlike storms, floods, or wildfires, heat often remains difficult to perceive at planetary scales, despite its profound effects on ecosystems, agriculture, infrastructures, and human bodies. What does a heatwave look like to a satellite, to a plant or to a human body? Through this question, the installation explores how thermal stress becomes legible across different forms of intelligence and observation. What appears as a temperature anomaly to a satellite may register as metabolic distress in a plant, as a shift in ecological indicators for pastoral communities, or as bodily discomfort on human skin. Heat emerges not as a single climatic variable, but as a condition interpreted, sensed, and lived through multiple systems of knowledge and care.
Images courtesy of the artist.
orbital sensing plant metabolism ancestral forecasting human body
Sensing the Heat is a decentralized media installation that investigates how planetary heat stress is detected, modeled, governed, and felt through orbital and technopolitical infrastructures. Synchronizing live Sentinel-3 Earth observation data with physical matter, language, and algorithmic models, the work approaches heat not as a climate image but as an operational condition. It also anticipates the future role of ESA’s FLEX (Fluorescence Explorer) mission, scheduled for launch in 2026, which will be the first satellite specifically designed to measure solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF)—a faint light emitted by plants during photosynthesis that changes under heat and water stress before visible damage appears. Designed to operate alongside Sentinel-3, FLEX will provide unprecedented insights into plant stress at a planetary scale.
At the center of the installation is Pearl Millet (Cenchrus americanus), one of the Sahel’s most resilient staple crops. Stretching across Africa south of the Sahara Desert, the Sahel is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, experiencing rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, desertification, and increasing pressure on agricultural systems. Pearl Millet has become a key species for climate adaptation due to its exceptional resilience to heat and water scarcity. The plant appears simultaneously as a uranium glass sculpture and as an unstable point-cloud digital twin. The glass body fluoresces under ultraviolet light in response to real-time thermal conditions, while its digital specter reveals heat as algorithmic inference rather than direct representation. While uranium glass fluorescence and plant fluorescence originate from different physical processes, both involve the emission of visible light in response to absorbed energy. The installation uses this parallel not as a scientific equivalence but as a poetic and material analogy between planetary sensing, plant stress, and luminous response.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
An anomaly only exists relative to a recognized reference state. As climate systems become increasingly unstable, maintaining confidence in what constitutes a normal season, a healthy plant, or a predictable thermal regime becomes as important as detecting the anomaly itself. The installation therefore asks not only how thermal stress is sensed, but how different knowledge systems establish baselines, recognize change, and determine when a signal becomes significant enough to demand action. In this sense, the work reflects broader questions of climate governance and decision-making: how observations become evidence, how evidence becomes knowledge, and how knowledge becomes intervention.
At critical thermal thresholds, a heated interface translates distant climatic conditions into bodily sensation. In selected activations of the work, a performer assumes a ritual role of thermal mediation, carrying the heated plate through the installation and inviting audiences into a shared encounter with a remote environmental condition.
The work ultimately forms a system of relations between plant, heat, satellite, model, language, and body, suggesting that observation is never neutral and that every form of knowledge carries an accompanying responsibility of care. Drawing on emerging discourses on thermo-cultures and operational images, the installation foregrounds how thermal conditions become knowable through processes of sensing, modeling, and algorithmic inference, transforming heat into an operational category of governance rather than a merely visible climate image.
Rather than positioning satellite observation as a detached instrument of climate governance, the installation reimagines sensing infrastructures as relational technologies. By bringing together orbital observation, plant metabolism, ancestral forecasting practices, and bodily experience, the work proposes a shift from extractive modes of knowledge toward forms of attention grounded in interdependence, ecological attunement, and care.
As heatwaves become longer, more frequent, and more intense across many regions of the world, heat is increasingly emerging as one of the defining conditions of climate change. Unlike storms, floods, or wildfires, heat often remains difficult to perceive at planetary scales, despite its profound effects on ecosystems, agriculture, infrastructures, and human bodies. What does a heatwave look like to a satellite, to a plant or to a human body? Through this question, the installation explores how thermal stress becomes legible across different forms of intelligence and observation. What appears as a temperature anomaly to a satellite may register as metabolic distress in a plant, as a shift in ecological indicators for pastoral communities, or as bodily discomfort on human skin. Heat emerges not as a single climatic variable, but as a condition interpreted, sensed, and lived through multiple systems of knowledge and care.
Images courtesy of the artist.
Kyriaki Goni is an artist, who for ten years now engages with diverse media to explore the political, affective, and environmental dimensions of big tech. Her focus encompasses extractivism, surveillance, human and non-human relations, as well as alternative networks and infrastructures related to care and community. Employing websites, textiles, ceramics, drawings, videos, sound, and text, Goni's installations construct alternative ecosystems and shared experiences by bridging the local with the planetary and intertwining the fictional with the scientific.
BY KYRIAKI GONI
orbital sensing plant metabolism ancestral forecasting human body
Sensing the Heat is a decentralized media installation that investigates how planetary heat stress is detected, modeled, governed, and felt through orbital and technopolitical infrastructures. Synchronizing live Sentinel-3 Earth observation data with physical matter, language, and algorithmic models, the work approaches heat not as a climate image but as an operational condition. It also anticipates the future role of ESA’s FLEX (Fluorescence Explorer) mission, scheduled for launch in 2026, which will be the first satellite specifically designed to measure solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF)—a faint light emitted by plants during photosynthesis that changes under heat and water stress before visible damage appears. Designed to operate alongside Sentinel-3, FLEX will provide unprecedented insights into plant stress at a planetary scale.
At the center of the installation is Pearl Millet (Cenchrus americanus), one of the Sahel’s most resilient staple crops. Stretching across Africa south of the Sahara Desert, the Sahel is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, experiencing rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, desertification, and increasing pressure on agricultural systems. Pearl Millet has become a key species for climate adaptation due to its exceptional resilience to heat and water scarcity. The plant appears simultaneously as a uranium glass sculpture and as an unstable point-cloud digital twin. The glass body fluoresces under ultraviolet light in response to real-time thermal conditions, while its digital specter reveals heat as algorithmic inference rather than direct representation. While uranium glass fluorescence and plant fluorescence originate from different physical processes, both involve the emission of visible light in response to absorbed energy. The installation uses this parallel not as a scientific equivalence but as a poetic and material analogy between planetary sensing, plant stress, and luminous response.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
An anomaly only exists relative to a recognized reference state. As climate systems become increasingly unstable, maintaining confidence in what constitutes a normal season, a healthy plant, or a predictable thermal regime becomes as important as detecting the anomaly itself. The installation therefore asks not only how thermal stress is sensed, but how different knowledge systems establish baselines, recognize change, and determine when a signal becomes significant enough to demand action. In this sense, the work reflects broader questions of climate governance and decision-making: how observations become evidence, how evidence becomes knowledge, and how knowledge becomes intervention.
At critical thermal thresholds, a heated interface translates distant climatic conditions into bodily sensation. In selected activations of the work, a performer assumes a ritual role of thermal mediation, carrying the heated plate through the installation and inviting audiences into a shared encounter with a remote environmental condition.
The work ultimately forms a system of relations between plant, heat, satellite, model, language, and body, suggesting that observation is never neutral and that every form of knowledge carries an accompanying responsibility of care. Drawing on emerging discourses on thermo-cultures and operational images, the installation foregrounds how thermal conditions become knowable through processes of sensing, modeling, and algorithmic inference, transforming heat into an operational category of governance rather than a merely visible climate image.
Rather than positioning satellite observation as a detached instrument of climate governance, the installation reimagines sensing infrastructures as relational technologies. By bringing together orbital observation, plant metabolism, ancestral forecasting practices, and bodily experience, the work proposes a shift from extractive modes of knowledge toward forms of attention grounded in interdependence, ecological attunement, and care.
As heatwaves become longer, more frequent, and more intense across many regions of the world, heat is increasingly emerging as one of the defining conditions of climate change. Unlike storms, floods, or wildfires, heat often remains difficult to perceive at planetary scales, despite its profound effects on ecosystems, agriculture, infrastructures, and human bodies. What does a heatwave look like to a satellite, to a plant or to a human body? Through this question, the installation explores how thermal stress becomes legible across different forms of intelligence and observation. What appears as a temperature anomaly to a satellite may register as metabolic distress in a plant, as a shift in ecological indicators for pastoral communities, or as bodily discomfort on human skin. Heat emerges not as a single climatic variable, but as a condition interpreted, sensed, and lived through multiple systems of knowledge and care.
Images courtesy of the artist.
orbital sensing plant metabolism ancestral forecasting human body
Sensing the Heat is a decentralized media installation that investigates how planetary heat stress is detected, modeled, governed, and felt through orbital and technopolitical infrastructures. Synchronizing live Sentinel-3 Earth observation data with physical matter, language, and algorithmic models, the work approaches heat not as a climate image but as an operational condition. It also anticipates the future role of ESA’s FLEX (Fluorescence Explorer) mission, scheduled for launch in 2026, which will be the first satellite specifically designed to measure solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF)—a faint light emitted by plants during photosynthesis that changes under heat and water stress before visible damage appears. Designed to operate alongside Sentinel-3, FLEX will provide unprecedented insights into plant stress at a planetary scale.
At the center of the installation is Pearl Millet (Cenchrus americanus), one of the Sahel’s most resilient staple crops. Stretching across Africa south of the Sahara Desert, the Sahel is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, experiencing rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, desertification, and increasing pressure on agricultural systems. Pearl Millet has become a key species for climate adaptation due to its exceptional resilience to heat and water scarcity. The plant appears simultaneously as a uranium glass sculpture and as an unstable point-cloud digital twin. The glass body fluoresces under ultraviolet light in response to real-time thermal conditions, while its digital specter reveals heat as algorithmic inference rather than direct representation. While uranium glass fluorescence and plant fluorescence originate from different physical processes, both involve the emission of visible light in response to absorbed energy. The installation uses this parallel not as a scientific equivalence but as a poetic and material analogy between planetary sensing, plant stress, and luminous response.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
An anomaly only exists relative to a recognized reference state. As climate systems become increasingly unstable, maintaining confidence in what constitutes a normal season, a healthy plant, or a predictable thermal regime becomes as important as detecting the anomaly itself. The installation therefore asks not only how thermal stress is sensed, but how different knowledge systems establish baselines, recognize change, and determine when a signal becomes significant enough to demand action. In this sense, the work reflects broader questions of climate governance and decision-making: how observations become evidence, how evidence becomes knowledge, and how knowledge becomes intervention.
At critical thermal thresholds, a heated interface translates distant climatic conditions into bodily sensation. In selected activations of the work, a performer assumes a ritual role of thermal mediation, carrying the heated plate through the installation and inviting audiences into a shared encounter with a remote environmental condition.
The work ultimately forms a system of relations between plant, heat, satellite, model, language, and body, suggesting that observation is never neutral and that every form of knowledge carries an accompanying responsibility of care. Drawing on emerging discourses on thermo-cultures and operational images, the installation foregrounds how thermal conditions become knowable through processes of sensing, modeling, and algorithmic inference, transforming heat into an operational category of governance rather than a merely visible climate image.
Rather than positioning satellite observation as a detached instrument of climate governance, the installation reimagines sensing infrastructures as relational technologies. By bringing together orbital observation, plant metabolism, ancestral forecasting practices, and bodily experience, the work proposes a shift from extractive modes of knowledge toward forms of attention grounded in interdependence, ecological attunement, and care.
As heatwaves become longer, more frequent, and more intense across many regions of the world, heat is increasingly emerging as one of the defining conditions of climate change. Unlike storms, floods, or wildfires, heat often remains difficult to perceive at planetary scales, despite its profound effects on ecosystems, agriculture, infrastructures, and human bodies. What does a heatwave look like to a satellite, to a plant or to a human body? Through this question, the installation explores how thermal stress becomes legible across different forms of intelligence and observation. What appears as a temperature anomaly to a satellite may register as metabolic distress in a plant, as a shift in ecological indicators for pastoral communities, or as bodily discomfort on human skin. Heat emerges not as a single climatic variable, but as a condition interpreted, sensed, and lived through multiple systems of knowledge and care.
Images courtesy of the artist.
Kyriaki Goni is an artist, who for ten years now engages with diverse media to explore the political, affective, and environmental dimensions of big tech. Her focus encompasses extractivism, surveillance, human and non-human relations, as well as alternative networks and infrastructures related to care and community. Employing websites, textiles, ceramics, drawings, videos, sound, and text, Goni's installations construct alternative ecosystems and shared experiences by bridging the local with the planetary and intertwining the fictional with the scientific.
BY KYRIAKI GONI
orbital sensing plant metabolism ancestral forecasting human body
Sensing the Heat is a decentralized media installation that investigates how planetary heat stress is detected, modeled, governed, and felt through orbital and technopolitical infrastructures. Synchronizing live Sentinel-3 Earth observation data with physical matter, language, and algorithmic models, the work approaches heat not as a climate image but as an operational condition. It also anticipates the future role of ESA’s FLEX (Fluorescence Explorer) mission, scheduled for launch in 2026, which will be the first satellite specifically designed to measure solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF)—a faint light emitted by plants during photosynthesis that changes under heat and water stress before visible damage appears. Designed to operate alongside Sentinel-3, FLEX will provide unprecedented insights into plant stress at a planetary scale.
At the center of the installation is Pearl Millet (Cenchrus americanus), one of the Sahel’s most resilient staple crops. Stretching across Africa south of the Sahara Desert, the Sahel is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, experiencing rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, desertification, and increasing pressure on agricultural systems. Pearl Millet has become a key species for climate adaptation due to its exceptional resilience to heat and water scarcity. The plant appears simultaneously as a uranium glass sculpture and as an unstable point-cloud digital twin. The glass body fluoresces under ultraviolet light in response to real-time thermal conditions, while its digital specter reveals heat as algorithmic inference rather than direct representation. While uranium glass fluorescence and plant fluorescence originate from different physical processes, both involve the emission of visible light in response to absorbed energy. The installation uses this parallel not as a scientific equivalence but as a poetic and material analogy between planetary sensing, plant stress, and luminous response.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
An anomaly only exists relative to a recognized reference state. As climate systems become increasingly unstable, maintaining confidence in what constitutes a normal season, a healthy plant, or a predictable thermal regime becomes as important as detecting the anomaly itself. The installation therefore asks not only how thermal stress is sensed, but how different knowledge systems establish baselines, recognize change, and determine when a signal becomes significant enough to demand action. In this sense, the work reflects broader questions of climate governance and decision-making: how observations become evidence, how evidence becomes knowledge, and how knowledge becomes intervention.
At critical thermal thresholds, a heated interface translates distant climatic conditions into bodily sensation. In selected activations of the work, a performer assumes a ritual role of thermal mediation, carrying the heated plate through the installation and inviting audiences into a shared encounter with a remote environmental condition.
The work ultimately forms a system of relations between plant, heat, satellite, model, language, and body, suggesting that observation is never neutral and that every form of knowledge carries an accompanying responsibility of care. Drawing on emerging discourses on thermo-cultures and operational images, the installation foregrounds how thermal conditions become knowable through processes of sensing, modeling, and algorithmic inference, transforming heat into an operational category of governance rather than a merely visible climate image.
Rather than positioning satellite observation as a detached instrument of climate governance, the installation reimagines sensing infrastructures as relational technologies. By bringing together orbital observation, plant metabolism, ancestral forecasting practices, and bodily experience, the work proposes a shift from extractive modes of knowledge toward forms of attention grounded in interdependence, ecological attunement, and care.
As heatwaves become longer, more frequent, and more intense across many regions of the world, heat is increasingly emerging as one of the defining conditions of climate change. Unlike storms, floods, or wildfires, heat often remains difficult to perceive at planetary scales, despite its profound effects on ecosystems, agriculture, infrastructures, and human bodies. What does a heatwave look like to a satellite, to a plant or to a human body? Through this question, the installation explores how thermal stress becomes legible across different forms of intelligence and observation. What appears as a temperature anomaly to a satellite may register as metabolic distress in a plant, as a shift in ecological indicators for pastoral communities, or as bodily discomfort on human skin. Heat emerges not as a single climatic variable, but as a condition interpreted, sensed, and lived through multiple systems of knowledge and care.
Images courtesy of the artist.
orbital sensing plant metabolism ancestral forecasting human body
Sensing the Heat is a decentralized media installation that investigates how planetary heat stress is detected, modeled, governed, and felt through orbital and technopolitical infrastructures. Synchronizing live Sentinel-3 Earth observation data with physical matter, language, and algorithmic models, the work approaches heat not as a climate image but as an operational condition. It also anticipates the future role of ESA’s FLEX (Fluorescence Explorer) mission, scheduled for launch in 2026, which will be the first satellite specifically designed to measure solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF)—a faint light emitted by plants during photosynthesis that changes under heat and water stress before visible damage appears. Designed to operate alongside Sentinel-3, FLEX will provide unprecedented insights into plant stress at a planetary scale.
At the center of the installation is Pearl Millet (Cenchrus americanus), one of the Sahel’s most resilient staple crops. Stretching across Africa south of the Sahara Desert, the Sahel is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, experiencing rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, desertification, and increasing pressure on agricultural systems. Pearl Millet has become a key species for climate adaptation due to its exceptional resilience to heat and water scarcity. The plant appears simultaneously as a uranium glass sculpture and as an unstable point-cloud digital twin. The glass body fluoresces under ultraviolet light in response to real-time thermal conditions, while its digital specter reveals heat as algorithmic inference rather than direct representation. While uranium glass fluorescence and plant fluorescence originate from different physical processes, both involve the emission of visible light in response to absorbed energy. The installation uses this parallel not as a scientific equivalence but as a poetic and material analogy between planetary sensing, plant stress, and luminous response.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
The installation unfolds through multiple regimes of language, observation, and temporality. Technocratic protocols and operational directives coexist with ancestral forecasting practices rooted in Sahelian ecological knowledge systems. Inspired in part by the work of Indigenous climate advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and the environmental knowledge of Mbororo Fulani pastoral communities in Chad, weather and climate are read not through computational models alone but through the movements of birds, the flowering of plants, the behaviour of livestock, the direction of winds, the appearance of fog, and the position of stars. Fragments of this observational knowledge appear throughout the installation as forecasting statements such as: “The cattle remain close to water,” “Heavy fog promises a good rainy season,” “The scout returns with no pasture,” or “The stars no longer match the ground.” Alongside these voices, a satellite repeatedly returning over the same territory develops a form of orbital devotion toward a plant it can observe but never touch.
An anomaly only exists relative to a recognized reference state. As climate systems become increasingly unstable, maintaining confidence in what constitutes a normal season, a healthy plant, or a predictable thermal regime becomes as important as detecting the anomaly itself. The installation therefore asks not only how thermal stress is sensed, but how different knowledge systems establish baselines, recognize change, and determine when a signal becomes significant enough to demand action. In this sense, the work reflects broader questions of climate governance and decision-making: how observations become evidence, how evidence becomes knowledge, and how knowledge becomes intervention.
At critical thermal thresholds, a heated interface translates distant climatic conditions into bodily sensation. In selected activations of the work, a performer assumes a ritual role of thermal mediation, carrying the heated plate through the installation and inviting audiences into a shared encounter with a remote environmental condition.
The work ultimately forms a system of relations between plant, heat, satellite, model, language, and body, suggesting that observation is never neutral and that every form of knowledge carries an accompanying responsibility of care. Drawing on emerging discourses on thermo-cultures and operational images, the installation foregrounds how thermal conditions become knowable through processes of sensing, modeling, and algorithmic inference, transforming heat into an operational category of governance rather than a merely visible climate image.
Rather than positioning satellite observation as a detached instrument of climate governance, the installation reimagines sensing infrastructures as relational technologies. By bringing together orbital observation, plant metabolism, ancestral forecasting practices, and bodily experience, the work proposes a shift from extractive modes of knowledge toward forms of attention grounded in interdependence, ecological attunement, and care.
As heatwaves become longer, more frequent, and more intense across many regions of the world, heat is increasingly emerging as one of the defining conditions of climate change. Unlike storms, floods, or wildfires, heat often remains difficult to perceive at planetary scales, despite its profound effects on ecosystems, agriculture, infrastructures, and human bodies. What does a heatwave look like to a satellite, to a plant or to a human body? Through this question, the installation explores how thermal stress becomes legible across different forms of intelligence and observation. What appears as a temperature anomaly to a satellite may register as metabolic distress in a plant, as a shift in ecological indicators for pastoral communities, or as bodily discomfort on human skin. Heat emerges not as a single climatic variable, but as a condition interpreted, sensed, and lived through multiple systems of knowledge and care.
Images courtesy of the artist.
Kyriaki Goni is an artist, who for ten years now engages with diverse media to explore the political, affective, and environmental dimensions of big tech. Her focus encompasses extractivism, surveillance, human and non-human relations, as well as alternative networks and infrastructures related to care and community. Employing websites, textiles, ceramics, drawings, videos, sound, and text, Goni's installations construct alternative ecosystems and shared experiences by bridging the local with the planetary and intertwining the fictional with the scientific.