Remoteness (epistemic)

Pietrusko's reading of the "remote" in remote sensing (coined by Evelyn Pruitt, 1961): not distance or altitude but an epistemological category — a designation of inaccessibility produced by Cold War geopolitical blockage combined with the desire for planet-scale information. Inaccessible terrain was known by proxy: vegetation, indifferent to borders, became a communication channel for slope, soil, permafrost and water table; North American test sites stood in for Soviet ones; diagnostic keys turned unskilled photo interpreters into sensors running yes/no algorithms. Two consequences: a lineage into 1960s decision-tree pattern recognition, and the replacement of the map by a deployable classification procedure — a region counts as "mapped" once its key exists. Pietrusko's phrase: cultures of vegetality preceded cultures of digitality.