Introduction: the satellite's gaze As the most 'grounded' of the arts, landscape architecture has a more restrained legacy of engagement with technological innovation than other design disciplines. This reticence is partially a consequence of landscape architecture's customary role as ameliorator of the negative impacts of industrialization. It also results from working with the medium of the real landscape, whose unruly nature tends to resist both straightforward representation and technological fashion (Kullmann 2014; St-Denis 2007). Nevertheless, innovation in mapping and imaging technology has clearly influenced the evolution of landscape architectural theory and practice. In the twentieth century, both the modern theodolite and aeroplane photography transformed the way in which landscape architects imaged, and hence designed, the landscape. Whereas the surveyor's precise triangulation abstracted a site into discrete features, the aeroplane's orthophotos provided intriguing glimpses into the material landscape of continuity and interconnectedness (Anker 2001).