Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944) was a French writer and pioneering aviator. His descriptions of aerial reconnaissance during wartime provided poetic metaphors for technological mediation. He described the landscape below as “objects under glass in a museum” and himself as an “icy scientist” conducting laboratory experiments on war.
Saint-Exupéry’s phenomenological observations reveal how altitude and instruments fundamentally abstract the pilot’s relationship to ground reality.
Related: derealization, war-and-cinema, Paul-Virilio