Jerusalem is a city famous for its walls: the Old City walls, the infamous separation wall. Less known is an invisible wall that encircles the Old City and its surroundings. Centred on the Haram al-Sharif (or Temple Mount) and approximately 3km in diameter, a no-fly-zone is instantiated by a "geofence," a digital barrier programmed and controlled by DJI (the global leader of drone manufacturing), stretching from the ground into the skies, to prevent drone flights above the holy structures and near-by neighborhoods. 
Terra ex Machina explores this instance of automated enforcement in Jerusalem’s urban space. We flew a drone along the geofence perimeter (approx. 10km) from 7 launch points with its camera lens fixed on its center, the Golden Dome. Exporting over 10k sequential images we created a photogrammetric point cloud—materializing the invisible barrier as a spatial object: an urban ring of dense data surrounding a black void of missing data caused by the drone’s inability to penetrate the area. The result is an aerial view showing a digitally enforced blackout over one of the most volatile places in the Middle East. 
Against this machine-made “gaze from nowhere”, we embedded three point clouds of low altitude do-it-yourself aerial imageries, made using kites and balloons within the no-fly-zone—human-tethered, wind-guided, algorithms-resistant—filling the void with situated, community-grounded ways of seeing.

Concept: Hagit Keysar & Ariel Caine
Drone photography: Hagit Keysar & Barak Brinker
Kite & balloon photography: Hagit Keysar, Jeffrey Warren (PublicLab.org), Shai Efrati, and many other collaborators
Photogrammetry, GIS & Model Cinematics: Ariel Caine
Interface design simulations: Noya Antman Ron
Model sound composition: Francisco Mazza
Knurl (prepared cello): Rafaele Andrede

With support from: The production of the Video and Sound work was supported by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e. V. (ifa) as part of the project: ARE YOU FOR REAL (https://www.ru4real.de/cluster6.html). Earlier segments of this work were supported by: Mekudeshet Festival: The Jerusalem Season of Culture, DIY aerial photography has been supported by Public Lab and Mamuta Art and Media Center, Jerusalem.

Ariel Caine (GB) is a London-based, Jerusalem-born artist and researcher working at the intersection of 3D photography, modelling, and surveying technologies in the production of cultural memory and national narratives. He lectures at UCL's Department of Culture, Communication & Media and co-founded Chemist Gallery, London, in 2023.
Hagit Keysar (IL) is a Jerusalem-based researcher and activist examining the political potentials of open-source and community-driven technologies in spaces of conflict and colonization. She is a senior lecturer at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and heads its Visual Communication master's program.

Terra Ex Machina is an experimental 3D model-based project that mobilizes slow forms of data production to render perceptible algorithmic infrastructures that remain largely illegible. It examines a digital barrier known as a GeoFence, restricting drone movement across a 3 km area in the Old City of Jerusalem and its surroundings, revealing an otherwise unseen spatial regime. Through a hybrid methodology combining intentional drone crashes and do-it-yourself aerial imaging with balloons and kites, developed with residents, activists, and researchers in Israel and Palestine, it reconstructs a partial map of this boundary. The resulting images reveal how restricted zones become saturated with dense visual traces when aligned with embodied, situated practices of urban mapping.