Rebecca Bennett, McGill University
In 1998, U.S. Vice President Al Gore proposed his vision for a “digital earth.” At the time, it was a hypothetical prospect that a computer-generated globe could be used for modeling and simulation in the emerging earth systems sciences discipline.[1] Originally conceived to help scientists systematically address climate change, Google’s virtual earth has become a ubiquitous tool which allows us to visualize how human activity alters the Earth’s surface.[2] Yet the immediacy and vast quantity of Google Earth data also illustrates the extraordinary challenge of communicating the rapidity, extent, and severity of anthropogenic climate change.[3] Widespread uncertainty about the nature of the climate crisis is a logical dilemma, as it is not a singular entity, but a tangle of unwieldy forces that defy human perceptions of linear time. This prevents us from being able to fully conceptualize its scale.[4] Created to further our attempts to visualize the climate crisis, Google Earth exemplifies this paradox. From a data-driven perspective, it is a stellar achievement in that it offers public access to a vast visual record of the present. Yet the technology also has its limitations, mediating our access to the environment through a screen. It does not provide universal coverage of the globe—there is less complete data available for remote, unpopulated areas, for example—and its stability as an archive is dependent upon internet access.[5]
Textile artist Mylène Michaud critically engages with the benefits and limitations of Google’s virtual Earth to both connect and distance us from the environment, creating large-scale knitworks out of images collected from Google Maps and Google Earth as a complement to the digital archive. They confront viewers with the slippery inevitability of time and our inability to effectively conceptualize a disaster that is slow-moving in the context of our lifetimes but swift from the perspective of geological time. This flaw in our temporal perception complicates not only our emotional and cognitive engagement with climate change, but also raises questions about the adequacy of the tools we use to document and understand it. Rapid advancements in digital technology have enabled us to exhaustively track and visualize the evidence of climate change. Yet archivists are concerned that the accelerated pace of technological change will render internet archives obsolete, leaving limited evidence of our present for future generations.[6] This weakness calls into question the efficacy of our reliance on digital methods to preserve history. Michaud’s work engages with these issues, employing knitting as a physical alternative to vulnerable internet archives. She illuminates the detrimental impacts of human activity and settlement on the Earth’s surface, articulating an ongoing and inseparable relationship between humanity and the planet.
Michaud’s Knitworks as Personal and Cultural Archive
Given the innate relationality of the medium, knitworks can be read as archives of both personal and cultural significance. A narrative of the knitter’s relationship to their surroundings is embedded in intertwined stitches. When we engage with crafts that have existed for thousands of years, we are connected to our ancestors. This ability to access a relationship with the past is uniquely available to the human species.[7] Michaud’s contemporary knitwork activates this ongoing relationship between past and present by using the tools of our ancestors to communicate our contemporary experience of the world. Each knitted work communicates the temporal relationship of its own creation, where the yarn “marks time with respect to the life of the knitter and the emergent life of the knitted.”[8] In this way, Michaud intertwines herself with the landscapes she depicts. The trace of human activity is readily apparent in knitted garments, because the knitted loop structure makes visible the process of their creation. Conversely, while we might be dimly aware that computers were designed by human hands, computer screens conceal the structure that generates images on screens, imposing distance between the human makers and operators of the technology. The key difference, then, between the textile and the digital medium, is in the level of visibility of human activity inherent to the creation of the image. Therefore, as mimetic objects, Michaud’s knitworks function differently than the satellite images they reference. Her practice reflects a tension between fascination and repulsion with Google Earth, situating her practice in the digital era yet expressing a profound relationship to the planet that transcends temporal boundaries.
To promote awareness about our relationship to our physical environment, Michaud often selects the locations she depicts to correspond with the location of the gallery it will be exhibited in. However, she is most interested in examining deserts, mines and other remote areas where exploitative human activities have fundamentally altered the landscape. The inequity of climate impacts are reflected in the fact that these remote regions, which bear the most compelling visual evidence of environmental degradation, feature less precise and less frequently updated images than densely populated areas.[9] This is a central weakness of the Google Earth data that reflects the marginality of these spaces to viewers in the Global North, protected from the most brutal impacts of climate change by the intersecting privileges of distance and class.[10] It could be argued that these works, in imitating digital images which in turn represent the world, expand the distance between humans and the physical world. The temporal and textural qualities of knitwork, however, instead strengthen the link between humanity and the environment by materializing the process of making. Where human activity is a key force driving environmental change in our current era, this is a vital conceptual connection.
Antartique
Antartique (Figure 1) captures receding Antarctic ice formations, a stark portrayal of the impacts of climate change in this sparsely populated region. The texture and scale of Michaud’s work provides a more immersive experience than viewing the same landscape through Google Earth, prompting reflection on the time and labor that went into its creation. When it is exhibited, Antartique does not hang flat. Instead, it is suspended by a series of wires, so that it sprawls concave from ceiling to floor. In contrast to the flatness of the aerial perspective on Google Earth, it engulfs its allotted space, capturing the feeling of being overwhelmed by a natural landscape. It’s easy to get swallowed up in the presence of this work, to be keenly aware of the discrepancy between your own body and the art, as well as the place it represents. Moreover, the smooth, animated quality of Google Earth lacks realism that is more potent in the pixel-like detail of Michaud’s rendering. The map that emerges is not static; wind appears to tear across the surface as you survey the artwork. From a distance, the sweeping Antarctic landscape is in clear view, but as one approaches, it becomes harder to make sense of the image until only an abstract arrangement of dots is identifiable. Standing back, the impressive depth and scale of the work make it possible to conceive the vastness of the scene depicted. Speckled black and blue threads break up the monotony of the white snow landscape, tracing the contours of mountains, ice formations, and water. The fractured landscape is conveyed with great detail, even the most minuscule chips of ice delineated by Michaud’s one-to-one replication of pixels in stitch format.
Repurposing computer-generated images as knitted fabric, Michaud’s work highlights the analogous connection between pixels and stitches. “Pixelness” is a distinct feature of knitting which imposes certain aesthetic and structural boundaries onto any knitted fabric.[11] Through this key structural parallel between the knit/purl structure and the zeros/ones of binary code, cyberfeminist theorists argue that textiles laid the groundwork for the evolution of digital technology.[12] Michaud’s knitted maps directly engage with this relationship, expanding on the communicative potential offered by digital technology. Although they represent the same place, Antartique adds a layer of depth and dimension to the landscape that does not translate through the computer screen. Recognizable as a satellite image, the artwork amplifies the sensory impact of its digital counterpart, bringing viewers into close contact with the Antarctic landscape.
Further, Michaud’s textiles offer a striking perspective on the concept of time in relation to the climate crisis. Visualizing the progress of climate destruction is impossible, because climate change is not a unified force that operates according to our assumptions of linear time.[13] The concept of an ordered “natural history” itself reflects a need to quantify planetary time in relation to human history. As Michaud’s labor forms the temporal context of Antartique, the work illuminates the fact that humans are only able to conceptualize the passage of time in relation to ourselves, which fundamentally structures our interaction with the world. Both the satellite image and its textile counterpart are snapshots of a world undergoing constant evolution at a speed imperceptible to the human eye. Google capitalizes on our perception of its technology as a faithful mirror of the present, even as its virtual globe collapses time, often presenting a “mosaic” of images collected at different dates.[14] Google Earth’s data attribution at the coordinates corresponding to Antartiquereveals that the image is a composite of images collected between November 30th, 1998 and December 14th, 2015. Therefore, by the time Michaud began work on Antartique in 2016, the satellite image that inspired it was already outdated, underscoring the transient nature of the reality she seeks to capture.
When we spoke, Michaud reflected on this paradox, sharing that she plans to expand Antartique. This will be the first time she returns to a ‘finished’ work, and she approaches the process with an acute awareness that her updated map will be a patchwork of two distinct points in time, capturing inevitable and likely dramatic changes in the ice formations.[15] While I can only speculate about this as-yet unrealized work, it deepens a discussion of the nature of time in both Michaud’s work and Google Earth. Assuming Michaud maintains the color scheme of the original, it will be difficult—if not impossible—to differentiate between the moments depicted in the updated work, further highlighting the temporal inconsistencies in Google Earth’s simulation of the globe. This recognition of process is missing from our interaction with computers, as the immediacy of computerized images permanently locates them at the culmination of their creation. We hold a “cultural, ideological bias” towards communicating knowledge in an empirical manner, leading to the misconception that if we can visualize something, we can understand it.[16] This is a flaw visible in our trust in digital technology to make the present clear. Antartique reveals the ongoing human manipulation of the environment, visible both in the physical condition of the land and in the reliance on technology which presents a flawed, fractured map of the land itself. These tensions are characteristic of our epoch, positioning Antartique as a valuable archive in its ability to speak to the complexity of humanity’s relationship to the planet.
48°07’41”N 33°33’03”E
Whereas Antartique connects us to human traces in an unpopulated region, Michaud’s 48°07’41”N 33°33’03”E (2024) (Figure 2) exposes the direct consequences of human exploitation of the land through quarrying. At the same time, her art interrogates the limits of the perspective provided by Google Earth, which ultimately reinforce our dismissal of the social and environmental harm caused by quarries and mines. Unlike Antartique, 48°07’41”N 33°33’03”E is a long, flat rectangle displayed on a raised platform about a foot off the ground, closely mimicking the aerial perspective characteristic of Google Earth. Observing the work from various vantage points, irregular stripes of black, yellow, coral, brown, and grey undulate. Without a place name as a contextual anchor, these stripes seem to ambiguously reference the natural world—perhaps a canyon or a desert. Upon consulting the provided coordinates via Google Earth, the location is revealed to be Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. Contrary to initial assumptions of a natural formation, the striking bands are in fact the result of an open-pit quarry.[17] The presence of the quarry has completely altered the terrain of the landscape; carving a massive sore into the otherwise flat, green surroundings.
Whether intentional or otherwise, abstraction masks the ugly reality of the place depicted. In this way, the work highlights the cognitive dissonance that arises from an awareness of the aesthetic beauty of environmental destruction. This tension—termed the “apocalyptic sublime”—is a central point of conflict in discussions of environmental art.[18] Theorists from Kant to Edmund Burke have argued that the terror generated by looking at beautiful destruction is, in fact, not terror, but a dulled sense of awe arising from the security that there is enough distance between yourself and an oncoming disaster that you will never have to bear the consequences of its arrival.[19] In this work, Michaud invokes the apocalyptic sublime through abstraction, emphasizing the peripheral position of mines and quarries in our collective consciousness. By offering only coordinates, she limits the viewer’s perspective to an isolated rendering of the formal, aesthetic characteristics of the mine. Curious viewers are then shocked to discover the hypnotic waves represent a mine, which would never be described as beautiful.
This prompts a deeper reflection on the uneven distribution of the consequences of environmental destruction. Climate destruction will eventually impact everyone on the planet, but at present, social privilege is enough to protect against the most damaging effects of climate change.[20] The negative environmental and social impacts of mining activities are well documented. Mining and quarrying fundamentally alter ecosystems, damaging biodiversity and causing soil, water, air, and noise pollution. A variety of adverse health conditions, including lung cancer and kidney disease are also associated with mining.[21] By virtue of geographic distance, most of us are protected from experiencing these consequences. Instead, we benefit from the extracted minerals without having to consider their origins. For mining communities, these consequences are often permanent and irreparable, as their livelihoods depend on the continued productivity of these industries.[22] By encouraging interaction with Google Earth, Michaud’s art highlights the ability of the technology to make us aware of the consequences of our exploitative land use. At the same time, however, this reveals how insulated many of us are from the visceral impacts of extractive industries. The knitted map reminds us of the human labor intrinsic to the condition of the land in Kryvyi Rih. Google Earth obscures this labor, instead allowing remote surveillance of a region that bears the brunt of the repercussions of our perpetual consumption.
Ultimately, the work operates as a criticism of the perspective offered by technology. It is the privilege of distance that renders the beauty of this landscape available to gallery viewers. Distance and an aerial perspective reveal patterns that would not be visible standing in the quarry pit, obscuring the realities experienced by those living and working in quarries. There remains, then, a critical discrepancy between those of us who look at mines through screens, and those who labor in them to make a living. By isolating the chromatic motifs from their context, Michaud conveys the contradictions inherent to mining industries and their place within contemporary society. This also demonstrates how digital technology both limits and widens our perspective, ultimately preserving our ability to ignore tangible environmental destruction by keeping it at a distance.
Despite having received offers to access more advanced earth simulation software, Michaud continues to use Google Maps and Google Earth because they are publicly available.[23] Such a deliberate choice underscores the shared responsibility we all bear for the state of our planet. As geologist and textile artist Christine Metzger notes, “we are the creatures that get to tell the story of everything,” a unique privilege and responsibility that unites the goals of both science and art.[24] Yet even our best attempts at rationalization remain inherently flawed.[25] Climate change and the existential threat it poses to humanity’s long-term survival has exposed this weakness. The vast quantities of data collected in our efforts to understand climate change confirm that widespread environmental change is underway. But on its own, this data does not help us to conceptualize what it means to be living through an uncontrollable crisis of our own creation. Michaud’s works engage with our false sense of certainty in data, illuminating the flaws of a technology we are less inherently critical of than her chosen medium: knitting. The physical, tactile nature of her works allow us to see details that are obscured by computer screens. This exposes the many tensions characteristic of our epoch, revealing the fraught nature of human relationships with technology and the environment.
Knitting, a practice that dates to early human history, has not only endured but also influenced the development of machines and technologies that now shape our experience of the world. Drawing on the theoretical and structural similarities between knitting and digital technology, her knitted maps transcend representation, serving as a testament to our ongoing, interconnected relationship with the Earth. By engaging with remote areas where data is sparser, Michaud highlights the gaps in our vision that exist even with broad access to the globe. While it remains unclear whether future generations will be able to interact with internet archives, there is historical evidence to suggest that knitting will continue to resonate as it has for generations before us. It might be impossible to transcend the limits of our human perspective, but Michaud’s work asserts that by undertaking activities that have followed us through history, we can form a more fruitful relationship with the tools we rely on in the present. Her work draws attention to these enduring connections between past and present, highlighting the inseparability of humans from the technologies we create, the processes they drive, and the environment we continually reshape with our presence.
Endnotes
[1] Qiang Zhao et al., “Progress and Trends in the Application of Google Earth and Google Earth Engine.” Remote Sensing 13, no. 18 (September 21, 2021): 2, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13183778.
[2] Zhao et al., “Progress and Trends,” 13.
[3] Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin. “Defining The Anthropocene.” Nature 519, no. 7542 (March 11, 2015): 171. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14258; “The Anthropocene.” International Union of Geological Sciences, March 20, 2024. https://www.iugs.org/_files/ugd/f1fc07_40d1a7ed58de458c9f8f24de5e739663.pdf?index=true.
Geologists have proposed that we are living in a distinct geological epoch in which human intervention is a key influence on the global environment, referred to as the Anthropocene. Although this proposal was formally rejected by the International Union of Geological Science (IUGS) in March of 2024, the Anthropocene has permeated scientific, academic, and cultural discourses, due to its effectiveness in characterizing humanity’s relationship to the environment. The proposal was not rejected due to a lack of evidence of anthropogenic climate change, rather, because geologists were uncomfortable with ascribing the start of a new unit of geological time within less than the span of a human life. This reflects widespread uncertainty about the nature of the climate crisis.
[4] Anastasia Murney, “Tarot as Affective Cartography in the Uneven Anthropocene,” Journal of Visual Culture 22, no. 2 (August 2023): 247, https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129231196365.
[5] Lei Luo et al., “Google Earth As a Powerful Tool for Archaeological and Cultural Heritage Applications: A Review,” Remote Sensing 10, no. 10 (September 28, 2018): 21, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10101558.
[6] Michael Ashley, “Digital Conservation and Access: Saving Humanity’s History in the Petabyte Age,” Virtual Archaeology Review 1, no. 1 (April 11, 2010): 9, https://doi.org/10.4995/var.2010.4748.
[7] Christine Metzger, interview by Rebecca Bennett, October 2, 2024.
[8] Kilpi, “Knittedness,” 243.
[9] Lei Luo et al., “Google Earth,” 21.
[10] Kari Marie Norgaard, “Climate Denial and the Construction of Innocence: Reproducing Transnational Environmental Privilege in the Face of Climate Change.” Race, Gender & Class 19, no. 1/2 (2012): 82, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43496861.
[11] Kilpi, “Knittedness,” 244.
[12] Verena Kuni, “‹ SoftwAreZ › Linking Textile Techniques and Digital Technologies in Contemporary Art, Or: Of Moths and Micro-Revolts.” In Metatextile: Identity and History of a Contemporary Art Medium, ed. Tristan Weddigan. (Edition Imorde, 2010). https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-69406. While these relationships are a compelling entry point to expanding discussions of digital media, these theories require a critical reading, particularly since cultural attitudes on both gender and technology have shifted significantly since the 1990s. This is beyond the scope of this paper, however for further analysis, see Verena Kuni’s critical reading of Plant’s work in her article “‹ SoftwAreZ › Linking Textile Techniques and Digital Technologies in Contemporary Art, Or: Of Moths and Micro-Revolts.”
[13] Murney, “Tarot as Affective Cartography,” 260.
[14] “How Images Are Collected.” Google Earth Help. Accessed December 13, 2024. https://support.google.com/earth/answer/6327779?hl=en#zippy=%2Csatellite-aerial-images.
[15] Michaud, Interview.
[16] Fabian, Time and the Other, 106.
[17] Britannica, “Kryvyy Rih,” last updated October 21, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/place/Kryvyy-Rih.
[18] Nurmis, “Visual Climate Change Art,” 508.
[19] Nurmis, “Visual Climate Change Art,” 508.
[20] Norgaard, “Climate Denial,” 83.
[21] Adator Stephanie Worlanyo and Li Jiangfeng. “Evaluating the Environmental and Economic Impact of Mining for Post-Mined Land Restoration and Land-Use: A Review.” Journal of Environmental Management 279 (February 2021): 2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.111623.
[22] Worlanyo and Jiangfeng, “Post-Mined Land,” 1.
[23] Michaud, Interview.
[24] Metzger, Interview.
[25] Fabian, Time and the Other, 106; Murney, “Tarot as Affective Cartography,” 260.
About the Author
Rebecca Bennett is in her final year at McGill University, where she has completed a Bachelor’s degree in Art History and International Development. She serves as an editor for Canvas: McGill’s Undergraduate Journal of Art History and Communications. Rebecca is also an avid knitter, and her work can be found on Instagram @benknits.