The Machine Refuses — Ethan Sheaf-Morrison

Overview

The Machine Refuses is a project that explores the limitations and failures of Google Earth as a mapping tool. We treat Google Earth as a window unaware of its function as a Game Engine with the same designed, and undesigned limitations. Push it out to the edges of its range and the illusion starts to break. Textures stretch, coastlines smear, and the polished surface gives way to grey-boxed ground underneath.

This project is a survey of those points. It treats the moment the picture stops holding together as evidence of the machines design.

The Machine Refuses — title wall, with the exhibition text and the first large-format plate — The Machine Refuses — title wall.

Antarctica is the case study of the technology’s extreme. Imagery of the continent is sparse, so the tool assembles a landscape out of whatever captures exist. What looks like a single view is a run of satellite passes taken years apart, by different sensors, in different seasons and under different light, stitched together and presented as one moment.

The exhibition text at close range, hung beside the ice it describes

An essay panel setting the argument in redacted text against a stretched satellite plate

Poster pair — a hand, a returning arrow, and a plate of fractured sea ice

Collage plate meeting a large-format print at the corner of the room

Antarctica is the limit case. A continent that is all periphery, drawn at the coarsest resolution anywhere on Earth, with small research stations rendered sharply inside it. A settlement drawn carefully inside a continent drawn badly is the whole argument in one frame.

The panorama plate — a wide assembly of satellite passes across the Antarctic coast

Two plates hung between the gallery columns, essay panel facing ice plate

Two tall plates turning a corner — text panel and blue ice plate

Each seam marks a join between two different times the machine has treated as one.

The prints running the length of the corridor, receding into the room — .

They are printed on unmounted paper and hung loose. The sheets curl away from the wall at the bottom edge, which does the same work the imagery does — it refuses to sit flat and pretend to be a window.

Detail — two sheets curling away from the wall at the lower edge

Detail — a plate curling off the wall, the room visible beyond

The printed edition.

A visitor reading the main wall, with the publication on its plinth alongside — .

The exhibition

The main wall in full — title texts, panorama plate, and the plinth — The main wall, installed.

The projection room — a dark plate facing moving imagery across the space

Bench seating between the printed plate and the projection

The projection lighting the far wall, a print lit at the right

The same corner, the projection carrying into the next room

The full space, looking through the room toward the courtyard door — The full space.

Looking down the corridor, plates in the foreground and projection beyond — .

A visitor reading in the installed space — .

Tools

Google Earth and public satellite archives
Affinity
Large-format printing

Gallery

The main wall — title texts, the panorama plate, and the publication on its plinth

The panorama plate, assembled from satellite passes taken years apart

Two plates hung between the gallery columns — essay panel and ice plate

The plates read as a transect down the length of the room

Collage plate and large-format print meeting at the corner

The projection room — moving imagery played against the printed plates

The full space, looking through to the courtyard

The exhibition text at close range, beside the ice it describes

A visitor reading in the space — the work installed in a room people already use