4.5 x 9.5 feet
cotton, wool, acrylic, trevira yarn
digital jacquard, GAN-generated landscapes
California Terrain is a woven textile made with wool, cotton, and acrylic yarns, created from AI-generated imagery derived from Google Earth Engine satellite data processed through GAN models. The GAN-generated landscapes were created in 2019-2020, then made into a collage for weaving. The woven terrain examines how space, time, and territory are visualized and controlled through contemporary technological infrastructures in California. The training set of satellite images from mountain ranges across California are re-imagined to confront the colonial geo-logics embedded in these technologies, which are often perceived as neutral or objective. The textile serves as a counter-interface, one that shreds the illusion of technological omniscience by embedding disruption, error, and material resistance into the image itself. Threads unravel where resolution breaks down; warp and weft refuse the smoothness of the digital surface, pixel per thread. In this form, the landscape is not simply rendered—it is re-imagined through the geological as a hallucination of land. It speaks to the weight of deep time embedded in materials like clay, mineral pigments, and sedimented landscapes, while also addressing the imprint of living under systems that stratify space, identity, and value through contemporary technology. To engage with geological time contends with histories of displacement and extraction, but also with the potential to read and render these forces differently—through material practices that hold resistance and relation across multiple scales and ratios. It follows its own form of strata, layer upon layer, expanding beyond their digital resolution.