“ecologies (Arctic)” by Michele Barker, Anna Munster
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Title:
- ecologies (Arctic)
Artist(s) and People Involved:
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Symposium:
- ISEA2024: 29th International Symposium on Electronic Art
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Artist Statement:
An aerial drone hovers precariously close to the face of a glacier. One hundred metres below, an underwater drone engages in ‘oceanic’ hovering.
While the aerial drone records the constant dripping of water and calving events from the face of the seemingly solid ice wall, the underwater drone is witness to a different but related temporal transition. Here, centuries-old air and soil – trapped within the melting icebergs calved from the glacier – are rapidly releasing in gaseous, liquid and solid forms into the sea.
‘ecologies(Arctic’) is a multichannel audio and video installation that juxtaposes the scale and duration of
millennial glacial movement with rapid deglaciation occurring through human-induced climate change.
It avoids the spectacle of collapsing glaciers and melting ice, aiming instead to sensorially engage audiences with an embodied visual and sonic exploration of the shifting spaces and times of a fragile ecology. In ‘ecologies (Arctic)’ time and place are experienced as porous thresholds: above and below water and ice, liquidity/rapidity meeting the frozen/static. The experimental drone footage and field recorded soundscape are joined by another, speculative moving image ‘companion’ perspective: AI- generated video. A counterpoint to the drones bearing witness to the complex ecologies of climate change, this speculative imaging asks: what might a deglaciated Arctic look like in the year 2058; 2058 being the current predicted forecast for the loss of one of the Arctic’s largest glaciers, Hambergbreen.
