“Ice-Time” by Clea T. Waite

Title:

Ice-Time

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Exhibiting Artist(s):

Clea T. Waite

Symposium:

ISEA2020: 26th International Symposium on Electronic Art

Creation Year:

2017

Medium:

Multi-projection video and audio

Artist Statement:

Polar ice is the most visible yet inaccessible indicator of climate change. The effects of climate change visible in Greenland are a prelude, a four-dimensional window into deep time. The “Ice-Time” cine-installation is a poetic response to the accelerating changes we are observing in Earth’s ecosystem, investigating environmental deep time using polar ice as a unique window onto ecosophic issues of climate change. The immersive, multi-projection video and audio mediascape acts as an architecture of spatiotemporal experience, engaging the body and memory in a somatic montage – in the decoding of a tangible, spatial poem.

Glaciers are crystal tesseracts that contained the time axis of earth’s climatological history. “Ice-Time” occupies a hexagonal architecture echoing the structure of both water crystals and tesseract shadows in three-space. The ambisonic audio occupies the space as a sonic matrix of possibilities – a glacier-like, fluid landscape that changes with the listener’s attention, position, and trajectory. Through a vivid, material presence of image, sound, data, and time, the immersive installation establishes an embodied, dynamic interaction of form and content. The “Ice-Time” mediascape allows the beholder a sentient, intrinsic experience of the environmental implications of polar ice and the essential role ice plays in anthropogenic climate change.