A r c t i c . L i s t e n i n g . P o s t
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Rising
North
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Rising
North, 2007
Digital
video, 3' 11'
Voice:
Tracy Reynolds
Sound Editing: Victor McSurely
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How can
we make sense of the climate change predictions in the news? What does
a seven degree temperature rise in the Arctic really mean? How do we
absorb scientific information into our everyday lives?
The news headlines that came up on March 21, 2007, when I entered “north
pole” into the Google News search ranged from stories of endurance and
adventure (such as kiteboarders surfing our farthest north) to movies
set at the Pole and watercolor classes offered in North Pole, Alaska.
From heroic achievements to Hollywood spectacle, from small community
experiences to the geopolitics of climate change, the circumpolar north
is our cultural repository for our deepest fears and wildest imaginings
of the past, present, and future of our planet.
Rising North is an immersive installation with surround projections
of the nine minute video. It takes monthly temperature readings from
the North Pole data buoys and visualizes the rise in temperature of
7 degrees Celsius over a century (until 2107) that some climatologists
predict for the region. The audio combines background shortwave frequency
static with the voice of an opera singer singing the top headlines from
Google News about the North Pole on March 21, 2007.
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As
a rendering of scientific data and media reports on climate change in
the Arctic, Rising North gestures towards our incapacity to truly absorb
and process the magnitude of this information. Rather than recapitulating
words or numbers, the video offers emotive fields of experience (both
in the visual and auditory spectra) through which we might derive a
new, if strikingly incomplete, understanding of “our farthest north.”
Rising North, through its ambiguous color modulations and operatic voice
that hovers at the limits of intelligibility, may propose that our comprehension
of the Arctic is already necessarily partial—it is a region most of
us will never encounter first-hand—even as it becomes a heated locus
in the climate change discussion. By selecting opera to be the vehicle
of conveyance, Marsching also suggests that the Arctic has become a
stage upon which the media spectacle of “global warming” is being enacted;
we will listen intently to the dramatic tale of its transformation,
thawing and steady climb into the frightening upper registers.
--Shane Brennan, curator, NewClimates.com
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