I gave five talks about my exhibit up at the ICA in Boston last night–8 minutes five times in a row.  After the blinding headache that ensued no doubt from the effects of my own droning repetition, I started thinking about the most significant part of what I was saying about the project.  Basically the images I was talking about, as you see here, take DEMs from glaciologists studying the dynamic response of the mass balance of glaciers around the world to environmental factors and I render them in a 3D program with temperature, light, cloud, snow covers that are relatively accurate to the sites (the picture you see here is the edge of the Austfonna glacier in the northernmost tip of Norway, an area known to be a common jumping off point for early north pole expeditions).  I then insert these tableaux of vaudevillian performers (here Mike Waters, the project manager for the ICA building construction supervises Naomi Greenfield, a local balloon artist, making an umiak, a common boat form in the arctic, out of pin balloons).

People often ask what those performers are doing there?  I am inspired by the history and diaries of arctic explorers, who ventured out on polar discovery expeditions woefully underequipped for survival, but with the canny Knowledge that in order to survive the long season of darkness, 4 months or so of total night and subzero temperatures that often they would endure for 2-3 years, they had to bring all of Western culture with them.  They printed daily newspapers on their printing press, held classes, brought sets of silver and libraries of literature.  But they also brought trunks filled with costumes and sets to perform the popular theater of the time–farces, acrobatics, or even Shakespeare.  These uneducated sailors and educated scientist explorers would print broadsides and playbills and throw themselves into the productions wholeheartedly.  In the face of the perhaps imminent death in the harsh environment they were surrounded by, they used theater, with its qualities of wonder, spectacle, and humor to transport them to other realms of desire.  It occurs to me today that the north pole and arctic are in the news usually with tones of gloom and doom, and many people feel a sense of futility as we move forward.  But it will take a sense of hope, wonder, humor, and even a belief in the impossible to move us forward into protecting these sites, and our entire planet.

-- JaneMarsching