one year ago this month

a whiteout on a glacier in Iceland

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).

Once the conversation began around arctic Listening Post and Climate Commons, I suddenly found myself having many more interactions and receiving many more emails in my day-to-day about the increasing interest in using art as a vehicle for expressing environmental concerns.

In the last five weeks, our book tour has stopped into eleven cities around North America. In the context of climate change, it’s an interesting time to be traveling around. Everywhere I go, the locals are talking about how “unusual” the weather is for this time of year. At the beginning of December it’s hot in Denver and snowing in Seattle; DC has tornadoes and rain has flooded numerous areas on both coasts.