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).

A day after Christmas, the Anchorage Daily news ran an article about flooding and erosion in small Alaska Native villages on the west coast of Alaska with names no one else except Alaskans are familiar with….Shismaref, Kivalina, and Newtok. It is a story Alaska Natives are quite familiar with. With the sea ice thinner, arriving later, and leaving earlier in the Bering Sea, Bering Strait, and Chukchi Sea, coastal communities are experiencing more intensified storms with larger waves then they have ever experienced, and the loss of permafrost which kept river banks from eroding too quickly. Permafrost is a layer of ground that is frozen year around, or at least it used to be year-around.

The waves from these seas are larger because there is no sea ice to diminish their intensity, slamming against the west and northern shores of Alaska, causing severe storm driven coastal erosion. It has become so serious that several coastal villages are now actively trying to figure out where to move entire communities.