‘In dreams begins responsibilities’ W B Yeats
Recently when I was talking about the International Polar Year, and how they only happen every fifty years, someone joked that it might be last one. Like all good jokes, it provokes some serious questions. Will the polar regions exist as identifiable and distinct regional geography in fifty years time? What will have happened to the landscape and people of the Arctic? Given the changes that have already happened in the last 5-10 years, it is hard to imagine what the arctic might be like in fifty years. The latest climate models tells us the news is not good, no summer sea ice by 2050. As changes in the biophysical world accelerate, culturally we try to make sense of this change. One impetuous that I am interested in has been the impetuous to “archive” as a way of trying to confront a sense of loss at the extinction and disappearance of much flora and fauna. Much of these archiving impulses attempt to categorise, capture and represent that which is disappearing. But archives can be as much about the future as the past, as we see in the valuable ice core archives of climatic histories, that allow us a generative look at the future. We can imagine that if we changed the demands of the archive and the achievable we might get some very different artefacts and objects of knowledge. In my project on the “Ice Archives: Curating Climate Change” I have been interested in thinking about what kind of other archives might expand our creative imaginings of different climate futures. To that end, I have been thinking about the imaginative and physical work of ‘making sense’ and ‘thinking with’ such an array of political, media, everyday perceptual phenomena is a process of Knowledge formation in its own right: that is, it is a messy form of ‘together-work’ of thinking about climate change and building Knowledge around this flow of images, information, exhibits, data and events. Collaboration is at the centre of this. One of the ways I have been trying to work this out in practice is with my collaborator Jennifer Gabrys, on a joint project “Weather Permitting” (www.weatherpermitting.org) where we are proposing to build a number of weather gardens based on understanding of future and past climate change.

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).

Happy new year everyone! Lets change the world this year, OK?

I’m still thinking about the questions raised earlier in the comments to various posts on this site, asking what kind of role art can play in climate change issues. As I plan out my year, I am trying to keep my feet to the fire of my focus this past year or two: thinking about how to continue creating projects that combine visual, technological, interdisciplinary, collaborative, conversational, and site-responsive works about our human impact on climate change in the arctic in the past and future. In a nutshell I think that I will be gathering much more information, perspectives, narratives, images, and collaborators, trying to keep a balance between my studio practice and a practice of aesthetic alliances with so many different people. I want to go to a science research station in the arctic (any ideas anybody?)–Toolik in Alaska has been suggested to me, so that I can do some work there in the actual landscapes and technologies of the site itself. I’m trying to create visualizations of what the deep arctic will look like in 2110? What kind of transportation will we use to get there and travel around while we’re there? Will we live there? And if so in what kind of house? How will we grow food? What kind of phones will we have to communicate with? How will we get pictures/news of the rest of the world? I want to imagine these things with the combined mind of a science fiction illustrator and a sustainable design innovator.
Will these efforts or their resulting art/activist/conversation projects make a difference? Still wondering. Probably its a one person at at time thing.