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).

I’m always interested in seeking out other forms of interdisciplinary collaboration, which seem to be increasingly prevalent these days. One such form is the International Polar Year 07/08; their effort is described as:

The concept of the International Polar Year 2007-2008 is of an international programme of coordinated, interdisciplinary scientific research and observations in the Earth’s polar regions:

• to explore new scientific frontiers
• to deepen our understanding of polar processes and their global linkages
• to increase our ability to detect changes, to attract and develop the next generation of polar scientists, engineers and logistics experts
• to capture the interest of schoolchildren, the public and decision-makers.

Interestingly the first IPY was in 1882-83 and was the first international year of anything. Polar explorer Karl Weyprecht realized that the poles were the places where significant geophysical concerns were located–he felt that one nation or one research institution alone could not address such a vast and complex area, so he created an international scientific cooperative effort. There is a great site that looks at this history from the NOAA.