About There and Later: Data mining at the North Pole

About There and Later: Data Mining at the North Pole . 010105 - 120107

Project description:

In a series of digital images and sculptures based on 3D renderings, About Here and Later draws upon scientific data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, architect drawings, science fiction illustrations, feats by circus performers, nineteenth century histories, and renderings of arctic terrain to explore the zone of the imaginary that is the north pole.

At the North Pole, a collapse of real and simulacrum creates a space that is both a geographical zenith and a tangle of representations. It is the febrile diversity and paradoxes of this part of our earth that provide a launching ground for a revisioning of the intersecting histories, narratives, and desires of our culture's vision of and affect upon the north pole and deep arctic.

This project bases all work upon the collection of data, in a form of data mining that leaps from the virtual to the physical, from database to narrative, from history to the future. I work with data sets gathered through methodologies forming the past and future north pole: architecture, utopian philosophy, science fiction illustration, meteorological and geological sciences, history, spectacle, and 3D visualization (see keywords).

My project will proceed in three parts:
1: I scour the histories, ships manifests, image archives, scientific data, and maps of the arctic, collected in a weblog and video objects. In an extension of my recent work that has engaged images that border upon the impossible, whether that is an apparition of the Virgin Mary or Neil Armstrong’s images of UFOs, I consider historical representations of cultural phenomenon that exist on the margins, particularly focusing on how culture creates spectacle, narrative, and representation. Further, the weblog deepnorth considers the effect of the internet on our culture, and its realization of Benjamin’s belief’s about decentered authorship as surfers and bloggers become hybrid producer/consumers in a gift economy. The immediate availability of seemingly all possible information is an impossible notion. The internet is a contemporary collective wunderkammer collapsing multiple methodologies and information through hyperlinks, data mining, and simulations as well as other data forms.
2: A series of images that digitally combine 3D renderings of arctic terrain based upon scientific data gathered from current NOAA fieldwork and from nineteenth century arctic explorers with produced studio portraits of circus performers, such as jugglers or clowns.
3: Renderings from science fiction illustrators of the year 3000 at the North Pole will be given to an architect and a NOAA Arctic scientist to combine futuristic fantasy with the sober realities of science and the utopian practices of architecture. Large-scale sculptures in pin balloons and sustainable materials will be produced based upon a 3D wireframe rendering of the combined data sets and shot in Svalbad, one of the closest bits of land to the north pole.

The significance of this extended three year project comes lies in three aspects of my creative practice:
1. a forum for planetary ecological concerns: This first year of research into the cultural, historical, scientific, and political histories of the north pole and deep arctic has above all things shown me that the north pole is one of the key, most vulnerable, most visible faces of global warming and perhaps eventual biospheric collapse of all sites in our world. I thought I was researching into a place marked by experiences of distance, isolation, frozen vastness and the sublime, but what I have been finding is a complex, rich, beautiful and above all enormously significant biome in our world. The projects (the year long daily blog and video objects) seek to evidence this story of a place seemingly unattainable and remote and yet upon the health of which the future of this planet is largely dependent. The entire project is an invitation to engage in a passionate challenge of dominant economic control and domination which result in an ecological and spiritual wasting.
2. mining cultural representations of the impossible: In all my projects I consider historical representations of cultural phenomenon that exist on the margins, particularly focusing on how culture creates spectacle, narrative, and representation. This three year project seeks to create a series of works that map a wide range of cultural imaginaries located at the north pole: from our vision of the pole as the zenith of our world, a spiritual summit, a challenge to the limits of our human selves to the many political issues relevant to the deep arctic including the effects of our actions there upon the native peoples to the military, energy, and corporate institutions that strip the arctic for its resources to finally the literary, biographical, scientific histories of explorers at the pole.
3. hybridity and alliance: I seek to create hybrid digitally based forms that interweave science, culture, representation, history, and wonder. Through data mining and a synthesis of virtual spaces with photographed realities, I want to create an experience of how the digital seems to impinge, threaten or liberate our physical bodies and world. Finally through producing what Pierre Huyge calls “an aesthetic of alliances”, I point to the multiplicity of voices behind the creation of any cultural representation with the deep hope of inspiring others to create their own conversations about the interrelationships sustaining our world.