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Imagination and Wonder in the Face of Climate Change
Bleak news about climate change barrages us relentlessly. Stories of
future disasters, of ineffectual changes, of ever more catastrophic
climate models create a picture that many find daunting and off-putting.
We have gotten better at recycling, using fluorescent light bulbs,
etc., but still, the problem seems so huge, so out of our hands, and
getting every more complex, that its easier to turn away or indulge in
cynical dystopic visions.
The North Pole is the epicenter of the climate crisis news cycle and
data glut. It is our canary in a cold mine (literally), as the effects
of forced anthropogenic warming affect the delicate ecosystem more
extremely than climates closer to the equator. Melting faster than
scientist's predictions can keep up with, the possible effects of the
rapidly transforming boreal climate keep us hooked up to the morphine
drip of cataclysmic prophecies.
As a result, we are paying attention to the North Pole in ways we
have never done before. New technologies have allowed for nearly real
time experience of the landscape through webcams and other networked
technologies. Advances in engineering have allowed for penetration of
otherwise truly remote wilderness as never before: witness the
invaluable data found in mile long ice cores carefully screwed out from
deep within ancient ice sheets and glaciers. Developments in energy
production and travel allow for tourists and scientists both to cheaply
(relatively, at a cost of often $25,000 per ticket), quickly, and
comfortably sail up to the pole in nuclear icebreakers or subs. This
mythical place, which was once our most remote, our most inaccessible
landscape, is now almost on our doorstep and irrevocably connected to
very real, even quantifiable, daily human life.
And yet, the long rich history of Western exploration of the far
north is still a part of our anxiety over the disappearance of its age
old climate. The images, lectures, lantern slides, poetry, and journal
entries picturing the far off lands fueled deep desires to experience
and conquer. To the culture that produced so many people willing to
throw themselves at this harshest of terrains at ever greater expense
and national pride, the north pole was our farthest north, spiritual
summit, heroic destination, most extreme landscape on the farthest edge
of the world. Its vast tracts of land and sea and ice existed beyond our
borders of representation and understanding, yet were pictured as
sublime frontier, filled with the supernatural or paranormal, a place
outside of the normal vagaries of life, where even our shadows,
footprints, and breath act alien to us.
"What may not be expected in this country of eternal
light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle
and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only
this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities forever." — Mary Shelly,
Frankenstein, letter from Walton, explorer to North
Pole
But, Shelly's Frankenstein lecturing about the quest for glory on the
way to the North Pole is now Al Gore on an elevating platform gesturing
towards complex graphs of temperature fluctuations. The technologies of
communication deployed by science, industrialization, and geopolitical
concerns picture this territory now. What was once considered a
wilderness foreign to our Western culture is now a harbinger of our
future and so has become part of us. The natural, the technological,
and the production of data are no longer in conflict, but exist in
reciprocal need.
The north pole, once a mythical land of unreachable sublime
wilderness, is now at the heart of scientific data predicting calamity.
How do these disparate pictures resolve or oppose one another? Can we
turn our doom-filled prophecies into catalytic responses? Can the power
of imagination and wonder provoke us out of exhausted cynicism toward
visionary engagement?
What is the opposite of despair, of disaster, of death? Elaine
Scarry, in her groundbreaking book The Body in Pain, makes a
claim for the power of imagination to push the world towards creation,
while pain (or the fear of pain?) leads towards destruction. In the
nineteenth century, Western explorers of the Arctic took with them on
their ships as much of Western culture as they could, including sets of
silver, libraries of great literature, and smoking jackets. They also
brought trunks of costumes with which they performed the popular theater
of the time upon the ice during the long winters of darkness when they
were trapped in the ice in subzero temperatures with little hope of
survival. These extravaganzas were a necessary focal point for a crew
deeply suffering and filled with doubt. Harnessing the power of wonder
allowed them to take a journey out of the dark cold and into other
fantastical worlds with humor and spectacle.
This story became the basis for Arctic Then, a series of images of
vaudevillian performers enacting uncertain tableaux with detritus of our
urban communities and set upon 3D visualizations of digital elevation
models of ice caps and glaciers from around the world. The images put
the glaciers in the place of the explorers of yesterday: starving,
endangered, with little hope. There is so little that we feel we can do
to save them. Perhaps yoking the power of imagination on their behalf
can create a rift in the immense sea of complex uncertainties of
responses to the climate crisis.
Arctic Listening Post
I have researched, mapped, and explored the North Pole for the last
five years through Arctic Listening Post, a collaborative,
interdisciplinary digital media project. Through this project, I created
a pair of video installations that imagine the future of the North Pole over
the next hundred years: Rising North and Future North Ecotarium.
Rising North, a nine-minute large scale video projection pairs a very
economical and meditative color field visualization of the change in
temperature at the North Pole over the next century with a larger than
life operatic voice singing in aria form the prosaic news headlines from
Google news on the vernal equinox of March 21, 2007: reports of
kiteboarders surfing over the pole to watercolor classes offered in
North Pole, Alaska to endless accounts of changing climate data. How can
we make sense of the climate change predictions in the news? How do we
absorb scientific information into our everyday lives?
Future North Ecotarium imagines our future in the next
hundred years after irreversible climate change. Created in
collaboration with visionary architects Mitchell Joachim and Terreform
Studio, the three-minute stop motion animation images our response to a
three meter sea level rise over the next century. Massive migrations of
urban populations will move north to escape severe flooding and
increasing temperatures. Many areas inside the Artic regions will warm
up significantly, making their occupation newly desirable. Real estate
values will shift to privilege far northern climates formerly imagined
as the edge of the earth. The reality of hundreds of millions of people
relocating their respective centers of culture, business, and life is
almost incomprehensible. In this animation, entire cities float away
from their flooded moorings and meet in a new North, re-imagining the
entire surface of our planet in the future.
I am often asked, what is the point? Or, more directly, can
aesthetic experience or art make any real difference in the face of such
a huge crisis? What does looking at (and listening to) art do to effect
change? Beyond pointing to the long history of art used to revision
crisis in the service of change, I call upon the power of our
imagination in partnership with our intellect and our activism as the
key trio in a global consciousness shift that is necessary to slow and
ameliorate the human causes of climate change. Instead of prioritizing
one approach over the other, the question should be: how can we put
everything we have in service to the act of inspiring individuals,
communities, and countries to work for our future?
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