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Article and Statement by the Artist
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?
