The Ice Time Project: Tessering the Space Time of Climate Change

RE:SOURCe The 10th International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology 13-16 September 2023 Venice, Italy PROCEEDINGS The Ice-Time Project Tessering the Space-Time of Climate Change Clea T. Waite Independent Colorado, USA [email protected] Abstract The geological provides a glimpse of time as a supradimensional force, a four-dimensional perspective that subsumes both past and future and whose deep time view far exceeds human perception. Visible evidence of this space-time polytope is our perception of changing matter over time: rusting metals, geological strata, coral reefs, and melting ice caps. Fathoming global warming-induced climate change involves vast systems and timeframes that are disconcerting for the mind to assimilate. Can we comprehend data representing planetary scales of matter and timeframes that progress over generations, far beyond empirical experience and the limits of our physical perception? Ancient glacial ice provides an 800,000-year timeline, a fourth dimension, into Earth's climatological past and the future uncertain outcomes of rising temperatures. The Ice-Time project is a series of immersive media artworks created in response to the precarious state of Earth's ecosystem, engaging interdisciplinary science-art research methodologies, including heuristic experience with polar ice in Greenland and collaborations with scientific experts. The project explores momentous environmental challenges – challenges framed by the concept of the Anthropocene, the idea that humanity should now be considered a geological and terrestrial force. The artworks presented here use the notion of the cinematic tesseract, a four-dimensional container of space and time, to formally explore immersive cinema in and as hyperspace. The series of cinema-installations enact the accelerating space-time of glacial ice caused by global warming. The Ice-Time project is realized in diverse, immersive moving image forms that include a multi-channel video installation with spatial sound, 360°cinema, ultra-high-resolution hypercinema formats, and virtual reality to create embodied experiences of the changing timeframes of polar ice. This essay will focus on two works from the series, the immersive video installation Ice-Time and the virtual reality environment TesserIce. The six-channel video / spatial audio installation Ice-Time is an immersive cinema mediascape. In the installation, the beholder experiences the time frame of a different form of matter as a proprioceptive, somatic experience. Ice-Time conveys realistic views of ice taken at all scales of space, from the microscopic to the planetary, combined within a threedimensional space of original sound recordings of ice. TesserIce composes a true four-dimensional mediascape in virtual reality that allows participants to propel themselves through the hyperspace dimensions of Earth's polar ice. The experience of higher-dimensional landscapes and acoustic cinematic environments uniquely places participants within a four-dimensional architecture. Placing the spectator's body in a conflation of real with virtual space fosters a radical solicitude between the space-time of the human and the geological. In each of these works, the stark imagery of ice serves as a distinct access point into the overwhelming complexity of global warming and its ramifications, creating an embodied, participatory, and poetic experience of climate change's time, scale, causes, and effects that imbues the spectator with a deep awareness of the environment and the cultural implications of ice. Keywords Anthropocene, polar ice, immersive cinema, supradimensional cinema, embodied perception, hyperspace, tesseract, Greenland, climate change, global warming THE ICE-TIME PROJECT The Ice-Time project is a series of media artworks combining science, technology, and art created in response to the precarious state of Earth's ecosystem. The project realizes hyper-dimensional, cinematic spaces that transform the audience’s subjective perception of time by transposing nonhuman scales of time to the human and back to grasp the temporal reality of climate change, particularly the time scales of glacial ice. These works enact the current accelerating changes in the space-time of glacial ice. The project engages interdisciplinary science-art research methodologies, including a polar expedition to Western Greenland and collaborations with scientific experts. The IceTime project uses immersive moving image forms that include a multi-channel video installation with spatial sound, 360°cinema, ultra-high-resolution hyper-cinema formats, and virtual reality to create embodied, proprioceptive, poetic experiences of the changing timeframes of ice. The images in the Ice-Time series present hyper-realistic, magnified views of ice taken at all scales, from the microscopic to the planetary. We achieved exceptionally detailed images of ice cores, crystals, glaciers, and other natural ice formations using ultra-high-definition timelapse photography and micro-photography in the field and in collaboration with polar scientists. The artworks explore momentous environmental challenges – challenges framed by the concept of the Anthropocene, the idea that humanity should now be considered a geological and terrestrial force. The resulting cinema-installations aim to convey the quiddity of ice and its ramifications as embodied, deeply aesthetic experiences. They create the opportunity for the participants to internalize knowledge of the cryosphere as few people in the populated and more temperate parts of the Earth have the chance to do, imbuing participants with an implicit awareness of polar ice's environmental and cultural implications. This essay focuses on two works from the series, IceTime and TesserIce. 178 FATHOMING Each individual life plays a small role in the state of the world, like the role of a single snowflake in creating a flowing glacier. Our collective imperative is to see beyond our immediate surroundings, envisage our effects on distant parts of the world, and grasp the scale of our collective impact. Climate change is the defining issue of our time. Philosopher Bruno Latour compared the interdependencies of our planet’s atmospheric processes and our inextricable reliance on them to the life-support technology of a space station that is breaking down. Using philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s designation for unambiguity, he wrote, Our current condition nearly relies on a more explicit understanding that this tentative technological system, this ‘life-support,’ entails the whole planet – even its atmosphere […] we are finally out of this strange idea of a nature that could remain infinitely distant from the fragile life-support system that we are slowly making explicit.⁠(Latour, 2006:106-107) As we are all now aware, global warming is precipitating unprecedented weather events, oil disputes, water wars, and refugee migrations while rising oceans and raging fires begin to redraw the global map of habitable spaces. Latour summarized this situation: ‘[…] everyone now knows that the climate question is at the heart of all geopolitical issues and that it is directly tied to questions of injustice and inequality.’(Latour, 2018:187). Psychically remote, we obliviously engender harm. The Antarctic Ice Sheet, Earth’s largest ice mass, holds 90% of the planet’s fresh water. Antarctica's ice currently remains relatively stable, but, for example, Thwaite's Glacier, which drains an immense expanse of West Antarctica's ice sheet, is expected to contribute several inches of sea level rise by the end of this century at its current rate of retreat. Should global warming remain unchecked, unleashing a sudden glacial retreat, Thwaite’s Glacier alone could release enough ice to raise sea level by ten feet over the next few centuries (Michon Scott, 2023), creating unfathomable alteration to Earth’s current land masses. 1 Greenland’s Ice Sheet is the second-largest ice mass on the planet. Because of its location, it is both more accessible for study and melting at a significantly faster rate than Antarctica. A joint study by NASA and ESA showed that Greenland lost 3.8 trillion tons of ice between 1992 and 2018, contributing 11 millimetres to rising sea levels. The melt rate of Greenland’s ice accelerated sevenfold between 1992 and 2018. The study’s findings forecast 70 to 130 millimetres of global sea level rise due to Greenland ice by 2100 (Michon Scott, 2023). But millimetres of sea-level rise and trillion tons of ice over a quarter century are cryptic numbers, abstractions that lack an emotional ingress. Can a work of art serve as a means to comprehend the unfathomable by providing an emotional connection to its subject? Can it provide, to quote poet Percy Shelley, ‘…the creative faculty to imagine that which we know …to act that which we imagine?’. (Shelley, 1917) For the Ice-Time project artworks – to know – we headed to Ilulissat in Western 1 In 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that 680 million people living in low-lying coastal zones Greenland, the location of Jakobshavn Isbrae, the largest outlet glacier in Wester Greenland and the fastest-moving glacier on Earth [Fig. 1]. Fig. 1: Jakobshavn Isbrae, Western Greenland, glacial retreat from 1851-2014. Original data NASA. Since the onset of the Anthropocene, Jakobshavn retreats, deflates, and withdraws its terminus. (Andersen et al., 2019) In this essay and these artworks, it is geology that is made explicit. Like Latour’s atmosphere, geology has been reconfigured, and with it, the significance of polar ice. We’ve realized that ice is an essential ecological system, a terrestrial life-support that makes our life possible. Ice in the cryosphere is also the most visible indicator of the short-term effects of climate change. Greenland’s ice is a prelude, a supradimensional window into an unfathomable space and time. MATERIAL TIME The geological provides a glimpse of time as a supradimensional force, a four-dimensional perspective that subsumes both past and future and whose deep time view far exceeds human perception. Visible evidence of this space-time polytope is our perception of changing matter over time: rusting metals, geological strata, coral reefs, and melting ice caps. Fig. 2: Ice-Time: GISP 2D 1841 ice core section from the Greenland Ice Sheet. Depth: 1840 to 1841 meters. Age circa 16000 years B.P. Image provided by the National Ice Core Facility, National Science Foundation. © Clea T. Waite, 2017 The Earth's cryosphere contains deep time. Imagine time as a material axis, a spatial lens outside our three dimensions that makes subtle changes to Earth’s atmosphere visible. The frozen poles are containers of Earth’s climatological timeline, a fourdimensional archive of atmospheric history. Ice cores drilled from ancient glaciers in Antarctica and the Greenland Ice Sheet, the planet’s deepest ice deposits, form this material lens [Fig. 2]. They provide a physical timeline 800,000 years back into the chronicle of Earth's climate and the future uncertain outcomes of rising temperatures. The poles are what philosopher Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects, a metaphor for forces and scales of space and time beyond human comprehension that ‘…involve profoundly different temporalities than the human-scale ones we are used to.’(Morton, 2013: 114) Glaciers are crystal tesseracts. would be adversely affected by sea-level rise due to ice mass melt. That number could exceed 1 billion by 2050(Michon Scott, 2023). 179 Comprehending global warming-induced climate change involves systems and timeframes so vast they are disconcerting for the mind to assimilate. Can we comprehend data representing planetary scales of matter and timeframes that progress over generations, far beyond empirical experience and the limits of our physical perception? The tesseract, a four-dimensional hyper-container of space and time, plays a fundamental role in the metaphors and structures that make the Ice-Time project. current research data and the cryosphere's role in understanding the greater picture of climate change. GROUNDWORK Heuristic immersion in the realm of ice, the first-hand experience of the cryosphere, was essential to Ice-Time (Waite, 2017) from its first inception [Fig. 3]. The research process for creating this project included the empirical methodology of the naturalist in the field, collaboration with scientific experts, and artistic praxis. Our intention was to venture beyond romantic notions of the sublime frozen North to work directly with polar scientists on the ice and in the laboratory. Fig. 4: Ice-Time locations in Greenland: Kangerlussuaq and Point 660 Camp, GIS, Ilulissat and Jakobshavn Glacier, Eqi Glacier and ETH/CU Camp, GIS. Image: C. T. Waite, 2017. Fig. 5: Ice-Time location Eqi Glacier and our ascent to ETH/CU Camp and the GIS. Image: J.J. Andreassen, 2016. a) b) Fig. 3: Heuristic immersion in the realm of ice. a) The author on the Greenland Ice Sheet above Kangerlussuaq. Photo: A. von Chamier, ©2016. b) Angelika von Chamier recording sound at the Icefjord, Illulisat. Photo: C.T. Waite, ©2016. Production for the Ice-Time project centred on a two-woman expedition to Western Greenland in 2016. We spent three weeks immersed in the ice landscape, filming and recording sounds in the 24-hour daylight at the Icefjord in Ilullisat, The Eqi Glacier, camping at Point 660 Camp on the GIS above Kangerlussuaq [Fig. 4], and the Greenland Ice Sheet above Eqi near ETH/CU Camp, GIS [Fig. 5]. Throughout our trip, enthusiastic guides, mostly Danish graduate students in geology and biology, assisted us, and they repeatedly made our quest for specific ice forms possible. Collaborations The integrated practice of art and science embodies a fundamental notion of interdisciplinary proficiency. We approached the creation of Ice-Time by applying the methodologies of both artists and scientists. This practice entails a direct engagement with materials and methods, combined with a commitment to deep research and seeking out the poetic artifacts that emerge from our scientific collaborations. Engaging with polar scientists deeply informed the artwork, providing insight into the interpretation and ramifications of A number of scientists contributed knowledge, experience, and data to the Ice-Time project. Physicist Kenneth Libbrecht at CalTech was the first scientist to join the project. Libbrecht is renowned for his studies and photographs of the morphology of ice crystals. He invited me to his laboratory in Pasadena, and we created custom snowflakes with his apparatus. Data from his research appears throughout Ice-Time. We began our field collaborations by consulting the ARCUS directory of Arctic Researchers and reaching out to the Polar Division of the National Science Foundation. These resources put us in touch with scientific researchers willing to collaborate. Geologist Twila Moon at the University of Bristol first suggested going to Greenland as the hotbed of current glaciological research. She and her colleagues Stephen Cornford and Michael Cooper generously taught us the fundamentals of glaciology. We met with David and Denise Holland from New York University while in Ilullisat and again in their laboratory in New York. David Holland is one of the first scientists to discover that the outlet glaciers are being melted from below by the warming seawater in addition to the warm air above. The ramifications of this discovery are now playing out on the accelerating melting of the ice shelves in Antarctica. Henry Kaiser is one of the world’s foremost under-ice divers, working for the NSF. Henry provided underwater video material from beneath the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, a location beyond our reach. There are fewer under-ice divers in the world with Kaiser's skillset than astronauts. Finally, we worked with Joan Fitzpatrick, Geoff Hargreaves, and Eric Cravens at the National Ice Laboratory in Denver, spending two days filming ice cores and thin slice samples in the freezers there [Fig. 6]. A highlight was when the NICL pulled out one of their most unique subjects for us, the ice core segment known as ‘Black Beauty’ [Fig. 7]. This ice core contains the thickest, most prominent volcanic ash layer found to date in any ice core sample. The ice core is from the WAIS Divide on the 180 West Antarctica Ice Sheet.⁠ 2 More recent layers of ice reveal traces of nuclear fallout and plastics. Fig. 6: Crystals and trapped air from the WAIS Divide Core WDC 06A half and half. Research: Joan Fitzpatrick. NICL/NSF. Photo: E. Cravens. Comparing the atmospheric records revealed by ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica and other sources, including tree rings and sediment deposits, reveals global interactions of climate events. Recent studies demonstrate a north-to-south reaction direction of abrupt climate signals, such as the systemic reaction to significant volcanic events, and have revealed the dominant role of ocean circulation in the interaction between North and South previously attributed to atmospheric processes. 3 Fig. 7: ‘Black Beauty’ ice core sample, NICL. Photo: © A. von Chamier, 2017. The NICL is part of the US Geological Survey. SUPRA-DIMENSIONAL CINEMA The notion of an object only perceivable in time, a higherdimensional object containing the time dimension within its own space, makes the four-dimensional tesseract – the hypercube, so intriguing. Motion is essential for comprehending all aspects of a higher-dimensional object from a lower-dimensional space, giving the tesseract as perceived from three-space an inherently cinematic nature. Three-dimensional film space – the two-dimensional image plane and the singular timeline dimension – is a closed system. The passage through this narrative space is passive, ocular, linear, and determinate. In contrast, four and higher-dimensional film spaces are participatory, somatic, relativistic, and nondeterministic. Within supra-dimensional film space, perspective is a function of the sentient spectator’s point of view. The narrative is dependent on the movement and orientation of the participant. Linear progression is augmented by spatial simultaneity. Navigation through supra-dimensional narrative space engages multiple vectors of physical engagement and perception, occupying a liminal space between the real and the virtual. 2 The entire WAIS Divide Ice core was drilled to a depth of 3,405 meters and was completed in December 2011. This cylinder of ice represents more than 68,000 years of climate history. The ash layer in the photograph has been correlated to the eruption of Kuwae in Vanuatu in the 15th Century, around 1458. The artworks presented here use the notion of the cinematic tesseract to formally explore immersive cinema in and as hyperspace. This supra-dimensional cinema creates a spatiotemporal flow structure that expands the screen into an architectonic, immersive hyper-mediascape fostering a polyperspectival narrative. The sentient spectator of immersive cinema navigates and deciphers different patterns of juxtapositions and associations within a four-dimensional cinematic space. In traditional cinema, we are disembodied viewers. We lose our connection with tangible knowledge. In supra-dimensional cinema, the spectator moves freely amid a multiplex geography of audio-visual facets, building interpretations and decoding meaning using formal structure, memory, juxtaposition, and association. With our supra-dimensional cinema, we aim to create an explicit connection to a poetics of space, an enfolding of embodiment and participation within the spatiotemporal experience of the cinematic. Our approach to visualizing and navigating a supradimensional, immersive cinema involves considering narrative as both time and space, faceted into simultaneous streams distributed in the cinematic architecture. The spectator is placed within the geometry of the film, creating alternative perspectives. No hierarchy, no explicit viewing direction or pathway dominates the flow. Instead, the narrative is composed as an open work, a ‘work in movement’ in the sense advanced by philosopher Umberto Eco. He described the open work as ‘[...]a “work in movement” whose movement combines with that of the viewer.’ (Eco, 1989: 86) The open work is a prepared field of possibilities for the unpredictable performance of the beholder, ‘a work of art stripped of necessary and foreseeable conclusions …’ (Eco, 1989: 15). ICE-TIME The six-channel video installation Ice-Time (Waite, 2017) is an immersive cinema mediascape in which the beholder experiences the time of a different form of matter as a somatosensory experience. In the Ice-Time installation, we intentionally ground the body of the spectator in a conflation of real with virtual space and time. Within the cinema-installation, the diegetic scales of ice's time expand and contract. The natural movement of ice often occurs at speeds beyond human perception – until the timescale of the ice is transposed to meet the perceptual timeframe of the participant. Time then reverts in Ice-Time, drawing the sensate viewer back into the perceptual time of ice. The participant's body is enfolded in an alternate timeframe, collapsing its sensory distance to the ice. The Ice-Time installation occupies a hexagonal architecture, echoing the structure of water crystals [Fig. 8]. Six large projections and a 9.1-channel, three-dimensional soundscape fifteen simultaneous media streams in total - create a room-sized environment whose spatial narrative is deciphered by the movements of the beholder. The concept of embodied perception enacted by the Ice-Time installation considers the See Sigl, M. et al. A new bipolar ice core record of volcanism from WAIS Divide and NEEM and implications for climate forcing of the last 2000 years: A 2000yr Bipolar Volcano Record – Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 00-118, 1151–1169 (2013). 3 181 entire body as a perceptual field in a poetics of space. The physical/virtual synthesized space interacts with the phenomenology of movement, enacting Eco’s work in movement. Proprioceptions construct an individual narrative within the space-time continuum of the cinematic construct. Fig. 8: Ice-Time occupies a navigable, hexagonal architecture, echoing the structure of water crystals. Photo: K. Baumann, 2017. Cinema comprises both sound and image. The soundtrack of Ice-Time creates an acoustic volume that further shapes the perceptual space of the artwork. Our sound recordings place the audience acoustically near the ice, recorded using contact microphones and hydrophonics in direct proximity to the ice, composed into a three-dimensional soundscape. THE FOURTH DIMENSION Common experience has three directions: up-down, side-toside, and forward-back. This world consists of three orthogonal dimensions laid out along the construct known as the Cartesian coordinate system (x,y,z). Visualizing four-dimensional structures from the confines of our three-dimensional space is a question that has challenged mathematicians and artists for 150 years. Most solutions necessarily view these structures in compromised form as two- or three-dimensional renderings viewed outside the polytope, looking at them rather than experiencing them from within. The results are shadows of shadows – the two-dimensional screen renderings of threedimensional shadow projections of the four-dimensional object. Two strands of interpreting the fourth dimension developed at its inception at the turn of the twentieth century; one defined the fourth dimension as an additional dimension of space perpendicular to our own three (x,y,z,w), unimaginable to us yet encompassing our three-dimensional scope as the cube encompasses the square. The other defined the fourth dimension as time (x,y,z,t), imagining space and time as a continuous, fourdimensional volume of past and future spread along a linear time axis, all moments existing simultaneously. In this interpretation, the present constitutes a continually shifting moment, manifested as a three-dimensional slice of this space-time polytope passing through the visible dimensions of our space. The perception of the four-dimensional tesseract from threespace relies on motion. The use of stereoscopy and cinematic motion in a 360° viewing field uniquely positions virtual reality to visualize a four-dimensional, cinematic space (x,y,z,t). V.R. provides an opportunity to geometrically construct, animate, and navigate the fourth dimension's shifting landscape and acoustic environment. TesserIce Fig. 9: Model of the Ice-Time installation, top view, with threedimensional sound setup. © Clea T. Waite, 2017. Spatial cues in the soundtrack are critical to choreographing the viewer within the installation. Shifts in the wave formations from each loudspeaker cause the acoustic interactions to vary, depending on the listener’s position. These formations create a strong spatial sensation. The design of the audio environment allows accurate placement of sounds within the space, giving us control of the overall interaction of sounds with each other throughout the room [Fig. 9]. INNER AND OUTER REALITY Four-dimensional cinema, three-space and time, fosters participation in constructing an individual narrative. It engages the sensate body and spatial memory in decoding poetic meaning. The immersive structure of the Ice-Time installation reinstates a distinct connection to a poetic space, an enfolding within the spatiotemporal experience of the cinematic. The beholder of immersive cinema is placed in an uncertain oscillation between inner and outer reality, virtual and real space. This supra-dimensional enfolding is rendered explicit in the five dimensions of the following work, the virtual reality project TesserIce. Reality is a hyper-volume of past and future matter extending along the limitless axis of time into a higher dimension of space beyond our sensory perception. Humans are existentially confined to the third dimension in the physical world, never able to physically experience the space of the fourth dimension that profoundly affects us. Within the hyper-volume of reality, polar glaciers are crystal tesseracts, four-dimensional containers of Earth’s environmental deep time. Imagine entering a four-dimensional space-time lens outside our three dimensions that renders subtle changes to Earth's climate visible and visceral – a space in which time is a material axis. TesserIce (Waite, 2024) creates an opportunity to experience a higher-dimensional landscape as it constructs a 4D, navigable architecture in V.R. The mediascape provides a chance to enter within the higher-dimensional landscape and acoustic, cinematic environment. TesserIce brings human perception into the supra-dimensional space-time of glaciers, creating an immersive, embodied experience of the time, scale, causes, and effects of climate change on the ice. In TesserIce, the participant enters a crystalline, fourdimensional cinema architecture. The participant is within a lifesize, traversable, virtual tesseract in which space, time, and sound behave according to the unfamiliar geometry of the fourth dimension. Their movements propel them through the hyperdimensions of this tesseract, traversing different cube rooms constructed from the images and sounds of Ice-Time. The space unfolds in unchartered vistas, juxtapositions, and timeframes within the space-time of Earth's polar ice [Fig. 10]. 182 Fig. 10: A four-dimensional architectural mediascape from within. TesserIce stillframe. © Clea T. Waite, 2024. In TesserIce, the participant is free to pass through walls and along floors, ceilings, and time within the four-dimensional architecture. The paths connect cubes following the true geometry of the tesseract. The navigation is inspired by novelist Robert A. Heinlein’s short story, ‘And He Built a Crooked House,’(Heinlein, 1967) describing a four-dimensional architecture that infinitely wraps back on itself. Viewing back into the third dimension from the four-space of the tesseract, an object's head and tail are coextensive. Neither inside and outside, nor top and bottom as we know them, are distinguishable. Linear perspective is fractured into crystalline, poly-perspectival facets or bent into a space of relativistic proximities. Within cinematic hyperspace, action is as pervasive as sound. In immersive cinema, immersive sound is critical as a key sensory component in defining space. The acoustics of the TesserIce mediascape, like Ice-Time, are essential to the sensory environment of the experience. We experimented with how an immersive soundscape ‘behaves’ in a four-dimensional, navigable space while adding essential spatialized information cues to the immersive experience. TESSERING: AN EMANATION OF THE REFERENT Philosopher Roland Barthes characterized (predigital and unadulterated) photography as an ‘emanation of the referent,’ a witness to authenticity, capturing reality into a spatial actuality that persists outside time. The lens-based image presents a paradoxical oscillation in the space-time continuum between virtuality and reality. This paradox evokes a supra-dimensional state of perception in which the mind experiences past and present times and real and virtual spaces in multiple, simultaneous levels of awareness. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.(Barthes, 1977: 44) Placing the viewer briefly in a paradoxical state of perception where multiple times and spaces are coincident – into a state of tessering4, collapses the logical space-time continuum between two events, namely the place and time of photographing and the place and time of viewing. This act of tessering is an enfolding, an instantaneous leap through the fabric of space-time using a shortcut through a higher dimension [Fig. 11]. For the wider public, the empirical nature of data, like photography, is inevitably experienced as virtual. Much of our current data originates without human mediation, which filmmaker Harun Farocki designated ‘operational images.’(Parikka, 2023) The Ice-Time project, conversely, serves an experiential function as a document of our unique moment in glacial space-time. The artworks mediate the paradox of presence – a first-hand yet simultaneously remote experience of image and data. The viewer becomes connected, tessered, to the original time and space of the ice, sharing the presence of place experienced by the human cinematographer at the scene. Fig. 11: Tessering into Ice-Time. Still frame (Icefjord Illulisat, Greenland). © Clea T. Waite, 2017. Conclusion Glaciers are crystal tesseracts, hyperspace containers of environmental time. The geological provides a physical manifestation of deep time. It demonstrates the supra-dimensional force that is time, allowing us to glimpse a higher-dimensional perspective that subsumes both past and future and whose scope far exceeds human perception. The notion of the cinematic tesseract, a higher-dimensional polytope, formally explores immersive cinema in and as hyperspace. Space-time as an enveloping domain is made explicit through this formal cinematic device. In supradimensional cinema, narrative space is rendered architectonic and relativistic, engaging multiple vectors of perception. Embodiment, participation, and a poetics of space emerge from this formal compositional approach to cinema, placing the participant in a liminal space bridging the real and virtual. The Ice-Time series of immersive media artworks documents our unique moment in glacial space-time, using the form of supra-dimensional cinema to enfold the participant in a paradoxical oscillation with a remote and unfamiliar reality. The series of immersive films realizes diverse hyper-dimensional cinematic spaces that transform the audience’s subjective perception of time while simultaneously imagining the microscopic, our own human scale, and the scale of the planetary. The works structurally transpose non-human scales of 4 The nomenclature ‘tessering’ is introduced by the author in (Chamier-Waite, 2019). ‘Tessering’ is originally derived from its use in the science fiction novel A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engel, 1962. 183 time, particularly the time scales of glacial ice, to visualize the current temporal reality of climate change. The Ice-Time moving image works create a supradimensional space of signification and navigable time, enacting the meta-dimensional data vistas of climate research as unique, deeply aesthetic experiences. The cinema-installations serve as entry points for reflecting on natural systems and processes, tessering our awareness to remote ecosystems affected by the climate crisis we have created – now affecting us at home. Placing the spectator's body in a conflation of real with virtual space fosters a radical solicitude between the space-time of the human and the geological. The embodied, participatory structure of the works enables the sentient spectator to form a deep, poetic awareness of the environment, the cultural implications of ice, and the imperative of our engagement with it. Shelley, P.B. (1917) ‘A Defense of Poetry’, in A Defense of Poetry and Other Essays from Project Gutenberg. Available at: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num =5428 (Accessed: 26 June 2018). Waite, C.T. (2017) Ice-Time [Six-channel video installation with 9.1 Surround audio and mixed media]. Available at: https://vimeo.com/cleawaite/icetimedoc. Waite, C.T. (2024) TesserIce [Virtual Reality, HMD]. Acknowledgements Many thanks to my artistic collaborators Angelika von Chamier, Jared Christopher Kelley, Todd Furmanski, Max Orozco, and Caleb Foss for their contributions to TesserIce. Further thanks are due to the scientific and musical contributors: Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, Dr. David Holland, Dr. Denise Holland, Henry Kaiser, Dr. Twila Moon, Dr. Stephen Conford, Stephen Hunter Flick, Douglas Quin, and NICF’s Geoff Hargreaves, Eric Cravens, and Dr. Joan Fitzpatrick. The National Academies Keck Futures Initiative and the University of Southern California provided financial support for Ice-Time. TesserIce began during the Immensiva 2021 V.R. residency at the Espronceda Institute of Art & Culture, Barcelona. References Andersen, J. et al. (2019) ‘Update of annual calving front lines for 47 marine terminating outlet glaciers in Greenland (1999–2018)’, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland Bulletin, 43. Available at: https://doi.org/10.34194/GEUSB-201943-02-02. Barthes, R. (1977) Image, music, text. Translated by S. Heath. New York: Hill and Wang. Chamier-Waite, C. von (2019) ‘Somatic Montage: Supra-Dimensional Composition in Cinema and the Arts’. Dissertation, University of Southern California. Eco, U. (1989) The Open Work. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Heinlein, R.A. (1967) ‘And He Built a Crooked House’, in A.C. Clarke (ed.) Time Probe. 1st Edition’ edition. Dell Books. Latour, B. (2006) ‘Air’, in C.A. Jones (ed.) Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art. 1st MIT Press Ed edition. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, pp. 104–107. Latour, B. (2018) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. 1st edition. Polity. Michon Scott (2023) Where will sea level rise most from ice sheet melt?, National Snow and Ice Data Center. Available at: https://nsidc.org/learn/ask-scientist/where-will-sea-level-rise-mostice-sheet-melt (Accessed: 5 February 2024). Morton, T. (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Posthumanities) - Kindle edition. Available at: https://www.amazon.com/Hyperobjects-Philosophy-Ecology-afterPosthumanitiesebook/dp/B00FP9EI5Y/ref=sr_1_1_twi_kin_2?s=books&ie=UTF8 &qid=1514513037&sr=11&keywords=hyperobjects+philosophy+and+ecology+after+the+e nd+of+the+world (Accessed: 28 December 2017). Parikka, J. (2023) Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual. Univ Of Minnesota Press. 184 RE:SOURCE conference Website https://www.resource-media.art/ Instagram @resource_mediarts #resource2023 PROCEEDINGS Edited by Francesca Franco and Andrés Burbano Editorial Assistant Clio Flego Graphic Design Josef Iop Published and distributed by Resource Press – Venice, Italy [email protected] www.resource-media.art/press Organiser RESOURCE ETS Cannaregio 2176 - 30121 Venezia (IT) CF / VAT number 94104310274 [email protected] Partners Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH) Università Ca’ Foscari Scuola Grande dei Carmini Metadiapason MiC, Direzione Generale Educazione, ricerca e istituti culturali ISBN 979-12-210-6571-8 The conference RE:SOURCE was realised thanks to the contribution of the Italian Ministry of Culture, Directorate General of Education, Research, and Cultural Institutions. 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