Ice Time

Ice-Time Clea T. Waite1 interdisciplinary Media Arts + Practice University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts Los Angeles California USA [email protected] ABSTRACT Ice-Time is an immersive video installation combining science and art. The artwork creates a singular cinematic portrait of ice, ranging from vast glaciers to individual crystals, in a poetic response to the accelerating changes we are currently observing in Earth’s ecosystem. Ice-Time elicits the poetics of frozen water revealed by current geological research. The artwork documents this moment in glacial space-time, expressing the beauty and the rationality of ice at odds with the devastating chaos its disappearance portends. In the installation, contrasting visual scales and supra-human speeds of observation reveal the essence of ice. \acmBooktitle{9th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts (ARTECH 2019), October 23--25, 2019, Braga, Portugal}\acmDOI{10.1145/3359852.3359979} \acmISBN{978-1-4503-7250-3/19/10} https://doi.org/10.1145/3359852.3359979 KEYWORDS Science + Art, Immersive Cinema, Immersive Sound, Ambisonic, Climate Change, Anthropocene, Embodiment, Perception, Tesseract, Deep-time, Real Space, Virtual Space. ACM Reference format: The immersive cine-installation occupies a hexagonal architecture, echoing the structure of water crystals. Six large projections and a 9.1-channel, three-dimensional ambisonic soundscape create a room-sized environment. The juxtaposition of elements transfigures as visitors navigate the space in an embodied, dynamic montage. The Ice-Time project approach demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary art-science research and collaboration as it distills contemporary culture’s psychic moment of a data-driven reality. Through a vivid, material presence of image, sound, data, and time, the immersive film establishes a somatic interaction of form and content. The installation imbues the spectator with an awareness of the environmental and cultural implications of polar ice and the essential role ice plays in anthropogenic climate change. CCS CONCEPTS \copyrightyear{2019} \acmYear{2019} \acmConference[ARTECH 2019]{9th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts}{October 23--25, 2019}{Braga, Portugal} 1 Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). ARTECH 2019, October 23–25, 2019, Braga, Portugal© 2019 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-7250-3/19/10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359852.3359979 Clea T. Waite. 2018. Ice-Time. In Proceedings of ARTECH 2019. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359852.3359979 1 Introduction Ice and steam can reveal more about the nature of water than water alone ever could. [Murch 2001] The geological provides a glimpse of deep-time as a supradimensional force – a four-dimensional perspective that subsumes both past and future and whose scope far exceeds human perception. The Greenland Ice Sheet, the planet’s second deepest deposit of ice after Antarctica, functions as a frozen container of Earth’s climatological timeline. The ice-cores excavated in Greenland provide an 800,000-year view into the preterite history of Earth's atmospheric conditions (Figure 1). In the tesseract of the geological, the simultaneity of space conjoins with the succession of time. A volume of past and future matter spreads along the time axis in which all events, all states, coexist simultaneously. The present moment of now constitutes a continually shifting, threedimensional slice of this four-dimensional hyper-solid as it passes through our space of only three dimensions. Greenland’s ice is a prelude, a supra-dimensional window into deep-time. ARTECH 2019, October, 2019, Braga, Portugal Climate change is a defining issue of our time. It 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. The Ice-Time project is a creative response to the perilous state of Earth's ecosystem that engages interdisciplinary research methodologies to explore the significant environmental challenges framed by the concept of the Anthropocene, the idea that humanity should now be considered as a geological and terrestrial force. The Ice-Time project examines our culture’s altering perceptions of space and time, the deeptime of Earth’s environment, by using polar ice as a unique window onto issues of climate change. The installation immerses the audience in accelerating glacial time, imbuing them with an implicit awareness of the environmental and cultural implications of polar ice. Figure 1: 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.2 Ice-Time is an immersive, multi-channel audiovisual poem. The installation Ice-Time constructs an embodied, cinematic experience whose spatiality is deciphered by the somatic perambulations of the beholder. The installation is configured from six channels of video faceted amongst six large projections and a three-dimensional soundscape – fifteen simultaneous media streams in total. The artwork occupies a room-sized, immersive environment structured as a crystalline, cinematic tesseract. This hyper-mediascape formally explores the coexistence of subject with the architectural structure of a cinema-installation. 2 A Crystal Tesseract 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 1980] The empiricism of the photographic image has left an indelible mark on modernity. The photograph is an image captured within an 2 The entire WAIS Divide ice core was drilled to a depth of 3,405 meters and was completed in December of 2011. This cylinder of ice represents more than 68,000 years of climate history. Comparing the atmospheric records displayed in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, as well as other sources that include tree rings and sediment deposits, reveals the global interactions of climate events. Recent studies demonstrate a north to south systemic reaction to abrupt climate signals such as large volcanic events. These records have further revealed the dominant role played by ocean circulation in the interaction between the northern and southern hemispheres, previously attributed to atmospheric processes. C. Waite impenetrable window made of glass with an infinitely high index of refraction. The photographic presents a paradoxical oscillation in the space-time continuum between virtuality and reality. Philosopher Roland Barthes characterizes photography as an “emanation of the referent,” [Barthes 1980] a witness to authenticity, capturing reality into a spatial actuality that persists outside time. 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. Figure 2: Jakobshavn Isbrae, Western Greenland, glacial retreat from 1851-2013. Original data NASA3. Since the onset of the Anthropocene, Jakobshavn retreats, deflates, and withdraws its terminus. Contemporary technology enhances human vision, augmenting sight with extended wavelength cameras, microscopes, telescopes, radar, sonar, and satellites (Figure 2). We have created universal access to data, shared over our global machine networks. A cyborg perception of a more profound truth that cannot be seen with the naked eye is realized. In 21st-century, the role of the photographic, Barthes’ signifier of modernity, has been appropriated by data. The stark iconography of polar ice used in Ice-Time serves as a distinct access point into the overwhelming complexity of climate change and its ramifications. If the art of every era reflects the way in which its science and technology influence the culture’s view of reality, then for this culture of the early 21stcentury, our techno-scientifically affected perception stems from a data-driven view of climate change. Ice-Time expresses the beauty, the rationality, and the gravitas of ice by imparting a detailed picture of glacial ice as a formal aesthetic construct, as an essential force in the global climate, and as a supra-dimensional container of the climatological record of our planet. The glacier is a crystal tesseract. The Ice-Time mediascape is constructed both conceptually and representationally as a four-dimensional cinematic object. The four-dimensional tesseract, viewed from the third dimension, is 3 Original image NASA: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3806 with an update by E. Olsen: http://neven1.typepad.com/.a/6a0133f03a1e37970b01b8d14a1056970c-pi Ice-Time inherently cinematic owing to the fact that our awareness of it occurs as it unfolds in motion. The film cells of Ice-Time are faceted in space amongst the six projections and three-dimensional soundscape. The installation occupies a room-sized, immersive environment composed of translucent screens that are viewable from both sides. The screens are arranged in an enfolded hexagon formation, a shape based on the molecular structure of ice intersected with a hypercube section in three-space (Figure 3). The projections are scaled to human height and suspended from the ceiling to create an unobstructed, navigable space of physical immersion. In Ice-Time, the film’s narrative circulates throughout the installation. Events are presented in poly-perspectival simultaneity, cognitively assembled by the viewer through navigation and proprioception. The spectator fills in the gaps between cinema cells, the conceptual negative space between the signifiers, in a phenomenological perception of a three-dimensional form. A timebased assemblage of multiple views occurs in the mind. The conception of the object’s entire form is created by mentally connecting obscured views and overcoming perspective. This formal construction of the installation creates a feedback loop of multimodal interpretation. The deciphering of metaphors and significations are performed in conjunction with the concomitant structure – a poetics of space. Architecture, images, and soundtrack combine in a four-dimensional syntax to convey a kinesthetic experience of data poetics. ARTECH 2019, October, 2019, Braga, Portugal unified display of expanded spatial dimensions. At other times, facets of similar images build a virtual space of distributed cells in simultaneous, serial arrays. Enfolded variations in scale and distance build a supra-dimensional space of concurrent, varied, miseen-cadres (Figure 4). The screens seem to punctuate an extended space-time continuum, emphasized by the viewability of each projection from both sides. The movement of ice in the film is perceived as the effect of time on matter. Within each frame, the scales of time expand and contract, enfolding the viewer in variations of speed and distance in relation to the objects. Movement within the images often occurs at speeds beyond human perception – until the timescale of the ice is transposed to meet the perceptual time frame of the viewer, then reverts, drawing them back into the perceptual time of ice. Figure 4: Ice-Time: facets of similar images build a virtual space of distributed cells in simultaneous, serial arrays. Photo: A. v. Chamier. The images of Ice-Time present hyper-realistic, magnified views of ice taken at all scales, from the microscopic to the planetary. The sensory distance between the body of the beholder and the ice is collapsed (Figure 5). In its approach, Ice-Time echoes artist Paul Klee’s andacht zum kleinen, the devotion to small things. Klee was concerned with “energy and substance, that which moves and that which is moved.” As described by art historian Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Klee could, “through observation of the smallest manifestation of form and interrelationship… conclude about the magnitude of natural order.” [Klee and Moholy-Nagy 1968] From a single snowflake, the glacier grows. Figure 3: Ice-Time (2017) installation model top view. The architecture of the installation is formally inspired by the hexagonal structure of ice molecules and the three-dimensional shadow of a tesseract. Image: C. Waite. The viewer’s trajectory is choreographed by carefully staggered sequences of cuts that rotate in time between the screens, drawing the viewer’s gaze and body with them. At times, one image will flow from screen to screen, enlarging the space into a Cinema is both sound and image. The sounds of ice in IceTime create a liquid architecture that further forms the perceptual space. Our sound recordings place the audience acoustically near to the ice, recorded using contact microphones and hydrophonics in direct proximity with the ice. 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 in a form of echolocation. The ambisonic, acoustic matrix of the installation is produced using a custom, 9.1channel audio array. The design of the audio environment allows ARTECH 2019, October, 2019, Braga, Portugal accurate placement of sounds within the space, giving control of the overall interaction of sounds with each other in the entire room. Figure 5: View of the Ice-Time installation placing the beholder within microscopic images of individual ice crystals. Photo: K. Baumann. 3 Presence Heuristic immersion in the realm of ice, the first-hand experience of the cryosphere, was essential to Ice-Time from its first inception. Ice-Time centers on an expedition to Western Greenland in Summer 2016. The design-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 working directly with polar scientists on the ice and in the laboratory. Glacial ice contains millennia of climatological events, visible to the trained eye. Engaging firsthand with scientists provided insight into the interpretation and ramifications of current research and the roles Greenland and Antarctica play in understanding the greater picture of climate change. Through the use of ultra-high-definition time-lapse photography and micro-photography in the field, we achieved exceptionally detailed images of ice cores, crystals, glaciers, and other natural ice formations. The resulting film aims to convey the quiddity of ice and its ramifications as an embodied, deeply aesthetic experience. It creates the opportunity for the audience to internalize knowledge of the cryosphere as few people in the populated and more temperate parts of the Earth have the opportunity to do. As a developing medium, immersive cinema invites the invention of a fresh vocabulary of scale, position, and movement within the image, and especially a new conceptualization of structure. The formal expansion of the cinema medium admits a supradimensional modality of space and time in a multiplex geography, both virtual and tangible. The concept of embodied reception illustrated by the Ice-Time installation takes the role of the entire body as a perceptual field into consideration. Within an architectonic, immersive cinema-space, perambulation engages sight, sound, movement, and memory. The virtual space intersects with C. Waite phenomenological peregrination. Embodied sensations are engaged in constructing an individual narrative through the spacetime continuum of the cinematic construct. For the public, the empirical nature of data is necessarily experienced as virtual. Ice-Time, as film, serves this empirical function as a document of our unique moment in glacial space-time, expressing the beauty and the rationality of ice at odds with the devastating chaos its disappearance portends. The film performs the paradox of presence attributable to the photographic – a first-hand yet simultaneously remote experience of data. The viewer becomes connected, tessered, to the other time and space of the ice, sharing the presence of place experienced by the cinematographer at the scene. Simultaneously, what the viewer experiences is no more than a disembodied specter that fails as presence because there is, in actuality, no shared space between the cinematographer, the subject, and the viewer of the image. The empirical document remains a paradox of virtuality and reality. In cinema, we lose connection with the embodied knowledge that is the essential difference between brain and mind. In the Ice-Time installation, we have intentionally grounded the body of the spectator in a conflation of real space with the virtual, lest our increasing adaptation to lack of presence diminishes our ability to relate to other human beings, to nature, and to the world. Philosopher Umberto Eco reminds us that “… art offers us an organic knowledge of things—in other words, it acquaints us with things by gathering them into one form.” [Eco 1989] Fourdimensional cinema acts as a space of spatiotemporal experience by fostering participation in the construction of an individual narrative. It engages the sensate body and spatial memory in the decoding of poetic meaning. The immersive structure of the IceTime installation reinstates an explicit connection to a poetic space, an enfolding of embodiment and participation within the spatiotemporal experience of the cinematic. The spectator of immersive cinema is placed in an uncertain oscillation between inner and outer reality, a position indicative of the greater Zeitgeist arising out of the evolving culture of the 21st-century. The Ice-Time project demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary art-science research and collaboration. The vivid, material presence of image, sound, data, and time immerses the spectator within the essence of ice. It establishes a somatic interaction of form and content that imbues the spectator with an awareness of the environmental and cultural implications of polar ice and its essential role in anthropogenic climate change. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the University of Southern California for their support in making the Ice-Time project happen. I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to the scientists who contributed their data and knowledge to the piece and to our guides in Greenland who made exceptional efforts to advance our work there. I am grateful to the Annenberg Fellowship, the Research Enhancement Advanced Ph.D. Fellowship, the Russell Endowed Ph.D. Fellowship, the Gene Autry Foundation, the Mary Pickford Foun- Ice-Time ARTECH 2019, October, 2019, Braga, Portugal dation, and the Cagney and Lacey Fellowship from the Center for Feminist Research at USC for their financial support. Our research in Greenland for Ice-Time would not have been possible without substantial funding from the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative. The Canon Corporation provided further, inkind support. Finally, I deeply indebted to my collaborator Angelika von Chamier. REFERENCES [1] BARTHES, R. 1980. Camera Lucida. Hill and Wang, New York. [2] ECO, U. 1989. The Open Work. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, [3] KLEE, P. and MOHOLY-NAGY, S. 1968. Pedagogical Sketchbook. Mass. Faber & Faber, London. [4] MURCH, W. 2001. In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, 2nd Edition. Silman-James Press, Los Angeles.