POLAR: Fieldwork & Archive Fever
SPEAKERS
| Alice Angus | Michael Bravo | Anne Brodie | David Buckland | Rita Cachão | Emilie Cameron | Nigel Clark | Denis Cosgrove | Fiona Davies | Jean De Pomereu | Katrina Dean | Klaus Dodds | Simon Faithfull | Heather Frazar | Stephan Harrison | Matthew Kurtz | London Fieldworks (Bruce Gilchrist & Jo Joelson) | Jane D. Marsching | Edward Morris | Simon Naylor | Marko Peljhan | Inês Nisa Rato | Sverker Sorlin | Bob Spicer | Bernard Stonehouse | Nicola Triscott | Weather Permitting (Jennifer Gabrys and Kathryn Yusoff) | Rachel Weiss | Dennis Wheeler | Eric Wolff | Kathryn Yusoff |
ABSTRACTS & BIOGS
Alice Angus
Time Accidents, Topographies and Tales
The Arctic is an imaginary place for many people - where "earth and water and all things are in suspension". Often portrayed in visual art as a landscape of sublime desolation. Over the last six years Alice Angus has been creating a body of art work exploring the perception of the North. She will discuss ideas of proximity and remoteness, technology and presence, and the concept of 'wilderness' against the lived experience of a place. The three films that connect this body of work are a personal exploration of the intimate way people form relationships with their environments. They are underpinned by an exploration of how the technologies of travel and communication impact on a sense of time, from the coming of the railroad to the 'new' world of data and communications: our perceptions of geography are affected not just by knowledge, but by the way it is mediated that affects our perceptions of geography. Beginning in the winter of 2001 Alice took the railroad across Canada, from east to west, against the historic flow, creating the film, Near Real Time. Then, in 2003, Alice was the only non-Canadian to participate in the first Parks Canada residency in Ivvavik National Park in the Northern Yukon. She began a collaboration there with guide Joyce Majiski which took them to Glenmore Lodge in the Cairngorms, Scotland in 2004 and Klondike Institute for Art and Culture in Dawson City, Canada in 2005 for "Topographies and Tales" due to be completed this year.
Alice Angus, co-director of Proboscis, is an artist inspired by rethinking concepts and perceptions of landscape and human relationships to the land. With Proboscis her work combines artistic and curatorial practice with illustration and animation and she is currently working on: 'Lattice' a 3 year project for the British Council’s Creative Cities initiative in East Asia; 'Anarchaeology' a new commission with Render at the University of Waterloo Canada, to ‘excavate’ stories and experiences in the Waterloo Region and 'Snout', a collaboration with inIVA (Institute for International Visual Arts, London) and researchers from Birkbeck College exploring relationships between the body, community and the environment; Topographies and Tales (2004-2007) a collaboration with Joyce Majiski investigating issues of landscape and identity in the North. Recent projects range from 'Social Tapestries' a 5 year research programme exploring the social and cultural benefits of local knowledge sharing enabled by new mobile technologies, 'Navigating History' a series of commissions in libraries and 'Landscapes In Dialogue' a web based series of video clips and essays inspired by a residency with Parks Canada.
Michael Bravo
Dr. Michael Bravo is Head of the Circumpolar History and Public Policy Research Group at the Scott Polar Research Institute. He has 25 years of experience working in the Arctic. His academic roots are in the Cambridge University History and Philosophy of Science department. Michael was a lead author in writing the Humanities and Social Sciences content for International Polar Year. He is joint editor of Narrating the Arctic (2002) and a contributor to recent international debates about climate change and sea ice loss. He is currently writing about public spaces of knowledge and governance in the Arctic.
Anne Brodie
Information gathering in Antarctica
My experience of the Poles was as a visiting artist with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS)/ Arts Council fellowship programme. I travelled on board the BAS ship 'James Clark Ross' for 10 days sailing from the Falkland Islands, crossing the Antarctic convergence zone to live and work alongside the scientists and support team for two months at the BAS base Rothera on the Antarctic peninsula, and spending 3 weeks 'deep field' on the mainland at the refuelling base 'Skyblu'. Although arriving with a preplanned project - building a glass furnace, and focussing on the dynamic, transience of the environment, it soon became apparent that in order to fully understand my environment it was necessary to temporarily let go of preconceived ideas and plans, and instead intuitively information gather, which my role as artist rather than scientist enabled me to do.
My first realisation was that we really weren't supposed to be there at all. The Antarctic may be overwhelmingly beautiful but its also logistically difficult, labour intensive and expensive to put humans on the continent. It is dangerous and inaccessible, necessitating people to live in close confinement with the elements and one another at the bases, particularly when camping deep field. It is mentally challenging being surrounded by such vastness of scale and extremes of sensory input. Stripped of the superfluous external stimuli that surrounds our normal lives, it gives heightened awareness to our own vulnerabilities and human significance. Its a difficult place in which to be human but at the same time important that we're there – few would dispute that the scientific work being carried out gathering atmospheric, ecological, and cryogenic data, is crucial to our understanding of our planet.
In the same way as the scientists were physically connecting with the environment using scientific instruments of measurement and bringing back physical and electronic samples and data, it was the individuals unique human connection with the Antarctic environment that became evident to me. Perhaps we should be utilising and and embracing our heightened 'humanness' that the extraordinary polar environment invokes instead of trying to eliminate it from objective data collections? Is there a place for emotion, playfulness, non scientific experimentation, instinctive data collecting? Should the data collecting just be the preserve of the scientists? Does my data collecting of the light by hanging rolls of film on a pole in the Antarctic 24hour summer have as much a role to play in our understanding of light intensity as more rigid scientific light experiments? Whilst at SkyBlu, I decided to bring my own ice 'core' back to the UK. Unlike the scientific ice cores which from the outset have a predetermined course, the roughly hewn 90kg ice block invokes the question 'what are you going to do with it'? every time it's mentioned. There are many artistic uses I can think of for the ice, however it is this very notion of being able to make choices with the 'data' that almost seems more significant than anything I actually do with it.
Graduating from Stirling University with a BSc in Biology, Anne Brodie's first career choice was salmon farming on the west coast Scotland. Returning to education, she studied Fine Art Ceramics at the City Lit Institute, London, and then at the Royal College of Art (MA Ceramics and Glass), graduating from there in 2003. Working experimentally with hot glass, film and photography, she jointly won the international Bombay Sapphire prize for design and innovation involving the use of glass with a short film 'Roker Breakfast' in 2005.
Anne works on the boundaries of science and art and has been awarded two Arts Council grants, one for a current collaborative project involving the use of bioluminescent bacteria as a light source in a tubular glass 'chandelier installation'. Most recently Anne was awarded the jointly supported British Antarctic Survey / Arts Council fellowship to Antarctica where she lived and worked for over two months.
David Buckland
Cape Farewell
Cape Farewell brings artists, scientists and educators together to collectively address and raise awareness about climate change. Created by David Buckland in 2002, Cape Farewell has led five expeditions into the wild, beautiful and icy High Arctic, a place for artistic inspiration and scientific enquiry. From this vantage point the artists and scientists aim to illustrate the workings of this crucial part of the planet, drawing attention to the effect changing weather patterns will have on us all and our climate. Following these expeditions has sprung an extraordinary body of artwork, a film co-produced by the BBC, Cape Farewell’s first major book title, a CD ARCTIC, educational resources for GCSE Geography and Science and a UN award winning website.
In 2007, Cape Farewell launched their first Education Voyage taking 12 young people from England, Germany and Canada to Spitsbergen in Svalbard and their first Arts/Science voyage to Greenland. This epic journey saw an international crew of artists including Vikram Seth, Amy Balkin, Beth Derbyshire and Singer Liam Frost cross the Greenland sea from Longyearbyen, Svalbard. David Buckland will talk about this epic voyage accompanied by visuals from the journey.
David Buckland is a designer, lens based artist and film maker whose artworks have been exhibited in numerous galleries in London, Paris and New York and subsequently collected by the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum, New York and the Getty Collection, Los Angeles amongst others. Five books of his photographs have been published. He has designed over 20 sets, as well as costumes, for The Royal Ballet, Rambert Dance Company, Second Stride, Compagnie Cré-Ange and Siobhan Davies Dance Company. Since 2001 he has created and now directs the Cape Farewell project. www.capefarewell.com
Rita Cachão & Inês Nisa Rato
The Plot of Nullius_Antarctic Landscape
With the adjudication of a specific cultural work, the rising of an exhibition that should reflect both the Scientific and Artistic worlds through the specific context of the Antarctic, the elements were set for the plot to begin. From a mesh of possibilities potentially available some constrains start to trace the path: How to speak about something that has never been experienced by those who are to speak? and, How to deal with the legitimate expectations of both sides of the dual mix science-art? a recent relationship in its goals. These two concerns will guide the conceptualization of the exhibition both on the thematic chosen and on the way to present it. The specific art-science context will lead to an exhibition that is set to think and develop some ideas on a particular realm. By claiming an educational philosophy, it will convey its subject through the processes of art/design thinking, bringing to the foreground the reflection on the Antarctic (landscape) while concomitantly building a bridge with science developed in the Antarctic by Portuguese people. It will be a construction in progress by all visitors, a sensible and intelligible one, and not just the materialization of an artistic vision.
Being that Antarctic is such a peculiar territory, for a long an unknown land and still of no one and at the same time of all (Nullius, the space where emptiness and absence roles); a place where man is lead to explore his limits and is confronted with his fragility towards the inhospitable nature, though feeding our imagination by its strangeness and adversity. Being so, it took us to question to what extent we know that territory, or if we only have an idea of the place, effect of the stories told by those who have been there, the pictures brought and our own wishes. It is from this confrontation between man and nature that we find the concept of landscape, territory elevated to knowledge as an act of culture. Intrinsically associated to the characteristics that define this space is the fact that till recently no one had inhabited it, as well as being distant to many, inclusively to decision makers. So, we asked ourselves what kind of a place is this that we are building without experiencing. Is it possible to say that the images that we keep in ours memories in fact belong to a landscape, to the Antarctic landscape? Finally, has the Antarctic a landscape or a non-landscape as there is not a culture informed by it? Through the exhibition we propose four actions/concepts that will guide the visitors attention, asking him/her to intervene in the construction and development not only of the exhibition but also of his own concept of the main subject, the Antarctic landscape. The four actions were translated into games, each one lead by its concept: the non-measurable; the interminable; disquietude; the unutterable. In a crescendo of abstraction, starting in the most tangible features of Antarctic landscape and culminating in the subjective formulation of myths in the process of storytelling.
Inês Nisa Rato, is biologist and designer, with a master thesis in public health about the Creative Person _ mental health perspectives, and a post-graduation course in Emergent cultures _ from critic to artistic manifestations. She is collaborator with Ectopia, an art-science experimental laboratory, in Gulbenkian Science Institute at Lisbon, freelancer design and educator in diversified topics, trying to practice innovative strategies and projects. Her newest interests are the nature and design interactions.
Rita Cachão was born in Lisbon, took her licentiate degree in Fine Arts – Sculpture by the University of Lisbon and is currently attending a Ma in Design, by the University of Wales. Meanwhile has worked on social contexts, both on directed projects and on a community arts association Extramuros, Associação cultural para a cidade (cultural association for the city), which took her through the practice and creation of art within socio-cultural environments, as well as in the planning of cultural events. Since early times developed connections with science-art world that later led her to join the founding team of Ectopia, (Bio-art experimental laboratory at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência) as an Arts Project Worker. Both are authors, curators and designers of Nullius_ Antarctic Landscape exhibition
Emilie Cameron
'To mourn': story, history, and materiality in the Canadian Arctic
This paper will consider the material dimensions of polar exploration stories and particularly the materiality of stories relating to the 'Bloody Falls massacre', an event in which a group of Copper Inuit were killed by a group of Chipewyan Dene along the shores of the Coppermine River in 1771. Neither Inuit nor Dene accounts of the event figure to any extent in the historical record; instead, the narrative of explorer Samuel Hearne, who allegedly witnessed the event, is considered the primary and most reliable source of information about the massacre. I will argue that the durability and dominance of Samuel Hearne's account can be understood in material terms and that the lines drawn between Indigenous 'stories' and European 'histories' are fundamentally reliant upon 'things', including, in this case, the rocks, flowers, and bones assembled by members of the Franklin expedition when they visited Bloody Falls in 1821.
Emilie Cameron is a Ph.D. Candidate in Cultural-Historical Geography at Queen's University, Kingston. She is interested in the geography of stories relating to the Canadian Arctic and in histories of encounter, emotion, and science.
Nigel Clark
Spectral Analysis: Reading Signatures of Suffering in Ice and Ash Cores
Lately, explorations in the `glacial’ depths of geological time have been starting to gain a more discernibly human face. Evidence of rapid climate change revealed in polar ice cores raises the prospect of momentous transformations occurring over time-spans which are quite graspable in human terms: a few generations, perhaps even a single lifetime. Likewise, ash cores from Australia and elsewhere tell a story of dramatically intensified forest fires around the onset of the `modern’ El Niño Southern Oscillation some 6000 years ago, which are also suggestive of a specific human cohort caught up in unforeseeable climatic and ecological shifts. In this way, both these `archives’ raise questions of what it was like to pass through major thresholds of change – to live through events that may well have pushed human endurance and adaptability to its limits.
0ver recent decades there has been growing attention to the issue of acknowledging and remembering those who have suffered in human–induced catastrophes, often in ways that encourage expressions of compassion or grief which cross over national boundaries. But what of those who have been caught up in momentous events with other-than-human causes, those whose experiences may be distant from us in time as well as space? My play on analysing `the spectral’ refers to the inevitably speculative nature of recreating and reflecting on such lives, as well as gesturing toward the close ties between `objective’ scientific evidence and reflection on the human subjective dimension of traumatic events. As we contemplate the possibility of new episodes of rapid climate change, I ask what part these `ghostly’ presences of past climatic upheavals might come to play in our own day-to-day lives, how we might think about them, remember them, take inspiration from them. For these are not simply tragic figures, they also express a rather awesome human (but not only human) ability to mobilise, to experiment, to improvise under unthinkably disturbing conditions.
Dr Nigel Clark lectures in human geography at the Open University. His work focuses on the question of what it is to be a soft, fragile being inhabiting a volatile physical world. And how issues of care, compassion and good citizenship might be tied in with a sensitivity toward the dynamism of earth processes. He has explored these themes in writing on natural disasters, climate change, bio-invasion, animal domestication and the human use of fire. He is the co-editor of Environmental Changes, Global Challenges and A World in the Making, and is currently working on a book titled something like Volatile Worlds, Vulnerable Bodies.
Denis Cosgrove
Images and Imagination in 20th century Environmentalism: from the Sierras to the Poles
Recent claims that the environmentalist thinking and politics that dominated the last years of the past century were based on outmoded, "modernist" categories jibe with academic criticism of dualistic thinking about "culture" and "nature", and with attempts to acknowledge the roles of non-human agency and affect in the co-construction of social worlds. While acknowledging the salience of these arguments, the paper claims that they pay insufficient attention to the role of pictorial images in shaping and promoting environmentalism throughout the 20th century. Pictorial images are less prone to dualistic interpretation than texts, and they work directly through affect. An examination of iconic images of key 20th century environmental crises -- wilderness preservation, soil erosion, urban sprawl, nuclear testing and global environmental change -- reveals both continuities in image making and presentation, and the evolving roles of physical nature itself in shaping their composition and meanings. Globalization of environmental concerns and images has shifted nature's icons from landscape towards living species, and from a temperate to a tropical and polar geography.
Denis Cosgrove is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Geography at UCLA. He obtained his BA and DPhil at Oxford and has a Masters degree from the University of Toronto. His geographical research focuses on the history of ideas and graphic representations in shaping attitudes to environment and landscape. He has written extensively on landscape in 16th century Italy and 19th century Britain, on the history of mapping and cartography in Renaissance Europe and 20th century America. His books include Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (1984; 1996), The Palladian Landscape (1993), Apollo's Eye (2002) and Geography and Vision (in press). He is editor of Mappings (1999), and co-editor of The Iconography of Landscape (1988), Water, Engineering and Landscape (1990) and High Places (in press). His current research includes a study of relations between aerial photography and popular mapping in mid-20th century America, of landscape forms and preferences in Southern California and the role of mapping ideas in contemporary art practices.
Fiona Davies
Intervention / Transitory / Landscape
The proposed presentation involves discussing the framework of the research undertaken for a series of art works resulting in an examination of the ephemeral polar and sub-polar landscape as experienced by Aubrey Ninnis on the S.Y. Aurora. The S.Y. Aurora was trapped in the ice when anchored in McMurdo Sound, and then swept by the weather from there up towards New
Zealand. Ninnis's diaries, photographs and drawings are held in the Royal Geographical Society archive in London. Ninnis' diagrams of the changing direction of the Aurora are particularly interesting as a form of mental mapping is undertaken. In this presentation the Ninnis documents and photographs will be placed in the context of the photographs taken by Frank Hurley of the 'Endurance' also trapped in the ice on the other side of the Antarctic within the same sort of time frame. Climate and landscape collaborated together to form a moving, changing and finally ephemeral landscape.
Fiona Davies is a visual artist who has worked extensively with various forms of archives, ideas of narrative and the telling of stories in the context of museum and gallery practice. She has a B.A. ( Visual Arts) from U.W.S. in Sydney Australia and a M.F.A. from Monash, Melbourne. She has exhibited widely. Recent solo exhibitions include ' When the sun blinks' the Antarctic Room Canterbury Museum, Christchurch N.Z Sept/Oct 2007; Memorial / When I was younger Blacktown Arts Centre Feb / April 2007; Water/Flower of Another Esa Jaske Gallery June 2006 Memorial/Double Pump Laplace St Marks, Aberdeen, NSW May/June 2006; In Memoriam Oceania Centre U.S.P. Suva, Fiji July 2005; Ice/Plain as a Glass of Water Esa Jaske Gallery Jan/Feb2004; Safe Return Doubtful Antarctic Room Canterbury Museum Christchurch NZ Aug/Sep 2003. Group exhibitions have included Breaking Ice: Re-Visioning Antarctica Adam Art Gallery Wellington NZ July /Oct 2005; 2004 The Year in Art S.H. Ervin Gallery Sydney Nov/Dec 2004
Jean De Pomereu
Freeze Frame: Capturing Antarctica’s ‘Absence’
In ‘The Worst Journey in the World’ published in 1922, Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote that “nothing is more striking about the exploration of the Southern Polar regions than it’s absence”: If no longer absence of exploration, then still absence of scale, absence of perspective, and ultimately, high up on the vast Antarctic Plateau, absence of relief. A primordial, denuded topography that often resides on the cusp of the indiscernible, and that, when photographed, is a natural subject for ‘natural abstraction’ and minimalism.
Long before it was sought, however, this ‘absence’ was domesticated by early Antarctic photographers such as Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley who journeyed South in the first decades of the 20th century. Products of their age, these photographers composed images according to dominant post-romantic and classical cannons. They used explorers, ships and other human references to suggest foreground, middle ground and background, thus providing the viewer with tools for reading the boundless vistas that unfolded before them.
The direct recognition of the aesthetic value of Antarctica’s ‘absence’ eventually became apparent in photographs of the later half of the 20th century. This new perspective was in many ways the late and indirect offspring of the broader abstract and minimalist movements in Western art: Two parallel movements that, though their development and increased visibility, would have been absorbed by photographers such as Eliot Porter, Neelon Crawford and David Stephenson - New perspectives that would have opened their eyes to the power of the elemental, and enabled them to recognize that perhaps the Antarctic experience is better captured in the absence “that is”, rather than through notions of perspective and scale imposed on a composition.
Long before my own encounter with Antarctica, my work as a photographer already tended towards a distilled, all-encompassing simplicity - indeed, it was this search that first drew me to the Southern Continent. Influenced by Western abstraction, and to a certain extent by Far Eastern aesthetics, I have sought to take up the legacy of past Antarctic photographers, journeying from a remnant of romantic classicism, into ‘natural abstraction’, minimalism, and ultimately toward the elusive goal of framing Antarctica’s ‘absence’: A vain and open ended quest if there ever was one…
Jean de Pomereu is a photographer who’s work has focused on the Antarctic since 2002. He has traveled to Antarctica on numerous occasions and his images have been exhibited in galleries in Paris, Brussels, Madrid, and Christchurch, N.Z. In parallel to his photographic work, Jean has a strong interest in the visual and imaginary interpretations of Antarctica since the time of its discovery, and has given lectures on this subject at the National Gallery of Scotland and the Scott Polar Research Institute. A graduate of the Scott Polar Research Institute, Jean also works for the International Polar Foundation (IPF) and writes for the IPF’s scientific information website www.sciencepoles.org. He is a member of the Education and Outreach Committee for the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008. In December 2006, Jean returned to Antarctica to photograph Californian artist Lita Albuquerque’s spectacular Stellar Axis land-art installation: www.stellaraxis.com - the largest art project ever to take place in Antarctica.
Katrina Dean
Katrina Dean is the curator of history of science at the British Library with research interests in aspects of the history of science and technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, broadly geographical themes in the history of the sciences, and science archives. She previously worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Bristol on the resesarch project 'A History of Subglacial Exploration in Antarctica, 1957-2007', the National Archives of Australia, and the Australian Science Archives Project. Her PhD research at the University of Cambridge, Settler Physics (2005) explored some developments in physics and technology between 1850 and 1950 through the migrations of scientists between Australia and Cambridge. Current projects in addition include 'Beyond the Photograph: Science and the Antique in the work of William Henry Fox Talbot' and 'Digital Lives: Research Collections for the 21st Century'. Katrina is co-organiser (with Kathryn Yusoff) of the Polar Archive events.
Klaus Dodds
Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He previously taught at the University of Edinburgh and was a visiting fellow at Gateway Antarctica, University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He is the author of five books including Pink Ice: Britain and the South Atlantic Empire (2002). His research interests include the geopolitics of the Antarctic and the South Atlantic and has visited the Antarctic on four occasions.
Simon Faithfull,
Simon Faithfull, has, among other projects, developed a practice primarily using a palm pilot as a sketch pad, allowing him to quickly record the world around him - often the most immediate subjects which offer themselves -such as traffic and commercial signs and signposts, architecture, skylines, vehicles, his dog, people etc. These drawings are then processed and produced on vinyl, plastic, glass or paper, or sometimes made available by e-mail subscription. In parallel to this practice and as an extension of it, Simon Faithfull has also regularly undertaken video projects also involving notions of observation. In 2004, Faithfull was invited to travel to Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey as part of The Arts Council’s International Fellowships Programme. He emailed back 56 drawings to 3000 in-boxes around the world. In 2006, an exhibition of video works from his journey was presented by The Arts Catalyst simultaneiously at Stills Gallery (Edinburgh), Cell (London) and Parker’s Box (New York). Artist's website: www.simonfaithfull.org
Heather Frazar
Icy Demands: Coring, Curating, and Researching the GISP2 Ice Core
The Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2) ice core was extracted from central Greenland over the course of five summers between 1987 and 1993. I approach this scientific object as a geographer, with the basic assumption that where science happens matters. Central to my research are what one scholar has termed ‘post-epistemological’ aspects. This set of concerns sketches out ways of knowing that collapse traditional boundaries between knowledge about the material world and that world’s intra-active participation in such knowledge. In a video work entitled Core Matters (or, GISP2 chronologies) (2005), I have brought together scientists’ footage from the GISP2 extraction site in Greenland, as well as my own footage from the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, Colorado (where GISP2 is stored) to highlight some of the material underpinnings of GISP2 production and research. I will screen segments of the video to illustrate some of the (freezing) situational and material specifics I address in my research. This format supports my general goal of illuminating and reflecting on GISP2 site- and matter-based dynamisms.
Heather Frazar is an independent scholar and visual artist based in Los Angeles. In 2005 she earned a Master’s Degree in cultural geography from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work focuses on the spaces, materiality, and aesthetics of science, including a recent video entitled, Core Matters (or, GISP2 chronologies). She is a contributor to a forthcoming publication dedicated to polar and mountain environments entitled, High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains and Ice.
Stephan Harrison
Dr Stephan Harrison is Associate Professor in Quaternary Science at Exeter University and Senior Research Associate at the Oxford University Centre for the Environment. He has over 20 years research experience in climate change and mountain geomorphology. He has worked for ten field seasons on the glaciers of Patagonia and for five field seasons in the northern Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan studying their fluctuation histories over the last 15,000 years and the geomorphological impact of recent glacier retreat on valley-side slopes. Stephan has also worked in the mountains of Tibet, Iceland, Scandinavia, Canada and in the Himalaya. He is a member of the Environmental Research Groups of the Institute of Actuaries and the Emergency Planning Society.
Matthew Kurtz
Arctic Climate Change and Inupiat Witnesses: Reconstructing the Subaltern?
In this paper, I want to draw from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's work in order to ask what metropolitan environmentalists might do "to watch out for the continuing construction of the subaltern?" Spivak is well known for her scrupulous vigilance about the duplicitous choices between 'speaking for' those on the margins and 'letting them speak' for themselves, yet her commitment to the (im)possibilities of transnational literacies and ecological justice provides no easy alternative. Using her work, I want to ask, first, how the figure of the Inupiat Eskimo has recently been represented in media as a natural witness of rapid environmental change at 'ground zero,' and second, in whose interests the metropolitan archives lay their claims to rural and remote knowledges like those in the Arctic. My hope is that these questions will not serve as (invested) condemnations, but only as warning signals about the dangers inherent in re-constituting indigenous people in the Arctic as the contemporary 'native informants' of global environmental change.
Dr Matthew Kurtz is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Geography Department at Open University. He came to the OU after a number of years teaching at University of Alaska Anchorage. His research is about neocolonialism's cultures and the early history of economic analysis in America’s insular territories in the twentieth century. Most of Matthew's fieldwork over the last eight years has been in arctic Alaska.
London Fieldworks (Bruce Gilchrist & Jo Joelson)
Polaria
In 2001 artists Gilchrist and Joelson travelled to Hold with Hope peninsula, North East Greenland, to observe and experience Arctic light. They spent the month of August living on the tundra working with instruments that measured and recorded light and physiological responses during the transition from 24-hour daylight to the twilight onset of winter. On returning to their London studio they used the fieldwork data to create a physiological interface for an interactive virtual daylight installation: Polaria. Visitors to the gallery could participate in the work and trigger virtual representations of arctic light through an electrical interface. This physical and direct connection with the work made explicit the idea of the body as technology in itself: both the source and receptor of data as well as its transducer, evoking the ethnographer Marcel Mauss’ notion that the body is our first technology. At the core of Polaria is an interest in human-environmental relationships via environmental cues or ‘zeitgebers’, (literally, the German word for ‘time giver’) and the translation of such experiences through a reductive artwork. The evanescent virtual daylight states evoked and experienced within the installation are chronologically representative of different times of arctic daylight throughout August 2001. Seasonal as opposed to diurnal rhythm is incorporated within the Polaria installation, provoking contemplation of the subtle relationships between mind-body and light, real, represented and imagined.
London Fieldworks have been engaged in a sustained enquiry into human consciousness and its relationship with natural or environmental rhythms and cues, visualised through the charting of sleep patterns, and the science of light. Art projects such as Syzygy and Polaria that typically engage with technology and the methodologies of science, have been far reaching both geographically and in terms of the range of collaborators and disciplines involved. Their most recent projects have played with scientific narratives to create speculative works of fiction; Spacebaby (commissioned by Arts Catalyst for Space Soon, London 2006) and Hibernator: Prince of the Petrified Forest (commissioned by Beaconsfield, London 2007) are part of a trilogy exploring themes of suspended animation, inspired by the hibernation patterns of animals and recent scientific research into the potential for human hibernation. The third project in the trilogy, SuperKingdom, an architectural intervention in Kings Wood, Kent, is currently in development, commissioned by Stour Valley Arts (2008).
Jane D. Marsching
Arctic Listening Post: technology, imagination, and our furthest north
The north pole is a geographic point that is inaccessible, unrepresentable, all darkness or overwhelming light. A place one travels to, but never remains at. But as our farthest north, spiritual summit, heroic destination, most extreme landscape on the farthest edge of the world, it is also always waiting to be found, rediscovered, and represented. Explorer narratives have given way to feats of daring; kiteboarders, golf tournaments, naked swimming have taken the place of narratives and images of cultured Westerners fighting against the extreme environment.
The north pole and arctic are quintessential wilderness, vast tracts of land and sea and ice beyond our borders of representation and understanding, yet 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. As we move into this time of climate change media glut, the age-old narratives of exploration, myth, and literature yield to climate concerns, meterological data, ocean currents, etc. Shelly’s Frankenstein lecturing about the quest for glory on the way to the North Pole is now Al Gore on a 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.
This presentation will present works from the ongoing new media art project Arctic Listening Post, which explores climate change and sustainability through the lens of a collaborative, interdisciplinary hybrid science research art practice. The project seeks 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, the works seek to create an experience of how the digital seems to blur, threaten or liberate our physical bodies and nature. Finally through producing what Pierre Huyghe 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.
Jane D. Marsching is a media artist working with issues of belief, representation, and science. She has exhibited internationally including recent exhibitions the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. She has received numerous grants and fellowships for her current project including a Creative Capital grant. With Mark Alice Durant in 2005, she wrote and edited a catalog of the exhibition The Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal with essays by Marsching, Durant, Marina Warner and Lynne Tillman. She is currently Assistant Professor at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, MA. She received her MFA in photography from The School of Visual Arts, New York City, in 1995. Her website is www.janemarsching.com
Edward Morris
What Can an Image Actually Do? A Candid Report from the Front by The Canary Project Director
The Canary Project is a New York-based arts organization dedicated to building public understanding of human-induced climate change and energizing commitment to solutions.
The foundation of the project is an effort by Susannah Sayler to photograph landscapes around the world that are showing signs and forewarnings of climate change. Sayler is also shooting landscapes where successes in conservation and adaptation to climate change are visible. This body of work is titled The Canary Project: Landscapes of Climate Change. The landscapes photographed by Sayler were selected in consultation with leading scientists and journalists, including the project’s scientific advisor, Dr. Paul Epstein of Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, and journalist Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker. Project co-founder and director, Edward Morris coordinates this research and edits Sayler’s photographic output. To date, Sayler has shot 11 of 14 locations planned for a book and traveling exhibition. One of the remaining locations is Antarctica, to which Sayler and Morris plan to travel in February 2008.
For the “Polar Imaginations” symposium, Morris will present some examples of Sayler’s images and discuss various strategies that The Canary Project has pursued to make the photographs as effective as possible in fulfilling our mission (such as exhibitions at art and science museums; presentations to a variety of audiences, including schoolchildren; free licensing of images; public art installations; media; and the Internet).
Among the questions/themes that I will touch on:
- Why does Sayler choose landscapes to photograph as opposed to people and “human-interest” stories?
- To what extent do we position the photographs as documents and to what extent do we position them as aesthetic objects? To what extent is the project as whole art, documentary, activism?
- To what extent do the photos depend on text and scientific contextualization?
- In what way do the images fulfill the Canary mission of “building public understanding of human-induced climate change and energizing commitment to solutions”? What are their limitations in fulfilling this mission?
- Already certain polar images are receiving common coinage (polar bears on ice; sun refracted through close ups of ice, etc.). To what extent are these common images iconic and to what extent are they cliché? What is the risk/benefit in these images becoming cliché? What will Sayler/The Canary Project do in its polar images to avoid/embrace cliché?
- What does The Canary Project have in store for the future with respect to its distribution and accumulation of polar and other images?
Simon Naylor
Data in Antarctic Science and Politics
The internationalisation of Antarctica as a continent for science with the Antarctic Treaty (1961) was heralded as bringing about international cooperation and the free exchange of data. However, both national rivalry and proprietorship of data, in varying degrees, remained integral to Antarctic science and politics throughout the twentieth century. This paper considers two large field-surveys in Antarctica: first, an aerial photographic survey carried out by the Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition of 1946-47; and secondly, the Scott Polar Research Institute’s radio-echo sounding survey of 1967-79. Both surveys involved geoscientific data but the context in which the investigations and the exchanges of their results took place changed. We argue that the issue of control of data remained paramount across both cases despite shifting international political contexts. The control of data on Antarctic territory, once framed in terms of geopolitics and negotiated between governments, became a matter of science policy and credit to be negotiated among scientific institutions. Whereas the Ronne data was of potential strategic value for reinforcing national territorial claims, the radio-echo sounding data contained information of potential economic and environmental value.
Dr Simon Naylor is a Senior Lecturer in Historical Geography at the University of Exeter's Cornwall Campus. He has previously held academic appointments at the University of Oxford and the University of Bristol. Simon's research interests focus on the historical geographies of science. He has conducted research into the geographies of provincial science in Victorian Britain and has paid particular attention to the significance of various spaces of scientific activity - fieldsites, museums, observatories, gardens, and the region more generally. He plans to continue this work through an examination of the colonial meterological and magnetic observatory network, which extended across the British empire in the early Victorian period. Simon has also been involved in a three year Leverhulme Trust-funded project that investigated the history of post-war Antarctic geophysics. The project paid particular attention to the exploration of the Antarctic ice-sheet, using seismic and remote sensing techniques, from the late 1940s up to the late 1970s by UK, US and Danish scientists. The project placed these scientific activities within a wider set of events, including the Cold War, the International Geophysical Year of 1957-8, and the Antarctic Treaty and argued that science in Antarctica should be considered a form of geopolitics in itself - what we termed a 'geophysical politics'.
Marko Peljhan
The Interpolar transnational art science constellation vision – the quest for third culture during the International Polar Year and beyond
I-TASC (www.i-tasc.org) is a decentralized network of individuals and organisations working collaboratively in the fields of art, engineering, science and technology on the interdisciplinary development and tactical deployment of renewable energy, waste recycling systems, sustainable architecture and open-format, open-source media. I-TASC is a lichen-like struc-ture sharing and integrating local knowledge, resources and skills across six continents in order to symbiotically engage with the air, ocean, earth and space commons. The translation of abstract data fields into useful networked information is one of the major tasks that has arisen as a result of the saturation of sensor outputs in the framework of the Makrolab (1997-2007) project that has been developed by the Projekt Atol organization. A similar task will be presented to us after we complete the initial setup of the Interpolar Transnational Art Science Constellation systems in the Arctic and Antarctic with my I-TASC colleagues. The understanding and translation of complex interrelations between the global dynamics of telecommunications, migrations and climate systems is at the core of this quest, a core, that has given new potential to the redefinition of what a “third culture” could be. A culture, that I define as a landscape nestled between the art of art, the art of science, the art of situations, the art of war, the art of exploration and the art of invention. Engineering and science on the one hand, and creative arts and humanities on the other are, at their best, instrumental at setting the path of evolution of knowledge. They all feed human curiosity and vision, but together, as a synergy, they would make a remarkable planetary evolutionary force, the “third culture”, which will have to be built on the experience and knowledge of the visionaries of past centuries and fuelled by our own twin forces of curiosity and responsibility.
Marko Peljhan (1969) studied theatre and radio directing at the University of Ljubljana and in 1992 founded the arts organization Projekt Atol in the frame of which he works in the performance, visual arts, situation and communications fields. In 1995 he founded the technological branch of Projekt Atol PACT SYSTEMS, which was started by creating an online satellite navigation urban interface project, the UCOG-144 and in 1999 the Projekt Atol Flight Operations, was founded, serving as the organizational branch for flight and spaceflight related projects. In 1995 he co-founded LJUDMILA (Ljubljana Digital Media Lab), and from 1996 on worked at there as programs coordinator. He coordinates the Insular Technologies high frequency global radio network initiative and the Makrolab (1997-2007) project and works as flight director of the parabolic art/science flights with the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Moscow and the MIR – Microgravity Interdisciplinary Research Consortium. From 2001 to 2004 he was member of the strategic council for information society established by the government of the Republic of Slovenia. In 2003 he oversaw the creation of a mobile containerized media lab-media literacy project, Transhub-01/Mobilatorij. His work was presented at major international exhibitions such as documenta X in Kassel, 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, Ars Electronica, Media City Seoul, Gwangju Biennale, Manifesta, Venice Biennale and ISEA. In 2000 he received the Medienkunst prize at the ZKM, in 2001 the Golden Nica, together with Carsten Nicolai for their work Polar, in 2004 the Unesco Digital Media Art Award for Makrolab and in 2007 the Preseren Foundation Prize, also for Makrolab. He is currently professor of interdisciplinary studies at UC Santa Barbara and director of Projekt Atol, where he also initiated the music label rx:tx. From 2005 on he is coordinating the design and utilization projects for the final Arctic and Antarctic Makrolab projects in the framework of the Interpolar Transnational Art Science Constellation.
Sverker Sorlin
Historicizing Climate and Arcticality
In the first decades of the 20th century there emerged an understanding among some scientists that there had been considerable changes in Arctic climate in relatively recent, historical times. It took long until they were aware that human climate forcing could be a significant factor in contemporary change. I am interested in how this change in understanding affected the general view of the Arctic and its history. Did the notion of change in any way alter the singularity of “the Arctic”? Did there emerge a notion of different Arctic pasts – and therefore different Arctic futures – under different climate regimes? Was there any similar understanding of historical climate change among indigenous populations? How did knowledge of past climate go down in indigenous knowledge traditions? What and where are the lieux de mémoire of Arctic climate? Are archives spoken, written, imagined?
Sverker Sörlin is professor in the Division of History of Science and Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm and he has held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley (1993), University of Cambridge (2004-05), and the University of Oslo (2006). Among his publications in English are co-edited books, Denationalizing Science, which appeared as the Sociology of Science Yearbook 1992; Sustainability – the Challenge (1998); Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of Nordic Scientific Practice (2002); Knowledge Society versus Knowledge Economy (2007); and articles on the history and sociology of science since the 18th century, on modern research policy and on Arctic issues. In Swedish he has authored or edited some thirty books. For his general history of European science and ideas 1492-1918, published in two volumes, he was awarded the August [for Strindberg] Prize for the best non fiction book of the year 2004. He has engaged in public debates on education and research policy, and in policy advice; during 1994-1998, and again since 2005, he has served on the Swedish Government’s Research Advisory Board. He was the director of the Center for Arctic Cultural Research at Umeå University in the 1990’s when he also led the NOS-H funded research program “The Northern Space”. He currently serves as the President of the Swedish National Committee for the International Polar Year 2007-09. He was co-proposer of the European Science Foundation “Boreas” program for Arctic studies in the humanities and the social sciences and is co-leader of the IPY project “IPY Field Stations” with Michael T. Bravo, University of Cambridge. His ongoing research focuses on the scientific discourses on, and disputes over, climate change in the Arctic and how knowledge claims relate to fieldwork and notions of precision and authority in the field.
Bob Spicer
From the earliest days of exploration at both poles, plant fossils retrieved from what are today cold, often ice-bound inhospitable landscapes have told a story of warmth and forests teeming with life. As geology and our understanding of how tectonic plates move improved it has become clear that for most of the last 500 million years of Earth history the poles were far warmer than now, despite the long winter darkness experienced there. At times of previous so-called "greenhouse" climates, polar forests with cycads, conifers, flowering plants, and ferns not only provided food and shelter for animals as diverse as dinosaurs and mammals and marsupials, but they also acted as superbly efficient carbon sequestering systems. They have left enormous reserves of coal, oil and gas that will be hard to ignore in the future, despite the damaging effect of fossil carbon on our climate. Today, as the Earth warms once more, conditions under which such long extinct ecosystems thrived are returning. The archive of fossil remains provide unique insights as to how those ancient ecosystems worked and how we might manage their return.
Professor Bob Spicer obtained a BSc in Botany from Imperial College London and then a PhD in Geology, also from Imperial, before being awarded a Lindemann Fellowship to study at the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. There he began a career-long interest in the vegetation and climate at high latitudes, particularly the Arctic and how this has changed over time. This interest has taken him on extended fieldwork in some of the remotest parts of Alaska and northeastern Russia.
On his return to the UK he became a lecturer first at Goldsmiths College, London, and then Oxford, before joining the OU as Professor and Head of the Earth Sciences Department. More recently he was the founding Director of the Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research also at the Open University. Professor Spicer is also interested in the changes in climate that occur as mountains and plateaux rise and fall. This has led him to Tibet several times. Most recently he was a core member of the climateprediction.net project that used the internet to realize the largest climate modeling experiment ever conducted to assess the uncertainties that are an inherent part of predicting future climate change. Apart from numerous television and radio contributions he has published extensively on how the atmosphere, biosphere, oceans and rocks all interact as an integrated system over time and is now applying that knowledge to understanding the implications of present global warming. This year Professor Spicer was awarded the Palaeobotanical Society of India International Medal for his contributions to the study of plant fossils.
Bernard Stonehouse
Arctic exploration: the whalers’ view
From the early 18th century to the 1850s whaling ships from Britain made over 5000 voyages to the Arctic, and more were made from Dutch, Danish and German ports. Between 1730 and 1850 British Arctic whaling became a major industry, operating from over 30 ports, and bringing employment to tens of thousands of men ashore and afloat. The industry has left a rich archival record in the form of logs, charts, customs returns, journals both published and unpublished, scientific observations, and paintings of ships in Arctic settings.
Every whaling voyage was an adventure into a deeply hostile environment, demanding skilled navigation and seamanship in foul weather among the dangers of floating ice. Some voyages involved far more. The most successful whaling captains were innovators and explorers, who developed new sailing skills, discovered new islands, coasts and whaling grounds, and year by year accumulated new knowledge on patterns of weather, ice movements, and the feeding and migrations of whales and seals. Notable among them were the two William Scoresbys – the father who explored widely in the Greenland Sea to discover new whaling grounds, incidentally establishing a long-standing farthest-north record, and the son who on every voyage maintained meticulous records of position, weather, terrestrial magnetism and sea temperatures, finally exploring and charting the northeast coast of Greenland. William Scoresby Jr’s two-volume ‘Account of the Arctic Regions, with a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery,’ published in 1820, is essential reading for Arctic maritime researchers today.
This contribution reports on whaling research at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, where many Arctic whaling records are held, and the Maritime Historical Studies Centre, University of Hull, where a website and database on British Arctic whaling (www.hull.ac.uk/baw) has recently been set up. We have located some 250 surviving whaling logs and journals, many of which yield valuable information on a range of Arctic topics, from routine life aboard to observations on Inuit hunters, from records of weather, sea ice and sea mammal distribution to accounts of disasters in fatal years, when weather and ice combined to destroy ships and men. Our work contributes to that of a recently-formed research group with interests in studying the far North Atlantic region, using historic documentary sources.
Whaling records have largely been ignored or discredited by scientists for their assumed lack of precision; few whaling ships, for example, carried meteorological instruments. However, all carried masters and mates well-experienced in their trade, who knew the maritime Arctic in its many moods and recorded it faithfully. Our programme re-examines selected logs and journals, applying validation tests to extract the most reliable data, in particular on geographical discovery, climate, weather patterns and sea ice distribution. We are exploring too the development and ultimate decline of the industry from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries, in particular its inputs into the economic and social development of Whitby, Tyneside and other northeast coastal towns, and examining contemporary whaling art for its often-meticulous detailing of ice, ships, whaling methods and whalers.
Dr Bernard Stonehouse is an environmental biologist with particular interests in marine birds and mammals, and the history of their exploitation by man. After service in the Royal Navy and a three-year stint in Antarctica as meteorologist, pilot and biologist, he read zoology at University College, London, and gained a doctorate at the University of Oxford. He has since undertaken extensive field research in both polar regions, and taught in universities in Britain, New Zealand, Canada and the US. Now retired from teaching, he is currently a Senior Associate of the Scott Polar Research Institute, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, and a Senior Honorary Fellow in the Maritime Historical Studies Centre Department of History, University of Hull.
Nicola Triscott
Nicola Triscott is a cultural producer with extensive experience in the performing, interdisciplinary and visual arts. She set up the pioneering art/science organisation The Arts Catalyst in 1993. As Director of Arts Catalyst, she has built alliances internationally between disciplines and commissioned more than 60 art projects that explore science and technology as transforming forces in culture and society. She speaks frequently on art and science and the cultural dimension of space at international conferences. She led the European Commission-funded MIR project (2001-4), organising zero gravity flights for artistic and scientific experimentation with the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Russia. She is contracted to the European Space Agency to develop a cultural policy for the International Space Station programme.
Weather Permitting (Jennifer Gabrys with Kathryn Yusoff)
Forecast Factory: Snow Globes and Climate Change
A blizzard of white flakes spun together with aquamarine glitter drifts repeatedly across submerged landscapes, scenes as far-flung as Kew Gardens, icy islands in New Zealand, and the London skyline. Penguins, bears, and whales anchor these spaces, exhibiting mild tolerance for the constant snowstorms. In each of these snow globe landscapes, nature is encapsulated. Replica gardens and animals only otherwise glimpsed in the zoo and natural history museum feature in these transparent globes and domes. Generally distributed as trinkets or souvenirs of landscapes and monuments, snow globes often stand as undisputed figures of kitsch culture. And yet, for all their apparent banality, snow globes reveal more about nature and natural history than may be supposed.
Snow globes offer a window into imaginary and speculative landscapes. They present landscapes within submerged and drifting scenes. As fixed as they may appear, snow globes are meant to be unsettled, and turned upside down. In this sense, they are at once fixed and dynamic, frozen and transient. In the space of the snow globe we can begin to imagine the shape of imminent environmental disturbances and alterations, especially abrupt climate change. This Weather Permitting project explores how the snow globe is an ideal device for projecting natures to come. Drifting snow could as likely be imagined as an apocalyptic ash; the submerged landscapes as images of ruined or flooded landscapes. “Zero Degrees” will explore these future and imaginary climate scenarios in the space of snow globes.
Weather Permitting is a collaborative art and research practice between Jennifer Gabrys (Goldsmiths, University of London) and Kathryn Yusoff (University of Exeter), who have combined experience in environmental research and landscape installations, geography, and media art. Weather Permitting investigates the phenomena of weather, from tornadoes in trailer parks to drifting ice shelves in the Antarctic. Recent work includes “Bear Life” published with Focas for Documenta 12; “Forecast Factory,” a snow-globe based exploration of climate change; and Zero Degrees, a forthcoming anthology on the cultures and communication of weather.
Rachel Weiss
Tall Tales, Apocryphal Visions and Hoaxes: Why Antarctica Makes Us Make It Up
This is a story about hoaxes, and it arises from the contention that Antarctica, which has always inspired a very certain kind of imaginary, as it turns out is a lodestone for the hoax. I will mostly be limiting myself to observations about art and artworks, though I'll start out from some broader observations. Most of my examples will be drawn from the exhibition Imagining Antarctica, organized as part of the Arts Electronica festival in 1986. My argument will not itself be a hoax, although it arises from a strong sympathy with its subject.
Writer, curator and educator, currently Professor of Arts Administration and Policy at
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Major curatorial projects include Global Conceptualism 1950s-1980s: Points of Origin (Queens Museum of Art, NYC: co-director with Luis Camnitzer and Jane Farver), Ante América (Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá, and traveled in South, North and Central America: co-curator, with Gerardo Mosquera and Carolina Ponce de León), The Nearest Edge of the World: Art and Cuba Now (traveled throughout the US: co-curator with Gerardo Mosquera) and Imagining Antarctica (traveled throughout the US: funded by the National Science Foundation). Weiss has published extensively on contemporary art in journals, magazines and newspapers in the US, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Australia. Major publications include Por América: la obra de Juan Francisco Elso (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas: co-author and editor) and Being América (White Pine Press: editor). Her book To Build the Sky: To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art is forthcoming. Guest teaching has included appointments at Goldsmith’s College, Creative Curating Program and the Royal College of Art, Program in Visual Arts Administration: Curating and Commissioning Contemporary Art, both in London; Curtin University, Department of Art in Perth, Western Australia and the China National Academy of Fine Art, Department of Art History in Hangzhou.
Dennis Wheeler
The Arctic climatic record: new data from old sources
Recent exercises in data gathering from the Arctic realm have been specifically guided by scientific needs. This presentation examines an important source of climatic data and information, much of which was gathered in an almost incidental way, in the logbooks and accounts of whaling vessels, of the ships of the Hudson’s Bay Company and of the Royal Navy. These documents, of which over 600 exist in UK archives, embrace the period when whaling was one of the dominant commercial activities in the region: 1790 to 1850. Moreover, the logbooks provide, fortuitously, information on an important period of climatic history that includes the Dalton solar Minimum and recovery from the Little Ice Age and marks the last time that the Earth’s atmosphere can be considered to be unencumbered by significant quantities of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. This presentation reviews the preparation, character and content of these logbooks and explains how the weather information, most of which is non-instrumental, can be interpreted, tested and analysed. Importance is given to the fact that observations were made daily and provide a detailed account of wind, weather and sea ice cover and that the logbooks constitute a unique source of information for the region. That this work draws upon the results of economic, political and occasionally scientific exploitation of the Arctic region provides added, inter-disciplinary, interest to the theme in which traditionally historical sources can be revealed to offer possibilities for scientific interpretation.
Presentation by Dennis Wheeler (University of Sunderland) but representing the wider interests of a recently-formed group based in the Maritime Studies Unit of Hull University with an inter-disciplinary interest in the study of the far North Atlantic region using historical documentary sources.
Dennis Wheeler is Reader in Geography at the University of Sunderland. His research interests are concerned with the use of historical documents, especially ships’ logbooks and of old instrumental data, in climatic reconstructions. He was worked on a number of major EU-funded climate research projects and published nearly 100 articles and three books. In 1997 he was winner of the Royal Meteorological Society’s Gordon Manley Prize.
Eric Wolff
Dr Eric Wolff is a Principal Investigator at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge. He has studied ice cores from the Antarctic and Greenland for the past 20 years, using them to understand changing climate, as well as changing levels of pollution in remote areas. He also carries out research into the chemistry of the lower parts of the Antarctic atmosphere. At BAS, he leads the programme: “Climate and Chemistry (CACHE): Forcings, Feedbacks and Phasings in the Earth System”. He is chair of the science committee of the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA). In this role, he led the writing of the community paper in Nature in 2004 that presented the new 800,000 year record of climate from the Dome C (Antarctica) ice core. His has been an author of more than 100 other papers. He has carried out 6 field seasons in Antarctica, and two in Greenland. His scientific interests include the climate and environment of the last million years (especially from ice cores), polar atmospheric chemistry, and ice physics, and he has a particular expertise in the interpretation of chemical records in ice cores. He has numerous international collaborations, and co-chairs international initiatives to coordinate future ice core research and to understand the chemistry of the lowest parts of the atmosphere.
Kathryn Yusoff
Dr Kathryn Yusoff is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Exeter, Cornwall. Her research interests include exploring the political aesthetics of environments and re-thinking visual culture in relation to emerging technologies of vision. Her PhD research, Arresting Vision (2005) examined the visual ecologies of Antarctica within the political and poetical sphere. She has visited Antarctica on several occasions. Currently, she is working on the project, Ice Archives: Curating Climate Change, which examines how climate change is understood and narrated through a range of “ archives”, such as polar bears, disaster movies, ice cores, satellite maps and critical art practice. Her research has been published widely in academic and art journals and she is involved in several projects for the International Polar Year. The Arts Council awarded ‘Grants for the Arts’ funding for the project Curating Climate Change.
Kathryn is co-organiser (with Katrina Dean) of the Polar Archive events and editor of the forthcoming book, BIPOLAR (2008) from the symposium.
Images:
Left & second left: Photo Kathryn Yusoff, 2nd from right: London Fieldworks, Polaria fieldwork NE Greenland (photo Anthony Oliver)
Far right: Anne Brodie, Wastegloo
