foreworD by Ross A. Virginia. introDuction by Paul D. Miller. tHe cauSeS anD effectS of cliMate cHanGe. Sonic lanDScaPe
CONTENTS 04 Preface by Brian Greene 06 Foreword by Ross A. Virginia 08 IntroDUCTION by Paul D. Miller 14 THE CAUSES AND EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE 16 Sonic Landscape 18 TERRA NOVA Q&A with Glasberg/Miller 28 Data Landscape 48 TIMELINE OF ANTARCTICA 56 Posters and Stickers 82 Economic Landscape 92 Emotional Landscape 122 AFROFUTURISM Q&A with van Veen/Miller 126 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 127 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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When you think of the term “ice” there are so many connotations that come to mind: surface tension, temperature, the opacity of the material, the basic sense that it can transform between liquid and solid. It’s elusive because it can become so many things. People use ice for almost every purpose—they make houses out of it, use it in their drinks, land airplanes on it, and if you happen to be in Finland, they make musical instruments out of it.
Paul D. Miller
What sphinx of cement and aluminum hacked open their skulls and ate up their imagination?... Moloch whose buildings are judgement! –Allen Ginsberg, “Howl!”
What I have done with this book is unpack some of the issues that drive my artwork and its relationship to the constantly changing facets of contemporary life in our information-economy dominated, post-everything twenty-first century. Looking back over the last several centuries, an intense amount of energy has been expended all over the world exploring and unraveling the meaning of humanity’s condition on the planet. Much of this energy has been spent in perverse and self-defeating ways. Our vision of modern life is tinged by events like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which makes former disasters like the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident or the 1986 release of radioactive steam in Chernobyl seem quaint and self-contained. More than ever, we are interconnected, and interdependent. In the future, regardless of any human action, the planet will be here—we, as a species, might not. If you look back at “ice” in English, you see it’s derived from the Old English term “is” that in itself is derived from what most consider to be proto-Germanic “isaz.” There are runes for it. There are symbols for it. There is poetry for it. It’s considered one of the most mysterious materials, yet in some parts of the world it’s simply part of the landscape. According to most sources in physics, there are fifteen known crystalline phases of water. Ice can exist on other planets in radically different forms, and if you really want to go “macro,” you realize that hydrogen is one of the basic substances of the universe. It’s that “meta.” Let’s put it this way: as a naturally occurring material, ice is a crystalline inorganic solid with what scientists like to call an “ordered structure.” It’s considered a mineral. Although it is based on the molecule of water, which in itself is made of a single oxygen atom linked and covalently bonded to two hydrogen atoms; many of the main qualities of ice are controlled by the hydrogen bonds between oxygen and hydrogen atoms. Got it? It’s the only known non-metallic substance to expand when it freezes. It is less dense than water, which means that ice floats on the surface of any body of water. Light reflecting from ice looks blue because ice absorbs more of the red frequencies of light than the blue ones, so icebergs containing a lot of impurities (algae, rock sediments, air bubbles, etc.) appear grey, brown, or green. Ice’s basic structure is hexagonal. Amusingly enough, scientists are still uncertain about what exactly makes ice slippery. From glaciers to pack ice, from icebergs to the undulating surface of what the scientific community likes to call the “cryosphere,” ice is an incredibly important part of the global climate, particularly with regard to the water cycle, the basic foundations of life on the planet as we know it. Most scientists would agree that the human body is made of about ninety-two percent water. When we look at ice, we’re looking at a reflection of mortality, of the body made solid and inarticulate. One could
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SONIC LANDSCAPE The Canadian composer, educator, and environmental activist R. Murray Schafer is perhaps best known for his use of the term “soundscape.” For him it implied a connection between how sounds evolve in acoustic space and how human perception connects the sonic phenomena around the observer. I am interested in the connection between graphic design components like the “soundscape” and how we can perform a composition. Turntables, and now any digital playback device, create sound fields, or personal sonic spaces. This is a visual exploration of that phenomenon. In 1969, Schafer also coined the term “schizophonia.” He used it to describe the phenomenon of splitting a sound from its source or the condition caused by this division from the natural to the artificial representation of a sound from its origin—this is the essence of sampling. Schafer wrote: “We have split the sound from the maker of the sound. Sounds have been torn from their natural sockets and given an amplified and independent existence. Vocal sound, for instance, is no longer tied to a hole in the head but is free to issue from anywhere in the landscape.” This section explores this theme through visual sampling.
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Terra Nova as performed at Multiplicidade in Brazil, November 30, 2010. Courtesy of Rodrigo Torres.
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Terra Nova as performed at Multiplicidade in Brazil, November 30, 2010. Top: courtesy of Rodrigo Torres; bottom: courtesy of Diana Sandes.
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September, 1519
Circa 350 BC The Ancient Greeks first come up with the idea of Antarctica. They know about the Arctic—named Arktos (the Bear)— from the constellation the Great Bear and decide that for order and symmetry to balance the world, there should be a similar cold southern landmass that was the same but the opposite: “AntArktos” simply means “opposite the Bear.” The Greeks conceptualized the term, but they never actually went to either the Arctic or Antarctic.
Circa 330 BC Pytheas of Massalia, a Greek merchant, geographer, and explorer, navigates the coast of Britain and the waters north of Scotland. He describes an island six days sailing north of Britain and names it “Thule.” This could refer to Iceland, but it could also have been the coast of the Shetland or Faroe Islands, or Norway. Pytheas is the first person to record a description of the midnight sun, the aurora, and polar ice.
1409
1578 Francis Drake passes through the Straits of Magellan. He finds himself blown significantly southward due to a tremendous storm in the Pacific. This event proves that Tierra del Fuego was separated from any southern continent. The resulting discovery comes to be known as the “Drake Passage.”
1592 Sailing on the Desire, Englishman John Davis discovers the Falkland Islands. The crew is forced to eat over 14,000 penguins, which they killed for food in order to survive the winter. Stored as properly as possible, upon reaching the tropics the penguin meat spoils—only sixteen of the original crew of seventysix reach home.
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Antonio de la Roché is blown south of Cape Horn giving him the first sighting of South Georgia.
1739 Jean-Baptiste Bouvet de Lozier discovers the island Bouvet. Due to significant ice packs, the island is not sighted again until 1808—the first landing does not take place until 1822.
1722 Yves Joseph de Kerguélen-Trémarec discovers the Îles Kerguélen.
1750 Antarctica receives its first literary treatment in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man: Relating Particularly his Shipwreck near the South Pole by Robert Paltock.
1764 John Harrison’s H-4 is adapted as the standard for the creation of longitude, which standardizes navigation based on measurement of time as it unfolds in increments. This leads to a revolution in how human beings measure the planet, and standardizes how space and time are measured.
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1819
Captain Cook sails past South Georgia on his third Antarctic voyage, and discovers the South Sandwich Islands two weeks later.
Englishman William Smith discovers the South Shetland Islands, claims them for Great Britain.
Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen is the second explorer, after Cook, to complete a circumnavigation of Antarctica. In the process, he returns to the Antarctic waters and discovers the Alexander Islands and Peter I Island.
1776–1779 On his final voyage of exploration, James Cook sails on the ships Discovery and Resolution along the west American coast and up to Bering Strait as far as 70°41’N with the hope of finding the Northwest Passage. There he encounters ice that stretches as far as he can see. It’s an essential demonstration of the separation of the Asian and American continents. On his way home from this voyage, he died in Hawaii during a failed attempt to recover one of the Discovery’s boats that had been stolen by the natives.
1820 The Royal Navy sends Edward Bransfield, with William Smith as pilot, to search the waters southeast of the newly claimed South Shetlands. As a result, it is believed that he was the first person to see the Antarctic Peninsula.
January 27, 1820 Russian Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen becomes the first person to see the Antarctic continent.
February, 1821 John Davis, an American sealer from Connecticut, arguably becomes the first person to land on the continent. Davis had been searching the South Shetlands for seals.
1821 Along with British sealer George Powell, Nathaniel Palmer discovers the South Orkney Islands.
1823 Englishman James Weddell sails to 74 degrees south. This is the farthest
1787 Ernst Chladni publishes Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges (Discoveries in the Theory of Sound), which establishes sound as a series of waveform patterns. This helps create a new field of science, acoustics, or how sound travels through space.
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The sealing industry commences on South Georgia. Because the Europeans are involved in a continent-wide war, the sealers are primarily from New England. PO
1817 Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a story set in the Arctic that strikes the tone for the rise of several innovations in English literature for the next two centuries, and embeds a narrative of polar exploration at the heart of early Modernism.
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A major motive for the exploration of the Arctic was the relentless economic competition and the quest for additional trade and commerce and the desire of European states to find alternate trading routes to China, in the form of
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January, 1821
In search of new sealing grounds, Australian Frederick Hasselborough discovers Macquarie Island.
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1594–1610
Johannes Kepler publishes A New Year’s Gift: or On The Six Cornered Snowflake, a mathematical treatise on why snowflakes form a hexagonal structure based on algorithmic analysis of how snowflakes are unique manifestations of a formula. Each snowflake is an expression of mathematics implicit in the foundations of nature.
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Captain James Cook and his crew become the first men to cross the Antarctic Circle.
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A revolution in oceanic navigation occurs when Ptolemy’s Geographia is translated into Latin, thus introducing the concepts of latitude and longitude to Western Europe. This allows for long distance sailing, and the creation of more precise methods of charting the positions of ships over immense expanses of the ocean.
Ferdinand Magellan sails from Spain in search of a westerly route to the Indies. Navigating down the coast of South America, he discovers the narrow strait passing through to the Pacific Ocean that today bears his name. Further south lies Tierra del Fuego, which the early geographers assumed to be the edge of the southern continent, representing the edge of the world as they knew it.
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The Treaty of Tordesillas is signed by Portugal and Spain, dividing the known world defined by the Atlantic Ocean between the two powerful kingdoms. Pope Alexander, VI presides over the division, with Spain taking the west and Portugal the east. Antarctica is not mentioned. The rest of Europe does not recognize the treaty.
either a Northwest Passage along the coast of North America, or a Northeast Passage along the coast of Siberia. A similar impulse leads to further exploration in the southern hemisphere.
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Ocean currents around Antarctica.
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