The Ice-Time project: Tessering the space-time of climate change

Fathoming global warming-induced climate change involves vast systems and time frames that are disconcerting for the mind. Can we assimilate data representing planetary scales of matter and time frames that progress over generations, far beyond the limits of our experience and physical perception? Ancient ice provides a four-dimensional perspective into Earth’s climatological timeline. The Ice-Time project is a series of immersive media artworks created in response to the precarious state of Earth’s ecosystem, engaging interdisciplinary science-art research methodologies and collaborations and heuristic experience with polar ice in Greenland. The series formally explores cinema in and as hyperspace, realized in diverse, immersive moving image forms, including a multichannel video installation with spatial sound, 360° cinema, ultra-high-resolution hyper-cinema and virtual reality (VR) to create embodied experiences of ice’s changing time frames. This article focuses on two works, the immersive cinema mediascape Ice-Time and the VR environment TesserIce. In Ice-Time, the beholder experiences the time frame of a different form of matter as a somatic experience. Ice-Time conveys hyper-realistic views of ice at all scales of space, from the microscopic to the planetary, combined within a three-dimensional space of original sound recordings of ice. The spectator’s body placed in a conflation of real with virtual space fosters a radical solicitude between the space-time of the human and the geological. TesserIce composes a true four-dimensional mediascape in VR that allows participants to propel themselves through the hyper-dimensions of Earth’s polar ice. The work uniquely places participants within a four-dimensional architecture. In each of these artworks, the stark imagery of ice serves as a distinct access point into the overwhelming complexity of global warming, creating an embodied, participatory and poetic experience of climate change’s time, scale, causes and effects, imbuing the spectator with a deep awareness of the environmental and the cultural implications of ice.