glacies lux: ice as moving image.

Abstract

Ice is one substance in which we can observe temporality in terms of climate change. glacies lux is an immersive time-based digital work, submitted as a practice-based research contribution to a PhD in Media Arts. It asks: how can ice, as moving image, move us towards poetically rethinking our relationship to the changing material landscape? What and how might urgent issues relating to a globally changing climate be understood by poetically re-presenting ice within a moving image environment? Rather than simply documenting ice and its changing status in contemporary global geography, my research captures particular aesthetic qualities in and of ice: its colour, its texture, its possible affect, and the extent to which images situate a viewer in a particular way within space. glacies lux is an immersive time-based digital work that is based on direct observation. It can link us viscerally to the massive scale of actual climate change that scientists, using difficult to decipher data sets, describe. Moreover, this work encourages the viewer to become a participating observer of the material landscape using their own perceptual experiences, rather than relying on mass media images to provide these for them. In so doing it becomes possible to challenge those images of ice as the only representations of climate change debate. The prime method for the research undertaken in this thesis is practice-based. It focuses on a blend of investigative, experimental and theoretical research methods to determine how ice functions as image and how it functions materially within the climate change debate. The prime method of investigation uses an oscillating dialogue between the construction of images through linguistic means and optical image construction. The works generated as artefacts for my thesis use the experimental material qualities and properties of ice as documented by the physical, chemical and climatological sciences. But the lack of sensory aesthetic attribution to these materialities within these fields becomes the starting point for my investigation. Additionally, I investigate how these materialities and disciplines might be positioned differently by bringing them into contact with cultural and aesthetic imagings and imaginings of ice. I add the subtle expression of content, via media art practice, creating glacies lux as a contribution, at an aesthetic level, to the debate on climate change. It should be noted that as a practice-based thesis submitted within the PhD program in the School of Media Arts, the demonstration of original contribution to knowledge lies in the practice under examination itself. This written document, however, supports, contextualizes and extends this contribution by giving the work a theoretical, aesthetic and cultural milieu. The weighting of the practice to the written document should be considered at a ratio of 60% studio work to 40% written documentation.