Panel Statement

Panel: New Environmental Art Practices on Landscapes of the Polar Regions; Politics, Emotion and Culture (FARFIELD 1)

Mag­nets of the Fan­tas­tic: Fu­tureNorth ex­plores the ques­tion: What will the fu­ture bring to the North Pole? What will be the ef­fect of cli­mate change on this re­gion?  Using the ex­am­ple of a re­cent col­lab­o­ra­tive an­i­ma­tion with vi­sion­ary ar­chi­tect Mitchell Joachim of Ter­reform 1, Marsching looks at the chal­lenges of cli­mate pre­dic­tion in un­der­stand­ing cli­mate mod­el­ing in real human terms. Tak­ing one pos­si­ble sce­nario of sea level rise, Fu­tureNorth imag­ines the fu­ture of our port cities and polar ocean one hun­dred years from now.  Posit­ing the needs for imag­i­na­tion and cul­tural nar­ra­tives to bal­ance the over­whelm­ing com­plex­i­ties of cli­mate data, this paper uses pos­si­ble fu­tures as a way to point to the chal­lenges of our cul­ture’s re­la­tion­ship with cli­mate data at the North Pole.

• Jane D. Marsching is a dig­i­tal media artist. Her re­cent ex­hi­bi­tions in­clude: the ICA Boston; Mass­MoCA; San Jose Mu­seum of Art, CA, USA, and oth­ers. She has re­ceived grants from Cre­ative Cap­i­tal, LEF Foun­da­tion, Ar­ta­dia and Artists Re­source Trust.  Re­cent pub­li­ca­tions in­clude: BiPo­lar (Cor­ner­house 2008), Gothic (Whitechapel Press, Lon­don, 2008), and S&F On­line: Gen­der on Ice (Barnard Col­lege, 2008). With Mark Alice Du­rant in 2005, she cu­rated The Blur of the Oth­er­worldly: Con­tem­po­rary Art, Tech­nol­ogy, and the Para­nor­mal at The Cen­ter for Art and Vi­sual Cul­ture, Bal­ti­more, MD; a cat­a­log of the ex­hi­bi­tion was pub­lished in June 2006 with es­says by Marsching, Du­rant, Ma­rina Warner and Lynne Till­man.  She is a co­founder and mem­ber of Plat­form2: Art and Ac­tivism, an ex­per­i­men­tal forum se­ries about cre­ative prac­tices at the in­ter­sec­tion of so­cial is­sues.
  

Full text (PDF) p. 1649-1653 [title slightly different]