Artist Statement
Tags: cine-installation, Ecosophy, immersive installation
Polar ice is the most visible yet inaccessible indicator of climate change. The effects of climate change visible in Greenland are a prelude, a four-dimensional window into deep time. The “Ice-Time” cine-installation is a poetic response to the accelerating changes we are observing in Earth’s ecosystem, investigating environmental deep time using polar ice as a unique window onto ecosophic issues of climate change. The immersive, multi-projection video and audio mediascape acts as an architecture of spatiotemporal experience, engaging the body and memory in a somatic montage – in the decoding of a tangible, spatial poem.
Glaciers are crystal tesseracts that contained the time axis of earth’s climatological history. “Ice-Time” occupies a hexagonal architecture echoing the structure of both water crystals and tesseract shadows in three-space. The ambisonic audio occupies the space as a sonic matrix of possibilities – a glacier-like, fluid landscape that changes with the listener’s attention, position, and trajectory. Through a vivid, material presence of image, sound, data, and time, the immersive installation establishes an embodied, dynamic interaction of form and content. The “Ice-Time” mediascape allows the beholder a sentient, intrinsic experience of the environmental implications of polar ice and the essential role ice plays in anthropogenic climate change.
Video: Ice-Time – Installation Documentation
- Clea T. Waite is an intermedia artist, scholar, engineer, and experimental filmmaker whose artworks investigate the material poetics that emerge at the intersection of art, science, and technology. She creates immersive, cinematic works engaging embodied perception, dynamic composition, and sensual interfaces – as well as one inter-species collaboration with several hundred tropical spiders. Her artworks examine climate change, astronomy, particle physics, history, feminism, and popular culture. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, USA, in Media Arts + Practice, unifying her artistic practice and her background in physics and computer graphics from the MIT Media Lab with research in cinema and media art theory. Waite has been a Humboldt Fellow, a Radcliffe Fellow, CERN artist-in-residence, and fellow at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Germany. Her awards include the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative, the IBM Innovation Prize for Artistic Creation in Art and Technology, and the Medienboard Berlin/Brandenburg. clea-t.de