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Short abstract

Glacial Hauntologies is an intra-disciplinary collaboration entangling contemporary art practices and glacier science. We explore what it is gained in our understanding of planetary ice when we do art and science through one another, and create works that foster new ways of relating to glaciers.

Long abstract

Comprised of both glaciologists and environmental artists, Glacial Hauntologies is an intra-disciplinary collaboration entangling contemporary art practices and glacier science. Through print, sound, pedagogy, writing, textile, sculpture, movement, fieldwork, and physics, we translate, subvert, and repurpose tools from many disciplines to explore geophysical data, glaciological archives, glacier memory, and alternate ways of relating to glaciers.

We will present some of the sculptural, sound, film, data, teaching, and performance work we have developed together since 2022.

- SIGNAL is a large sculptural fabric installation. Hung using materials used for glacier travel and weighted with ice cores, the sculpture changes shape as the melting of the ice core alters the stress distribution across it.

- WAKE is an audio-digital performance piece, using sonified seismic data from glacier calving events and glitched images from an archive of early US military incursions into Antarctica.

- MEDIAL MORAINE is an exploration of the teaching practices of two of our members on the Juneau Icefield, teaching scientific and artistic methods through one another.

The tensions that we grapple with in this collaboration reflect tensions embedded in how today’s society relates to glaciers. We explore how to: simultaneously hold responsibility for destabilizing the climate with the natural cyclicity of geologic systems that defies the life/death extinction binary; translate between the shared experiences of human bodies and icy bodies, convey the entanglement between human and geologic timescales, and dis/re-entangle the understanding that emerges from technologically mediated measurements (e.g., radar, remote sensing) and embodied ways of knowing.