I have been working on my talk for the Sur Polar event in Buenos Aires next month, and have, after numerous spoken rehearsals, made some small but important changes. The words flow more easily, and sound more like how I speak:
.
IntroA
I am going to give you a brief overview of my project, Antarctic Animation, including some of the rationale and methodology behind it.
IntroB
My purpose here is to explain the work, and to encourage those of you who have worked in Antarctica to share with me some of your experiences in the ice.
IntroC
So, what am I doing, why is it important, and how am I going about it?
1A
Antarctic landscape is beyond the experience of most of us, and to some it can seem terrifyingly remote.
This remoteness and strangeness can get in the way of us getting to know it.
1B
But if we want to learn what the future holds for future generations
it is important to find ways we can connect with this place.
1C
I am researching how the profound connections that some have made with Antarctic landscape can be revealed through making objects and animations..
1D
in dialogue with expeditioners , scientists, and other artists.
2A
Antarctica holds evidence of our planet’s changing nature.
3A
Experiencing Antarctica can change the nature of a person.
3B
Living and working in close quarters, in isolation from the rest of the world, we can become mindful of the impact of our actions, upon ourselves, each other and the environment.
You often hear it said that being in Antarctica is a life-changing experience.
4A
Here, we can find space to reflect.
4B
Ice and water are metaphors for self-reflection.
5A
Animation is the visual language of change.
5B
How can animation be used to take us into the landscape…
5C
to feel something of the changes that are happening, and experienced there?
6A
Scientists use animations to visualise important data about landscape change.
6B
These can sometimes be difficult for other people to read.
As straight graphs, scientific visualisations can seem remote from human experience.
6C
Constructing landscapes with the data, and with other Antarctic texts, we can visualise ourselves within this place.
8A
When the changes are represented as more like how we move…
8B
…we can identify more easily with the data.
(The animated images of sea ice extent through 1991 seem to breathe.)
9A
With this as the premise, I am working with dancers, artists and musicians, to respond to the voices of expeditioners…
…exploring ways to animate what we understand of their observations, actions and feelings.
(Freud recognised pleasure in feeling, and knowing, and doing, which he characterized as Eros, Nacissus, and the Man of action, in Civilization and its discontents (1930).)
Connecting to a moment of pleasure, experienced in Antarctica, can cut through the fear that can get in the way of us learning about it. It can help remove the blind spot.
I would like to end this presentation with one of the wearable sculptures made by Antarctic artist and scientist, Karin Beaumont – Masked Illusion. Here, it turns, like the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, and like a whirling Dervish…to draw you into the power of that sea.
I draw your attention to this piece to demonstrate that the voices of expeditioners can take visual, as well as spoken form.
(Fred Williams, Hans the Carpenter, Stephen Eastaugh and others)
Karin has even described another of her works (Threatened Treasure), in terms of a voice calling:
“This wearable sculpture is a call to protect the magnificent diversity of life in our oceans that is vital to the function of our world.” (2006)
If you have worked in Antarctica, and are willing to share with me a moment in the ice, I would like to record your voice describing what pleasure you found, in what you felt, and learned and did there.
Animating your voices can help us animate the landscape.
And if you have made, or know of objects or animations, that may be of interest to this project, please speak to me.
Thank you.
As you may have gathered, I am nervous about public speaking, if I am not well prepared.
I feel very bad about how unprepared I was for my last (and first!) Academic Review, and do not want that to happen again!
I had an afternoon with a dance therapist friend, who recognised my (Laban)’movement signature’ as being, like hers, “passion-drive”. We find pleasure in everything we do!
My partner has given me an article to read, “Quality in qualitative research – Criteria for authors and assessors in the submission and assessment of qualitative research articles for the Medical Journal of Australia (Kitto, Chesters, Grbich, Medical Journal of Australia, Vol. 188, No.4, 2008).
There’s a useful section on reflexivity, which has me thinking that my friend’s observation of me is important in terms of acknowledging this bias in my own response to the Antarctic. She recommends that I take this into account when I am planning interviews, and workshops with my upcoming movement study group (responding to Antarctic texts).
It is vital to recognise that we all have different ‘signatures’, or ways of engaging with the world.
My friend is an excellent advisor and mentor. She has achieved that balance between creativity and
analysis, which I aspire to.
She also took me shopping for a frock.
I will wear the frock, and have ordered new dancing shoes – black with small heals – like ones worn to Tang dance – to wear as I talk in Buenos Aires.
I am no longer in love with the leopard seal. Today it’s the frock.
Like Freud, I must always have an object to love.
I have been reading the catalogue for the current exhibition at Sydney Uni: Sigmund Freud’s collection: an archeology
of the mind.
There’s an article in there by Dr Janine Burke, whose father lectures me in Fine Arts at Melbourne University in the 1970s.
She writes:
The popular image of Freud as austere, remote and forbidding is ontradicted by the collection, which reveals a very different
personality……Though Freud prescribed the intense, inner journey of psychoanalysis for Vienna’s bourgeoisie, his own therapy was shopping. Arranging choice items on his desk, Freud confessed to Jung, ‘I must always have an object to love.’ His collection attracts multiple readings: as the
embodiment of his theories, as an investigation and a celebration of past cultures, as an exercise in aesthetic pleasure, as a quest for excellence, as a momento of real and imaginary journeys, as a catalogue of desires, and as a self-portrait.
Having watched the home movies of Freud, which are part of this exhibition, and reading more of his work, I suspect that Freud’s movement signature was ‘passion-drive’. His gestures seem impulsive, but fluid, as he talks (unaware of the camera), in the garden with a friend.
Perhaps I am helping to build, with its itinerant occupants, and other artists, a portrait of Antarctica.