Abstract

The Antarctic continent expresses climate change through its transforming physical landscape. Scientists and artists attending to this can be transformed themselves, coming to know it. Because most people will never see Antarctica, its voice is largely unheard; most are untouched by it. Some who have worked there have expressed their knowledge through poetic and scientific texts. In this research, methods of improvisation have been adapted from established dance and drawing practices to develop a series of on-line animations. Improvisation offers the animator processes through which to transmit something of the Antarctic landscape experiences some have reported: a heightened sense of being for a moment in a place where no line separates internal from external experience. Animation, the visual language of change, can begin to give voice to the profound kinesthetic connections that some have made with Antarctica’s changing landscape, through direct physical experience, or in gestural response to the texts of some who have worked there.

THIS is what I am writing about.