Antarctic landscape, that massive indicator of climate change, is remote from most human experience. Working within the fields of Dance Improvisation, Drawing, and Interactive Media, Antarctic Animation explores ways of bringing the profound connections that some have made with Antarcica’s changing landscape closer to human consciousness. In this research, ways of communicating the kinesthetic responses that some have made to Antarctic landscape and its texts are being explored through animation to help connect audiences with the fact of climate change. Antarctic Animation is positioned within the further fields of Antarctic Arts, Polar Arts and the Arts of Climate Change. Artistic explorers to both the Arctic and Antarctic have written, spoken, painted, photographed, filmed and danced from experience of extreme remoteness. Some have returned with unfamiliar yet more accurate ways of knowing landscapes in their more familiar homelands. Their work seeks to communicate changed perspectives, offering metaphors through which to view our own landscapes afresh, as if for the first time. Coinciding with the dawn of Antarctic explorations, artistic explorers have been developing Improvised Dance, Drawing and Animation as ways to kinesthetically connect our internal and external landscapes, as our selves continuous with our environment. Our selves are defined as energetic entities shaped by and shaping our landscapes through space and time. Antarctic Animation joins these artists in kinesthetically describing landscape as the world experienced both within and beyond our skin. The proposition is that kinesthetic awareness of our selves in landscapes can raise our consciousness of climate change.
Chapter headings:
1 Literature Review
1.0.1 Landscape
Define what I mean by landscape. Discuss internal and external landscapes – my own and other peoples. Theories about this cnecpt. Dualism/monism. What is different about Polar landscapes? What is differentabout Antarctic landscape? Are the Poles merging more in our minds in recent years?
1.0.2 Polar arts
Meeting British choreographer Siobhan Davies was a turning point in identifying my field of artistic inquiry. Davies had worked in the Arctic in 2005, with the Cape Farewell project. She returned changed in ways I recognised in other Polar artists, and in myself after working in Antarctica. Watching her Arctic dance, Endangered Species (2006), and hearing her speak of the Arctic, I could hear the changes that others would know: a heightened sense of physical connection with landscape and urgency in seeking ways of engaging others with that sense.
This field is identified by content and purpose rather than medium of expression or academic discipline. Driven by changed perspectives, the work of Polar artists can take many forms and be shown in many contexts. Like their scientific counterparts, these artistic explorers have worked in extreme conditions, and often invented new ways of using materials immediately at hand. Stephen Eastaugh established Antarctica’s first Sculpture Garden (2002) at Davis station, using bits of metal, wood and cloth to create totem poles. He stitches like the early explorers did, into canvas and surgical bandage, but for artistic expression. Invoking a range of disciplines from the sciences and humanities, Polar art can contribute to social and environmental understandings. They can present the familiar from unfamiliar perspectives they have gleaned from the Poles. Davies’ video installation Endangered Species (2006) appeared in a specimen case in London’s Natural History Museum. Suggestive of a Darwin collectible, a dancing human-insect form demands we see ourselves differently. The creature demands we see ourselves as we see ourselves at the Poles: very small and endangered.
Davies described the fact of her physical connection with her environment – Central London – as heightened by her Arctic experience: “So the knowledge is that I come back here, and I know I am being physically affected every second of the day. But now I’m more aware of it because I was put in that extreme situation up there.” Other artists who suggest similar responses to the Arctic include David Buckland, Antony Gormley, Max Eastley, Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey. (Burning Ice – Art & Climate Change, 2006). Davies also changed her thinking about the role of an artist. Following fellow Arctic artists Heather Ackroyd, Dan Harvey, David Buckland and others, she now sees the value in making artwork as propaganda for climate change awareness, and of taking a more active part in climate change debates (in con, London 2008). She joined Ackroyd on a panel of artists and environmental activists at the Friends of the Earth forum, Poison and Antidote (London 2008).
1.0.3 Antarctic arts
As her student at the National Gallery School in the early 1970s, my early encounter with Bea Maddock had alerted me to the changed perspective one can return with from Antarctica. As an artist aboard the Australian Antarctic Division’s first Humanities Programme (since renamed the Australian Antarctic Fellowship program), she returned with new eyes for her home land, Tasmania. Artwork issuing from that voyage (v? 1987?) suggested new ways of identifying ones internal and external landscapes. John Caldwell, Jan Senbergs and Bea Maddock were sent to Antarctica by the Australian government in 1987 as “a major step towards bringing Antarctica into the Australian cultural experience.” (Boyer, 1988;11) They were sent into alien territory on an impossible mission: to help familiarize the unfamiliar. And yet, as Peter Boyer wrote in their exhibition catalogue (Boyer, 1988;1), “If works of art about Antarctica have a common element, it is probably a fascination for things vast, unknown and elemental.” Maddock’s monumental drawing, Terra Spiritus (1995?), depicts Tasmania as vast, unknown and elemental. Rather than rendering Antarctica more familiar, Maddock’s post-Antarctic works offer unfamiliar views of familiar landscapes; her experience of Antarctic territory, which she described as like going to the Moon (in con 19996), is brought to bear on her most familiar place. Knowledge of Antarctic landscape as vast, unknown and elemental can be discerned in in much Antarctic art. Yet more than that, the work shows knowledge of familiar landscapes as similarly vast, unknown and elemental.
Maddock’s seven-panel work, We live in the meanings we are able to discern was made it in Launceston in 1987, immediately after her return from the Antarctic. Seven canvas panels are linked through three perspectives of the landscape, running horizontally across them as three narratives of the one place. The land is drawn, written (or perhaps spoken), and photographed. The stratified composition of this work presages her monumental Terra Spiritus. Pencil sketches made in immediate response to the landscape have been enlarged and fixed beneath encaustic on canvas, as if embedded under ice. Drawn in the style of early explorers’ topographical drawings, her drawings are similarly made to chart coastlines newly seen. Drawing is used as a language to explore Heard Island, contouring of the known forms (of buildings, a flagpole) amidst the unknown forms (of ice, rock, mountain) . Aboriginal words – place names from the south-west of Tasmania – are cursively written beneath the drawings, evoking ancient connections of this land and Australia, as Gondwanaland. Tasmania and Heard Island could have once been physically connected. Photographic replications of a glacier, repeated in tones of ethereal blues and greens, are enclosed in small box frames beneath the whole – three beneath each panel=21. Like frames of movie film, the format suggests a times-lapse capture of the ever changing light and colour, impossible to fix in one frame.
1.0.4 Art of Climate Change
Land art, climate change art etc…Goldsworthy etc…
1.0.5 Art of Improvisation
1.0.6 Art of Dialogue
Public dialogue can occur between and with an Antarctic community and artists. Scientists and support personnel who work in Antarctica can show us its landscape from a range of perspectives, offering multiple views of that place that we may not have thought of before.
This on-line interface is a tool for researching ways to dialogue, through a Thesaurus of words, images, animations and scientific data; Maps; Journey narratives; B(Log), with interconnecting hyperlinks.
1.0.7 Dance
‘There’s a woman called Maresa von Stockert who’s a choreographer, who is doing a piece this Thursday and Friday at the Queen Elizabeth Hall which is based on …climate change. I think it works with ice.’ (Davies, 2008, in con.)
1.0.8 Drawing
1.0.9 Animation
1.0.10 Interactive Media
.
2 Rationale
Why is this research important?
.
3 Lab Report.
What did I do? How did I go about my research? What have I been doing and how have I approached it? Take readers into an understanding of my methods of inquiry in all its various forms (animations, drawings, paintings, movement, audio, sculptures, installations, archival pieces…). Take them into my laboratory. What worked? What didn’t work? What did I do with the material that I have collected? How did I arrange it, classify it, learn form it? How am I going to present these experiments?
4. Conclusion
What does it all mean? What can I show people that wasn’t understood before before?
5. Discussion
What has changed since I began and what more needs to be done?
Notes:
What part of this landscape does Siobhan Davies form? Is there any connection to the work of Stephen Eastaugh or Bea Maddock? Who else does related work? How might we understand these individuals as part of whole? Where does your work fit in or not fit in?
Is landscape a useful metaphor – would dance be better?
Dear Lisa
It’s good to see you approaching this with such confidence. You have written a bold 9 sentence paragraph dense with ideas. I like the way you have set it out as a logical progression leading towards your proposition that, kinesthetic awareness of our selves can raise our consciousness or climate change.
Here are some suggestions mainly framed as questions:
What is the role is function of an Introduction in a thesis?
Do a little research on this, there are plenty of books and guides about how to structure a thesis.
The introduction can be quite personal in tone, it eases the reader into what it is that has captured your attention and led to you spending a significant portion of you life searching for an answer to a problem.
Is your proposition practical or accessible in the context of doctoral or artistic research? By this I mean is it quantifiable, measurable or even able to be understood?
You are proposing two fairly abstract and unquantifiable or even subjective objectives: self-awareness and raised consciousness.
Nothing wrong with that if you can convince us that this can be achieved through the experience of art (animation, dance). A psychologist might devise before and after tests. You need a different approach.
This means that to pull this off, you need to say quite a bit more about self-awareness and about consciousness of climate change.
Each of your sentences could be expanded (but not in length).
1. Antarctic landscape: Most people have some idea of Antarctica even though they may not have been there. How could you characterise these ideas? What’s different about having been there?
2. Connecting fields: How do you connect Dance Improvisation, Drawing, Antarctic Arts, Polar Arts, Arts of Climate Change, and Animation?
3. Connecting audiences with climate change: In what ways does climate change have an audience (Al Gore, polar bears)? What is your audience? What is different about how you present climate change?
4. Artistic explorers: Who are they? What terrain are they exploring?
5. Fresh perspectives: Examples of seeing the familiar with new eyes…
6. I don’t understand what you are saying in sentence 6
7. Landscape and self: Expand with examples. This is almost a thesis in its own right.
8. Dance: How can we understand the kinesthetics of describing landscape?
9. Your proposition.
Overall, I think you are being over ambitious (even extravagant) in your objectives in this paragraph. Is it really something as big as climate change that you want to write about or something else?
Best wishes
Simon
I agree that what I have written is perhaps better described as an Outline of what I intend writing about.
I agree it is over ambitious.
I mainly want to write about the journey of my own changing consciousness of climate change. This began in Antarctica and continues through making art in dialogue with others who have changed through knowing Antarctica. My journey began on approaching the Amery Ice Shelf, where Antarctica’s largest glacier, the Lambert, pours out to sea. Beneath a clear blue sky I stood with some of the world’s top climate change scientists. We were marveling at the immensity and clarity of the scene. I had heard them speak of their science on our way down here, and the landscape before us reflected their clarity of purpose: to measure yet more evidence of climate change. As we edged along the stark line of ice cliff, one of the scientists emerge from within to tell us about a satellite report just received: George Bush and John Howard were refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. These politicians, so removed from Antarctica, were doing a different dance, and expected us all to follow. We were speechless for quite a long while after that.
So my journey continues. I seek ways to bring Antarctica to life in the frozen minds of politicians and their followers in the so-called real world. Animation gives voice to such speechless responses as I experienced in Antarctica.
What I can do is a very small gesture towards showing how others respond to what Antarctic scientists and artists are telling us of the changes.
Dear Lisa
I have to apologise because I was responding to the paragraph that arrived by email. The blog notification is not working so I was unaware that you had written more.
I think the the text above beginning with ‘I mainly want to write about …Animation gives voice to such speechless responses as I experienced in Antarctica.’ is exactly the kind of writing that you should be extending.
Perfect!
Hold on to that clear confident voice. It is as though you’ve suddenly nailed it. Keep going…
Dear Simon,
It is good you can hear my more confident voice.
My outrage at Jeffrey Sachs’ lecture last night got me writing more (See Individual power). I wonder what this has to do with my thesis writing? It took ages to write, but in the end I had clarified my stance.
I have just answered my question. Writing helps me think. By the end of writing the thesis I will have grown in understanding. I will be making a clear stand on some things.
As an artist, I know I can never be right in anything I do. There is always another perspective. Knowing this has got in the way of me making a stand on things for a long time – in so many areas! I have upheld the scientific method as superior.
Oh, what a revelation to be writing this. It feels good, to feel my mind changing and opening up.
Simon,
You might like to refresh your screen when reading my Posts.
I change my mind so much that I edit and edit and edit.
Editing is writing too!
I’d love to see someone make an artwork or a poem called ‘as an artist’
speaking,
as a baboon
as a doormat
as a clothes peg
as a lightning strike
as a jug of milk
as a scream
as a chuckle
as a joke
as an armchair
as a speck of dust
as an asteroid
as a distant planet
as an ice cube
as a fish
as a storm
as a statistic
as a mathematical equation
as a explosion
as a fart
as an moron
as a thug
as a thief
as a murderer
as an amputee
as a stomach cramp
as a voice amongst many
I’ve forgotten what it is that I wanted to say.
By way of light relief and to continue with this looser line of thought, have you ever come across the work of YHChang Heavy Industries (Korean)?
I’ve been enjoying these orchestrated text pieces for some years now. If you have speakers on your computer, then start with Dakota
http://www.yhchang.com/DAKOTA.html
There are more subtle and refined works, such as artist statement
http://www.yhchang.com/PERFECT_ARTISTIC_WEB_SITE.html
And a list of others at: http://www.yhchang.com/
I LOVE your word list. What a good game to try!
YHChang’s pieces remind me of the projected video in John Hughes’s recent show, ‘I was a middle aged termite’:
John had shot video of street signs and advertising, driving through Sydney streets. He had edited the footage so the text read some sense – moving in and out of logical connections. He projected this footage over faces of people driving in a little car, all carved in wood. With some of his technological magic he had made their lips move. The whole experience was mesmerising. I missed the puppet show unfortunately, but it sounded like a re-run of his last one. I would have loved to have seen it again though.
Damien Minton Gallery website
16 July 2008
John is touring around the world from the next few months, placing some of his smaller sculptures in archaeological sites, apparently, and performing a puppet show out of a suitcase. At least, these are some of the things he said he was looking at doing. And shooting more video for future works.
Unlike John’s work, I found YHChang’s work monotonous. I couldn’t keep watching to the end. The text became a barrage of shouting, and moved too quickly for me.
But I did very much like the idea of using text in that way, of using text in Flash. John had actually suggested I try something along those lines some time ago.
Ref.
Damien Minton Gallery: Hobart Hughes – Free Live Art Performance “I was a middle aged termite”
* Saturday 28 June 2.00 for 3.00pm
DAMIEN MINTON GALLERY
61-63 GREAT BUCKINGHAM STREET REDFERN
T: 02 9699 7551
E: art@damienmintongallery.com.au
W: http://www.damienmintongallery.com.au
Seeing Damien’s message (above) reminds me of my remark that the poetics of the web resides somewhere between a postcard and a phone tap.
After all these years, I still forget that it’s one to many rather than one to one.
My take on the barrage of shouting is that it is a deliberate part of the piece and the piece is about excess. Yhchang uses the dimensions of rhythm and pace very deliberately. There are softer gentler works – but they are all charged (sexually or politically) in some way. I’m in awe of what she does with the tight constraints of form and bandwidth. That’s one of the reasons I posted it. That, and the feeling for text.
http://www.yhchang.com/ITS_A_WOMANS_WORLD.html
It’s nice to imagine John and his suitcase.
The rhythm and pace of Yhchang’s animations are subtle, even in Dakota. I can see this artist in in full control of her medium. Beautiful work. It is a challenge to achieve such a high level of aesthetic control on the web. Yes, I could see the shouting barrage was deliberate, but I didn’t need to be pounded for that long to get the idea.
I should mention that Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is a collaboration between Young-Hae Chang, a Korean woman, and Marc Voge, an American man, who live and work in Seoul.