Reflections in the ice

The ice crystal is a site map for looking at Antarctica. The puppet is for animating some mechanics of its landscape, and human responses to the motion.

We live within the limits of our understanding, within meanings we are able to discern.
There’s a wrestle between how the world appears and what you feel it means.

Antarctica is a vast ice factory with complex mechanisms we struggle to understand. We know that Antarctica drives our climate, that human actions since the Industrial Revolution affect changes in its landscape, and that our actions at home interconnect with changes in Antarctica. Our relationship with Antarctica is reciprocal.

The dot, line and shape can animate known motions of the landscape, and ourselves within it.

The map is like the maze of Terra Incognita, where pictures, animations and sounds reflected inner journeys made by characters in Carmel Bird’s stories. The maze was used again in Roget’s Circular, where a year-long correspondence between two friends reflected points of connection between their separate journeys through landscapes and memorabilia.

These early mazes were made using Macromedia Director, and are becoming less and less accessible as technology changes. Authored as .exe files on CDROM some years ago, they do not play on the current Mac operating system. They are not future-proofed.

Since 2003 I have been working in a Linux system, and I love that it’s open source. I want to make artwork for on-line access.

Simon suggested I look into XML. Perhaps.

I am not a programmer. I would like to work with one to build a maze for on-line access, uploading and archiving of animations, and for it to be automated as much as possible.

I would seed the structure with .gif and .swf files. As further animations are uploaded, they would be positioned following those they respond to, to reveal threads of thought, or dialogues.

The first generation of animations would gradually be replaced, and archived on a server. Archived sets of 20 animations could then be accessed on-line for review. A library of mazes could collect.

Even if it’s just I who animate to start with, it’s an interactive form I feel it’s important to explore. The conversational aspect of art-making is a way of knowing and communicating.

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No one ice crystal is the same, and so I would like the crystal form to change each time it’s displayed. This would also reflect the ever changing nature of ourselves, and our environment. Twenty nodes, at intersections of lines, would remain constant.

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Drawing, animating and writing help me think. And I have been feeling pretty stuck lately, with the task I have set myself: to animate changes observed and experienced in Antarctic landscape.

I have brought down to Melbourne some scientific papers on ice core data analysis.

Grappling with understanding their enormous complexity, I remember Beware of Pedestrians. The simple act of walking was the starting point from which a vast range of human gestures evolved. In that little film, the figure was trapped in a landscape of grids. It was an inner landscape that was being explored.

When I understand something of the mechanism behind the ice core data, I’ll have a starting point for animation. But with that I’m not there yet.

I imagine a figure moving within that mechanism, when I know it.

Walking with Simon through the night after listening the Tom Griffiths talk, we agreed that you can’t effectively draw something that you don’t know, and that drawing is a way of knowing.

Griffiths had talked about the circumpolar winds and Southern Ocean currents surrounding Antarctica.

I animate a figure circled by lines and dots, and see again how an understanding of something simple can become a starting point for expressing complex human responses to the landscape:

The lines and dots circle the figure anti-clockwise, like the coastal Antarctic water current. Beyond that (not represented here) the circumpolar current moves in a clockwise motion.

Too much logical analysis gets in the way of making art.

There is simply too much that even the scientists do not understand.

Simon and I also discussed the idea that the arts of Antarcticans give depth to their data. That marine biologist Karin Beaumont, for example, makes jewelery of the sea life she has studied, offers her and the wearers of her art, a physical connection with Antarctic landscape.

The scientific data means more when there’s also an aesthetic connection.

I find The Chase and the Labyrinth of a theoretical animator, Norman Klein.