What Happens When Icebergs Collide With Art
When the hip hop artist and music producer DJ Spooky first visited Antarctica in 2007, he was astonished by how fast everything there is changing. Meltwater can be heard trickling at the edges of formerly solid glaciers; the waters echo with the creak and roar of icebergs as they melt. Natural changes on this scale should take millennia. After all, Antarctica’s ice sheet—almost 10 times the volume of its northern rival in Greenland—took millions of years to create. Now it is disappearing at speeds visible on human time scales. DJ Spooky had the impression of “slow motion geological time” being “sped up by human climate change.”
DJ Spooky visited Antarctica to witness at first hand the changes befalling one of our planet’s most sublime places—a incorporates video and sounds he recorded from the ice and ocean, accompanied by melodic strings that seem to alternate between lament and sharp urgency. He plays with motion—even manipulating how sound itself moves through the room—to bring what he calls an “emotive, kind of immersive quality” to the experience.
