Antarctic Images Project at the Art & Industry Urban Arts Biennial

Antarctic Images Project
Ed Osborn

presented as part of:

SCAPE: New Zealand Community Trust Art & Industry Urban Arts Biennial
Transport Annex, Transport Gallery, Canterbury Museum
Christchurch, New Zealand
5th September - 3rd November 2002


The Antarctic Images Project consists of several kinds of visual
materials about Antarctica shown in a series of video projections: a
sequence of black and white still photos taken as part of aerial
mapping of Antarctica in the early sixties, home video footage of
some of the human activities that take place there, a few historical
archive photographs, and images from Antarctic webcams. By placing
these materials in close proximity, the notion of Antarctica as a
distant and distantly imagined site is juxtaposed with the reality of
Antarctica as a physical place in which humans exist and work in an
immediate and exceedingly practical level.

For the most part the images avoid falling into the "spectacularly
beautiful" category of nature and exploration portraiture. The home
videos in particular provide a more personal and less filmic view of
Antarctica than is usually found in print or mass media. Shot in the
eighties and early nineties, these videos come complete with unsteady
handheld shots, low-fidelity images, and sometimes lower-fidelity
sound; they offer a glimpse into the tactile and sometimes prosaic
experience of everyday life in Antarctica. Some of the activities
shown here include travel by air and land, conducting of scientific
experiments, moving equipment, working in field camps, and repairing
machinery.

Counterbalancing this are the sequences of aerial reconnaissance
images made in the mid-sixties to map the Ross Dependency, the part
of the Antarctic continent administered by New Zealand. As rendered
in video, the sequence fades from one image to the next so as to give
a sense of the scale and timing of the flight. These images were
shot from the bottom of a plane and include in the image a record of
the time and coordinates of the plane where the picture was taken.
Given the relatively detached framing of the images (determined by
the direction and altitude of the plane rather than a human eye to a
viewfinder) and the superimposition of mapping information in the
image itself, these images substitute the aesthetic intentionality of
the photographer's eye with a cartographic framework to order the
wilderness depicted within them. As such they are an artifact of a
moment when the land is first harvested for information, a moment
where the human urge to inscribe and name everything glides across
thousands of miles of previously untouched ice.

The sequence of images is accompanied by a voiceover reading excerpts
from the Provisional Gazetteer of the Ross Dependency. This
Gazetteer went through a number of different versions as the Ross
Dependency was mapped, and in examining the successive versions of it
one can clearly sense the difficulty in applying language to the
geography: Shapeless Mountain, Intention Nunatuks, Mistake Peak, and
Veto Gap are typical names to result from this process. In addition,
the naming of places for everything from expedition members to dogs
to items of food (Oates Piedmont Glacier, Lake Vanda, and Biscuit
Step, respectively) highlights the difference between the immense
Antarctic terrain and the relatively small framework of language that
the explorers brought with them to mark that landscape with names.

The Antarctic Images Project presents a look at the Ice and the human
activity on it that is by turns personal and detached, and offers a
framework to consider the continent differently from the ones usually
employed by visual media. The piece is one of a series of works
about Antarctica collectively entitled Anemomania. These works use
text, sound, video, sculptural elements, and still images to explore
the site as both a physical and psychological terrain in terms of the
meanings we attempt to inscribe onto it.

The Antarctic Images Project was produced for the Art & Industry
Urban Arts Biennial, Christchurch, New Zealand with support from:

Art and Industry Biennial Trust
Antarctica New Zealand
Gateway Antarctica, University of Canterbury
Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, Department of Art & Design
Christchurch Community Access Television
US Embassy, Wellington, New Zealand
New Zealand Antarctic Institute Antarctic Collection, University of Canterbury
Antarctica New Zealand Pictorial Collection
Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany
Australian Antarctic Division, Kingston, Tasmania



For more information see:

http://www.artandindustry.org.nz/
http://www.roving.net/videoworks/aip.html


–

Ed Osborn
Oakland / Berlin
[email protected]
http://roving.net
http://www.auralaura.com
http://www.soundculture.org
http://www.stretcher.org