Behind the scenes -- Quiet Listening
In which I get ice from an iceberg, which is to say a glacierEach summer in the Arctic, glacial ice melts and breaks away or “calves”, forming icebergs that drift from Greenland into bays in Newfoundland.
At the start of the summer, I was invited by Lucija to present my past ocean data work at the CaNOE (Canadian Network for Ocean Education) conference, where I met Patrick Wells from Memorial University. He hosted a workshop on iceberg ice's capacity to preserve carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In the fall, through DeepSense’s connections, I obtained leftover iceberg ice from their summer field trip collection.
His workshop was on the carbon dioxide that preserved in the iceberg chunks. When squeezing the ice berg ice pieces and hold it close to the ears, you can hear the sizzling sound from the air bubble escaping. It’s the sound that might came from thousands or even million years ago.
When We See and When You Hear, 2023
As glacial ice melts, pressurized ancient air bubbles are released into the surrounding water, generating noise levels surpassing even those found in tumultuous seas battered by 6-meter waves. This noise persists throughout the year and reaches peak intensity at frequencies ranging from 1 to 3 kilohertz, akin to the pitch range of a piano's uppermost octaves.*
I became fascinated by the possibilities of making something with the sounds that glaciers make as they melt and break apart. This sound is not referred to or assigned to a data set, as with my previous work, but is direct, an experiential, phenomenological property of the material itself. When glaciers melt, the centuries-old pressurized air trapped within the ice is released, creating sizzling sounds, and echoes from a world long ago. As I thought about the possibilities of this phenomenon, I also began to wonder, when the ice melts, and a glacier disappears, what is left for us to hear?
The sound of a glacier melting isn't something we typically hear, but when we do, it's different from what we might expect. In what should be one of the world's scariest phenomena for humans due to global warming and the resulting rise in sea levels, the sizzling sound of glacier ice melting possesses a popping, crisp, yet lingering quality.
Glacial ice with its millions of years of history, is crucial to planetary well-being around the globe. For example, glaciers store and release fresh water in dry seasons for more than 2 billion people and many millions of species in Central Asia and the subcontinent. Relationships between ice movements and life forms at high latitudes and altitudes inform every aspect of life on planet Earth. Shouldn’t we be listening more carefully to what the ice has to say and teach? As US NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) communicators explain: “Originally, scientists began studying glaciers only for the clues they offered about Earth’s climate during past ice ages and the role they played in shaping the landscape. Today, they are also trying to understand how quickly human-caused climate change will cause them to disappear. ”
Geophysical researchers, Erin Christine Pettit and collaborators explain the problem even more fully:
Marine noise pollution, and ocean noise in general, has received much attention from scientists. Human activity in the ocean is ever increasing and the trend is not likely one to stop. But despite all of this interest, there is a lot about ocean noise that still needs to be learned. For instance, we are only beginning to characterize what “normal” background noises in the ocean are…Fjords that still contain glaciers (or glacierized fjords) are extremely dynamic and active – anyone who’s ever seen a calving glacier can attest to the sheer loudness that’s typical of a glacierized fjord.
…With climate change on everyone’s minds, it’s even more imperative that scientists study these regions as they are quickly disappearing with rising temperatures.
As a musician or sound artist, Pauline Oliveros urges us to listen to the sound disappearing. When does the memory begin?
Does it begin to end when the sound that provokes it also ends?
The projection on the wall depicts, at a certain level of abstraction, iceberg ice melting, recorded using a Schlieren Schematic photographic technique
When the glacial melting occurs before our eyes, it's already in the past.
In traditional Eastern Asian painting, the significance of negative space rivals that of the ink works. Similarly, in music, empty beats are acknowledged as beats, carrying equal importance to the musical notes.
I wondered if I could use the art gallery as a space to think about the environment in a much smaller but direct, rather than data-mediated way. Or as Donna Haraway says about the force of art to stimulate our thinking, it is
“Not [as] any kind of utopia, but to offer an alternative space to step out of our pre-perceived system, to destabilize what we normally hold still. It matters to destabilize worlds of thinking with worlds of thinking.”
Schlieren Schematic
After working with numerous datasets and attempting to transform them into sound and images, I decided to aim for a direct visual presentation of the ice. This led me to something called the Schlieren Schematic. The Schlieren schematic effect emphasizes reality, amplifying rather than interpreting it, allowing people to see things that usually can't be seen.
Reflection due to the lack of homogeneity in the air is visible through the Schlieren setup.
More specifically, Schlieren imaging is a technique used to visualize density variations in transparent media. It is based on the principle that light passing through a medium will be refracted if the refractive index of the medium changes. In a Schlieren setup, light is focused onto a knife-edge or similar obstruction, which blocks most of the light but allows a small amount to pass through.
If there are density variations in the medium (caused by, for example, changes in temperature or pressure, the refracted light will have slightly deviated from its original path. This deviation is typically very small but can be amplified using lenses and mirrors to create a visible pattern. This pattern is then captured by a camera and processed to create an image showing the density variations.
To gain the best understanding of iceberg melting, observing the deeper water is more effective than focusing solely on the surface. The setup of the Schlieren Schematic visually corresponds to how the noise of iceberg melting reflects in the ocean and seafloor.
What we witness when we look at the world and its phenomena is not always a whole or current reality, but a broken-up, refracted reflection of what has occurred. There's no way to reverse it, and sometimes it contradicts our expectations or desires.
What unfolds after an event like irreversible melting has already transpired?
Can hot activism–the activism of emergencies and catastrophe, activism that requires quick responses also be cool or cold activism, activism that isn’t all about speed, but can look at and respond to processes that unfold over long periods of time? What could we call an activism that calls us to attend to and to see slow but massive processes? Is that slow activism, “cool” activism?
Global sea level is rising due to human-induced global warming, recent rates are unprecedented for over two centuries. The evolution of glaciers and the production of icebergs by melting ice directly influence this parameter.
Sarah Sze talked about the fragility of our pursuit of artists trying to understand this universe. We build things to occupy a room, a space. But eventually, we “want to occupy the memory.” But can we? Will we be able to do that?
Quiet Listening: How Can We See Glacial Melt? – The Installation View
Quiet Listening: What do we hear after glaciers melt?
Installation View
Anna Leonowens Gallery, 2024
The video projected on the wall depicts imagery filmed in the reflection of a telescope mirror as a piece of glacier ice melted in water, using Schlieren effect refractions. This choice of imagery led me to contemplate Schlieren imaging, as well as reflection and refraction. This was a departure from my previous work, where I interfered with the visual representation of various phenomena and occurrences in digital works. Schlieren imaging is more direct in some ways: it is used to visualize optical inhomogeneities in transparent media that are not readily visible to the human eye, but it doesn’t really alter those wave formations or convert them into other forms. Thus unlike my past works that imported data to generate imagery through algorithms, using reflection and refraction to develop this work involved highlighting something already present in what we perceive and amplifying it visually.
The circular projection raised a question: was it portraying a microscopic or macroscopic entity? The audience interpreted the circular shape of the telescope mirror in the exhibition as alternately a microscope or a globe. Additionally, viewers provided feedback that the melting ice in the water resembled clouds, fog, and water in motion; these interpretations came close to my hope for more organic, natural-looking, holistic phenomena in this show.
From the perspective of ice, it can be seen as a lively entity participating in the hydrological cycle. My glacial ice may have formed prior to human existence; the atoms in that body continue to circulate, even as they become water, although we can no longer see or experience or perhaps even remember the ice. A melting glacier, any melting glacier of the nearly 200,000 still extant on earth, represents a macroscopic perspective, offering a sense of a time span that stretches beyond human memory. The microscopic perspective is what we see in the gallery, from a video recording of a piece of glacier ice, a tiny speck of a global event; when the recording is over, the ice has already melted.
There is the paradox of isolating focus in the white box gallery on a certain “real” phenomenon and contemplating its significance. The enlarged visual representation of this tiny bit of melting ice provides a controlled depiction of glacial melt, including icebergs melting in the ocean. Attending to this phenomenon should take the central place in the gallery; it can be enlarged, yet such a visual can never surpass the reality of the turbulence caused by the melting of the world’s ice sheets and glaciers. What we see in the art gallery is just a tiny part of this phenomenological process which remains, everywhere, almost completely invisible and imperceptible to our senses.
The sound in the installation was derived from a soundtrack produced when several artist-participants–fellow MFA students past and present–contributed to making a small bit of glacial ice melt with the warmth of their hands, alongside with recordings of me alone also melting ice by holding it in my hands. The edited sound included the cracking of ice, the sound of melted water dripping, and the breathing and panting of all of us as we squeezed the ice. A human presence is implied in the sound, as it is in the staggered mirrors in the gallery. If we look at ourselves, we see ourselves in the frame with the melting ice, but we have a very hard time concentrating on both.
This is because the human brain tends to focus on immediate sensory input. Despite my research focusing on environmental issues, I recognize that I cannot constantly think about them. Human cognitive limitations mean that we only attend to environmental issues periodically, no matter how significant or catastrophic they may be.
Nevertheless, the melting of ice is a global reality and incipient catastrophe; the projected imagery in the installation thus serves as a moment of attention to this process. The sound also serves as a residue of something that has already occurred, allowing for a simultaneous perception and discussion of both an ongoing process as well as what has already transpired. The mirrors sketch an opportunity to contemplate the present moment and our human presence in the global context of glacier ice melting. As audience members walk by the mirrors, they can see staggered parts of their own reflections along with portions of the recorded image. The refractions and interplay of reflections in the space shift as viewers move through it.
Viewers are invited to see themselves in the exhibition, although they may only be partially visible at times as they move about. We are part of the continuous flow of information, phenomena, and matter even as our shifting attention is itself part of the noise that can obscure our ability to fully comprehend and address glacial melt.
I want to ask then: the thoughts we generate, the sounds we hear, and the images we see, how long will they last?
When the ice disappears, will we too fall silent, unremembered matter?
* Glowacki, Oskar, and Grant B. Deane. “Quantifying Iceberg Calving Fluxes with Underwater Noise.” The Cryosphere, vol. 14, no. 3, Mar. 2020, pp. 1025–42. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-1025-2020.