The Ice Core Walk and Hyperobjects Closing
Data Artist and UC Berkeley professor Greg Niemeyer presents the Ice Core Walk, an audio artwork about climate change made for a 36-minute walk around Store Lungegårdsvannet. Niemeyer will give a short artist's talk about his work, follow by a group experience of the work.
Hovedinnhold
The story of our planet's climate is recorded in ice over 800,000 years. The ice, over Lake Vostok in Antarctica, is 3 kilometers deep. A core sample of this mighty sheet of ice produces important geophysics data. With Ice Core Walk, you can take an audio tour and virtually walk down the data along the ice core. Listen how the climate changed in the distant past, and how dramatically it changes now. Each step equals hundreds of years... Go!
Greg Niemeyer presents The Ice Core Walk as the closing event of the Hyperobjects exhibition at KMD's Joy Forum Gallery and Rom 61 (Exhibition open April 25-May 04).
In his seminal book Timothy Morton describes hyperobjects as things that are "massively distributed in space and time in relation to humans." According to Morton a hyperobject "could be the very long-lasting product of direct human manufacture, such as Styrofoam or plastic bags, or the sum of all the whirring machinery of capitalism. Hyperobjects, then, are 'hyper' in relation to some other entity, whether they are directly manufactured by humans or not." This exhibition includes works that explore this idea, and demonstrate how hyperobjects reflect human relationships with the planet during the Anthropocene era.
In this exhibition Prof. Eamon O’Kane and Prof. Scott Rettberg have set up a dialogue between KMD and the HF program in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen and are collaborating with Greg Niemeyer, Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. The exhibition uses the idea of the hyperobject as a curatorial starting point and it is hoped that the works in the exhibition will merge with one another and in a way (to borrow Morton´s term) become viscous and “stick” to the other artworks and viewers that are involved with them.
The Joy Forum and Rom 61 are perfect contexts to begin this project in that both are part of a bigger structure that of the new building that the Faculty inhabits. The Joy Forum being born out of a need to locate a space for students to develop exhibiting practice and Rom 61 a place for the dissemination of artistic research. In this first iteration hyperobjects involves alumni of the Art Academy and staff from UiB and Berkley and in future iterations it is planned that current and future students will take part.
