Michele Barker & Anna Munster. Juried Artists
As Above, So Below
QUT Art Museum
23 June – 13 October
Artist Statement
An aerial drone hovers precariously close to the face of a glacier. One hundred metres below, an underwater drone engages in ‘oceanic’ hovering.
While the aerial drone records the constant dripping of water and calving events from the face of the seemingly solid ice wall, the underwater drone is witness to a different but related temporal transition. Here, centuries-old air and soil – trapped within the melting icebergs calved from the glacier – are rapidly releasing in gaseous, liquid and solid forms into the sea.
‘ecologies(Arctic’) is a multichannel audio and video installation that juxtaposes the scale and duration of
millennial glacial movement with rapid deglaciation occurring through human-induced climate change.
It avoids the spectacle of collapsing glaciers and melting ice, aiming instead to sensorially engage audiences with an embodied visual and sonic exploration of the shifting spaces and times of a fragile ecology. In ‘ecologies (Arctic)’ time and place are experienced as porous thresholds: above and below water and ice, liquidity/rapidity meeting the frozen/static. The experimental drone footage and field recorded soundscape are joined by another, speculative moving image ‘companion’ perspective: AI- generated video. A counterpoint to the drones bearing witness to the complex ecologies of climate change, this speculative imaging asks: what might a deglaciated Arctic look like in the year 2058; 2058 being the current predicted forecast for the loss of one of the Arctic’s largest glaciers, Hambergbreen.
About the artists
Barker and Munster are established media artists and researchers. In a collaborative practice spanning 25 years, their work has been shown extensively both nationally and internationally.
Major works include the award-winning ‘Struck’ (2005), ‘évasion’ (2014), an ambitious 8-channel responsive installation working across human and cinematic forms of movement; and the multi-channel interactive work ‘HokusPokus’, which explores perception, magic and early moving image technologies. This work represented Australasia in the International Festival of Digital Art (Cultural Olympiad) London, in 2012.
What has emerged in their practice is a unique visual language using cinematographic and editing techniques, seen especially in the commissioned immersive work ‘pull’ (2017), a key piece in Experimenta Make Sense: Triennial of Media Art (2017–21), and subsequently selected for ‘depth’, at the Science Gallery, Detroit (2019).
They are engaged in a long term project, ‘ecologies of duration’, using drones in more intimate, terrain-hugging modes of cinematography, and combined with audio field recordings tuned to Earth sound and signal. This project has taken them to Sami Lapland, the Arctic and sites of environmental devastation in Australia.
The artists have also written collaboratively about their practice-based artistic research including a new visual essay forthcoming for the anthology ‘Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology’ (Open Humanities Press).
Credits: Michele Barker + Anna Munster. Additional Arctic field recordings courtesy of Mark Ijzerman and Sébastien Robert