Hacking Antarctica

Hacking Antarctica is an investigation focused on rendering aesthetic responses to Antarctica beyond normative representations of the sublime and the imperceptible. It is based on fieldwork in polar and subpolar areas over the last 9 years. At its core, the research uses Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement as a way of understanding what is meant by the sublime and from that develops a practice that examines what a Kantian lack of access to nature implies.

This key Kantian concept is explained and devised into art works and then tested through concepts such as translation, transduction, infection and representation, using hacking methodologies informed by bricolage (L ´ evi-Strauss 1968), and diffraction (Barad 2007). The research expands on the taxonomies of the polar to reconsider the Antarctic as a border and periphery, bringing a conjunction of hacking methods and site-specific art that enables a performative causality with which to study the production of site. In other words, a performative approach as Barad and other feminist writers recognize, is questioning the traditional causality of ends and means and observer and observed and rather focuses on processes within discursive practices. Causality is reworked as a local externalization of the intra-acting relations of matter.

Within the overall system of research for Antarctica, technical methods used included; Free Libre Open Source software and hardware techniques, black and white and infrared photography, ultraviolet light sensing, sound recordings, hydrophone recordings, very low frequency recordings, AM radio sensing, error in photography (light leakage, displaced focus), in text (cut-up compositions), in video (glitch) and error in bodies as infections; bio-sensing agents (including yeast and lactobacillus), point-array analysis, translation of images to raw data, and from raw data to sound, land art performances, spatialization of sound, stereo panning, quadraphonic sound, interactive embroidery, radio broadcast and installations.

Specific outputs include: Antarctica 1961-1986 (2017), an interactive embroidered map of Antarctica showing sites of mineral sources and mineral pollution. The map was installed as an interactive instrument that allowed visitors to participate in the live shaping of the spatialization of sounds recorded in Antarctica. A digital Theremin sensor attached to the map was interfaced with Pure Data software running on a GNU-Linux Debian station. All software was made visible as well as the papers documenting the traces of the plutonium found there.

The research through an experimental set of hacking practices supported the hypothesis that Antarctica can be represented outside the sublime through the polar-site produced by hashes
of proxies and the diffraction produced when superposing modes of knowing. The interruption of the spectacle to respond to Antarctica is the result.