A multimodal collaboration between artists, writers, and scholars. This piece emerged from an expedition to the Arctic archipelago as part of the Arctic Circle Residency in Autumn 2022.
Heartbeat. Port LYR
Sergei Chernikov
I’m a visual person, and working with vessel operations, I need to have the ship-calls schedule printed out in front of me. I cross the days as they pass by for a fast and easy overview. Crossing the days in opposite directions made me see a symbolized cardiogram.
I found the idea of a place having a heartbeat beautiful. As in some religions and traditions, nature and its attributes are alive, and just the same happens here but just with a place and data.
For a person who spends a good amount of time in the office with spreadsheets, it was also thrilling to see them from a different angle – not as a business tool, but as a beautiful thing that represents the vitality of the place.
Each Heartbeat from the project consists of all the ship calls for the season months layered one on another.
Photos from the camera above the port office give more insight into the changes within the seasons and add a spicy hint of PowerPoint.
scrap iron, iron filings, hydrogen plant capitalist technomania
pipes, broken barrels, entrepreneurial hot air
traces of sulphuric acid,
oil, gasoline
Wellmankollen high crag on Danskøya dead white men’s
Örnenøya small island near
Danskøya aggrandizing
Lachambrebeen small glacier on Danskøya entitlement
Annabreen small glacier on Amsterdamøya
Strindbergfjellet mountain in Smeerenburgfjorden
Andréeland land between Wijdefjorden and Woodfjorden
Nansenbassenget sea north of Svalbard to Nansenbassenget
Amundsenbassenget sea north of Nansenbassenget to North Pole
Note
Epigraph from Virgohamna by Hein B. Bjerck and Leif Johnny Johannessen and published by the Governor of Svalbard, 1999. Left and middle columns draw from Bjerk and Johannessen’s pamphlet. Dutch “whaling station,” Harlinger kokeriq, was founded in 1636. Örnenøya, after Andrée’s balloon, Örne (Eagle); Lachambrebeen, after Andrée’s French balloon manufacturer; Annabreen, after Anna Charlier, Nils Strindberg’s fiancée. The greater the explorer’s largesse, the larger the land awarded his name.
The author declares that they have no competing interests.
Flotsam and Jetsam, Nordkappbukta
Dianne Chisholm
on conveyer belt of ocean currents, garbage gyres far
north from southern dumping grounds–our problem
to puzzle over
black wool glove sunk in time-rippled sand, thumb
folded under remnant four fingers
reaching for nothing
turquoise nylon twine entwined in tangled heaps of hemp rope
thick triple-coiled rope band unmanned, sand-marshaled barricade
against polar ecology, signature handiwork of
anonymous forces
M concludes our contemplative salvaging with crescendos
of ice-smashing. Hurls boulders at lagoon’s latticework
of surface harmonics, frozen water music. His impressive, impromptu
art brute. Discomposes, breaks us up.
Note
Nordkappbukta is the bay off Chermside Island’s north cape.
The author declares that they have no competing interests.
Drift
Felicia LeRoy
Drift is a way of looking at fluid motion where the observer follows an individual fluid parcel as it moves through space and time. Plotting the position of an individual parcel through time gives the pathline of the parcel. This nonlinear phenomenon can be visualized to show the spacial relationships between fluid bodies: human, glacial, and the sea. The segment depicted measures the outflow of the Monaco glacier, a vast wall of ice that you can hear groaning and cracking as it slowly slides into the sea. Since 1999 this glacier has receded over 2200 meters.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/1111203908
Datalog; Svalbard & Jan Mayan, NO, Datalog Readout, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Deployed buoy, 2022.
This Datalog readout shows mapping of drift pattern near glaciers and in the fjords surrounding Svalbard & Jan Mayen, NO. The data was captured in 2022 with an Arduino device equipped with an altimeter, accelerometer, and GPS. The device was deployed on a hand build drifter buoy, modeled after NOAA Global Drifter Array buoys and the LDL (Lagrangian Drifter Laboratory) buoys, and collected data on drift patterns near glaciers and in the fjords surrounding Svalbard & Jan Mayen, NO. The data was captured in areas where there is a gap in drifter data specifically around tide-water glaciers deep within fjords as well as in the open ocean along the NW and N coasts of Svalbard and inside the Arctic Circle. Copyright Felicia LeRoy 2022. Reproduced with the kind permission of the author(s)
The author declares they have no competing interests.