The completed artwork will capture a full impression of the landscape, sky and natural sounds of the Arctic and Antarctica, and will re-present the images and audio inside an immersive installation in a museum setting.
Implementing a state-of-the-art equipment system comprised of high-definition 360-degree video cameras, scientific light and environmental sensors, along with audio recording instruments, Blumenfeld will travel with her field team to the Arctic and Antarctica for 30 days of continuous recording in each location. The camera system will document representational images of the environment in real-time motion. The panel of scientific light and environmental sensors will acquire the color and intensity of natural light as it changes slowly throughout the day and night, as well as log the temperature, wind speed, humidity, seismic activity, among other variables. The audio sampling equipment will record the natural sound incidents of wind and wildlife, the sound of the ice itself, and the sounds from the auroras. The objective is to record continuously during the region’s 30-day period of greatest seasonal transition: the equinoxes, which are the sun’s yearly dawn or dusk at the Poles.
Walking into the first exhibition space, viewers encounter the 360-degree vivid moving images of the Arctic and Antarctica. The vast sky is filled with floating clouds, furious snow and windstorms, auroras, bright stars and constellations – the unique combination of meteorological and astronomical events that will have occurred during The Polar Project’s time in the field. Viewers are engulfed by the natural beauty of the changing light and moving sky. The natural sounds of the polar environment— the rushing wind and shifting ice, the call of a distant bird, or the crashing of a disintegrating iceberg—surround them from all sides as they stand inside the installation.
The adjacent exhibition space, devoted to a more abstract expression of the polar phenomena, has its walls filled with projected recordings from the light-sensors. Viewers experience, in complete silence, the subtle shifting of the intensity and color of polar light as it gradually changes, minute by minute. The walls are saturated with abstract luminous pulsing and undulating color. Together, the two spaces become a sanctuary for the mutable and magnificent nature of the environment in the Arctic and Antarctica.
The two types of imaging, camera and sensor, are exhibited in tandem to show complementary expressions. While the one space is displaying the high-definition footage of the sky and environment of Antarctica, the other space is displaying the glowing images of light from the Arctic. When that 30-day projection set comes to end, it immediately switches to the inverse: the Antarctica space plays the glowing images of light recorded in Antarctica, and the Arctic space plays the high-definition footage of the sky and environment from the Arctic. As such, the two spaces act conceptually as polar opposites—of north and south, of dawn and dusk, of sound and silence, of representation and abstraction.
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