c r y o k i n e t i c a

[kryos, meaning “icy cold” or “frost”]
[kinesis, meaning “movement,” often used to denote systems or studies involving motion]

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Cryokinetica explores how immersive technologies such as VR, AR, photogrammetry and 4D sculpture can provide new opportunities for the collective expression of living in a changing climate.

Immersive technologies enhance the qualitative possibilities for communication around environmental changes by facilitating new media interfaces for our affective and emotional interactions with environmental forms.

This occurs through i) advanced gathering practices (multimedia documentation of rarely accessible places and elements beyond the human physical senses), ii) textural extraction (audio-visual computational processing) and iii) immersive transportational experiences (spatio-audio-visual technologies) .

These technologies diversify and deepen the ways we can collectively share, process and document experiences of climate change by opening new spatio-temporal scales of enquiry and semantic inscription.

Cryokinetica seeks new possibilities for collective ritual through the AR-guided recording and communication of glacier forms, and the communal creation of a multi-sensory message capsule for future generations.

audio recording – morteratsch

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At the core of the human survival instinct is the drive to align with the physical tendencies of the environment. Cryokinetica seeks to explicitize this notion by harmonising artistic action with environmental currents.

Through an externalized gesture of surrender (placing the time capsule sculpture into the ice) the project develops a sense of geokinetic alignment in which the time capsule will remain at the mercy of the ice movement for as long as the ice exists, sculpted by the pressure and erosive force of geomechanical process. In the future, it will re-emerge, materially and politically transformed.

We now engage in a ritual to record an intention and message to our future selves. We make into flesh our accountability for species action through more-than-human ritual. We embody our uncertainty about the future beyond the proximal human body, affirming our intertwinement and synchronization with the Planet.

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By registering emotive reactions to shifting environmental envelopes, Cryokinetica prompts us to consider a renewed sense of environmental animism for the 21^st century.

Questioning the Western worldview drained of animistic relationality by the totalizing prioritization of rationalism, the project imagines a reconnection with the sense of living vibrancy and co-creativity of the environment; a sense of consciousness distributed across and between the material forms of the bio- and geological beings of the Earth, by which we humans are enmeshed and co-constituted.

Beyond the resultant considerations for conceptual framing, Cryokinetica seeks to develop a material sense of more-than-human animism across the artistic and technical processes involved in creating immersive audio-visual art, affirming co-creative practices of documentation and a somatic politics of non-alignment and adaptive fluidity.

Further reading

Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (Fuller, 2019)

Elemental infrastructures for atmospheric media: On stratospheric variations, value and the commons (McCormack, 2016)

When Gods Drown in Plastic: Vietnamese Whale Worship, Environmental Crises, and the Problem of Animism (Rots & Rots, 2023)

The Revival of Animism in the 21st Century (von Stuckrad, 2022)