Heart of a Glacier investigates how environmental change exceeds the perceptual, linguistic, and institutional frameworks through which it is typically understood, revealing the limits of human sensing within rapidly transforming ecological systems.
Rather than approaching climate change as a singular event or symbolic crisis, the work attends to slow, cumulative transformations that unfold beneath thresholds of immediate recognition. These shifts are not framed as emotional experiences to be interpreted, but as material processes that register unevenly and often belatedly within human perception. The installation treats perception itself as unstable, partial, and structurally misaligned with the temporal scales of environmental change.
Drawing on techno-scientific analysis and perceptual experimentation, the project foregrounds the glacier as a material system operating across spatial and temporal regimes incompatible with human experience. Understanding is not produced through narrative, empathy, or identification. Instead, the listener is confronted with an environmental presence that remains largely indifferent to observation, interpretation, or response.
Video and sound recordings captured 30 metres beneath the surface of the receding Morteratsch Glacier form the core material of the installation. These recordings generate a slow-evolving sonic environment structured by glacial acoustics and internal dynamics. The glacier is approached not as an object to be represented, but as a temporal system that organises sound, duration, and attention according to logics external to the human.
Spatial Audio Residency
During a twelve-month spatial audio residency with Amoenus, the work was developed into a 20-channel installation. The spatialisation incorporates impulse responses recorded within glacier caves on Svalbard by a research team led by Pawel Malecki at AGH University of Science and Technology. These acoustic traces extend the work’s concern with deep time, material resonance, and the translation of fragile environments into perceptual experience. For more information about the reverb recordings, please click here.
Awards
2023 MUSE Digital Art Award – Finalist
2022 LOM Audio LOM+you programme
Past Shows:
2023 Fragile Ecologies, London School of Economics / TBA21 Academy
2023 The Energy for Tomorrow, Fabbrica del Vapore (Milan, IT)
2023 CRiSAP Polyphonic, The Crypt Gallery (London, UK)
Short video, running time 01:38
leonard maassen 