Creative Capital

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For more than ten years, Jane Marsching has explored spectacular, mythical narratives taken from everyday life—for instance, purported sightings of the Virgin Mary in mundane settings. Her Creative Capital project, Arctic Listening Post, is a multi-layered piece that centers on the cultural history of the Arctic, the region’s increasing climate changes, and how the area is portrayed in popular media. The project includes a series of works released over a span of three years, to be fully completed by 2008.

Marsching was in part inspired by Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986), a non-fictional account of the author’s fifteen trips to the Arctic. Like Lopez, Marsching examines the Arctic’s beauty and vibrancy. She mixes and matches scientific data, cultural archives, and Web-based communication to build a complex, collective portrait of the Arctic.

The seed for Arctic Listening Post was planted in early 2005 when Marsching stumbled upon an Arctic webcam operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Later, she solicited scientists for information via email, connecting with Matthew Nolan, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who shared his data and research with her, ensuring the project’s factual accuracy.

A key component of Arctic Listening Post is the participatory website, Climate Commons (http://www.climate-commons.net), online November 27, 2006 through March 11, 2007. Thereafter, it will be archived and available as a resource. Marsching describes the site as “a networked conversation . . . similar to a group blog.” Online, readers/participants collectively discuss, via uploaded posts, global ecological issues. Marsching invited 12 core conversationalists from various fields, ranging from scientists to journalists, to post information on their research, though anyone who accesses the site can read the posts and respond to them. Marsching designed the site to feature a hexagonal on-screen conversation model, with visual “cells” representing related discussion topics, so readers can easily find and select relevant threads.

In December 2006, Marsching unveiled Climate Commons Lounge, a physical site where viewers could experience the online conversation—and engage in physical discussions—at Boston’s new Institute of Contemporary Art. Climate Commons Lounge was an inviting installation featuring furniture that was “upcycled” (re-used but not compromised) from discarded materials at the ICA’s construction site, which Marching gathered from dumpsters at the ICA construction site between March and July 2006—a wry but focused way of drawing attention to issues of sustainability.

Marsching is also working on a series of large-format color prints of virtual landscapes created using three-dimensional digital-rendering software. The imagined environments use digital elevation models from real glaciers from around the world, gathered from glaciologists studying the dynamic response of glaciers’ mass balance to climate factors. She’s also inspired by historical narratives of 19th-century Arctic explorers who staged dramatic performances—a distraction from the loneliness and isolation of the region.

As her final work in the series, Marsching plans to create installations of ephemeral, fantastical objects, such as a pin-balloon home or a kite boat, and staging performances in the Arctic. These will be based on imagery of futuristic habitats drawn by science fiction illustrators, modified to realistic parameters by climatologists and professional architects. Marsching will use some of her Creative Capital funds to create sculptures based on these designs, place them near scientific research stations, and then begin to conduct performances at the structures in 2007. She anticipates that the piece will take numerous forms including video, digital prints, and online works.

As of-the-moment as Marsching’s project may appear, the artist links her subject matter and visual themes to earlier artistic traditions inspired by a fascination with the environment—namely, 19th-century painters such as J. M. W. Turner and Caspar Friedrich, and their notion of an extreme, powerful nature that was both gorgeous and destructive, which they described as “the sublime.” Marsching applies this poetic, romantic sensibility to the Arctic, using a compelling mix of technologies and techniques to create a portrait of one of the remote areas of the world that spans past and present.

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