Radiant Arc clones ancient ice-core samples taken from North American glaciers rapidly disappearing due to global climate change.
Radiant Arc
Proposed for the University of Alaska Museum of the North and the 2014 Arctic Winter Games, Radiant Arc is an unrealized interactive environmental art installation designed to clone ancient ice-core samples taken from North American glaciers rapidly disappearing due to global climate change. Like freeze frames captured from an ancient time-lapse movie, Radiant Arc's, large, brilliantly colored ice crystals form a massive 360' long luminous arc along the museum's exterior facade, creating a kind of poetic time machine constructed entirely of fragile moments from Earth's prehistoric past.
Using ultra-pure water, and modified nano-engineering techniques developed for use in semiconductor and solar cell manufacturing, 420 thin-section ice crystals are nucleated and grown (cloned) from ancient glacier samples. In ultra-pure water absolutely "all" impurities are removed. As a consequence, the effective freezing temperature drops from 0 °C to -41 °C. Above that temperature, ultra-pure water cannot freeze, it does not know how. By strictly controlling its environment it can be held unfrozen at sub-freezing temperatures in a state of suspended animation - indefinitely. However, by "doping" ultra-pure, ultra-cold water with a tiny fragment of ancient ice, the unfrozen water will lock on to the glacial sample and use its prehistoric pattern like a blueprint to freeze from. This remarkable process instantly creates a macroscopic copy of the original glacier fragment, sculpting new art from ancient ice.
Reminiscent of rainbow holograms, each cloned ice crystal grown for Radiant Arc will produce brilliant and constantly shifting three-dimensional patterns of color. The colors are generated by the behavior of the decreased speed of polarized light in ice specific to the elastic stress in its crystal lattice. In ice each wavelength (color) of light slows to a fractionally different speed, signaling the precise amount of energy expended aligning its atomic structure to match that of the ancient glacial sample.
Challenging the notion that ice is static, visitors notice the tiniest movement around Radiant Arc's ice crystals translates into infinitely changing patterns of color and light, reinforcing that no single point in space or time in the exhibition is the same. Each cell used to grow the ice crystals are manufactured from special material created for ultra-low temperature work. The optical properties of the cells insure zero distortion of the crystals colors, and the near perfect surface provides no other mechanism for the water to lock on to and freeze from. With the temperature and purity of water tightly controlled, a sterile instrument is used to dope the cells with tiny glacier samples. Once doped, freezing is instantaneous, and the tiny sound of popping can occur as the water shifts from liquid to solid in a flash.
While technological in its reconstruction of nature, the artwork is neither a scientific demonstration, data visualization, nor a traditionally crafted artistic object or image. Instead, it is a new kind of art. Art that harnesses powerful laws of nature at the systems-level, providing the artwork the ability to dynamically create itself and a moment from time long past. As a physical experience — or as one visits virtually from other global museum locations using a tablet based application that provide a life-size interactive "3D window" on the exhibit — visitors immediately sense the project is far more than a scintillating field of prismatic colored ice, they intuitively understand it is a kind of time machine -- and that Radiant Arc is not simply millions of years "old", its equally millions of years "ago".