Voltar is a time machine where the ice that is cloned is not thousands of years "old", it is more remarkably thousands of years "ago".
Voltar
Commissioned for Emergencias, the world premiere of The European Union's 2012 Capital of Culture art exhibition hosted in Guimaraes, Portugal, Voltar is one of a series of three ice-cloning projects (Radiant Arc, Voltar, and Versonne) designed to clone fragments of ancient ice-core samples taken from Northern Hemisphere glaciers that are rapidly disappearing due to global climate change.
Voltar is unique in that it clones fragments of ice-core samples retrieved by scientists from deep within the ice sheet that originally covered Europe 20,000 years ago during the last glacial maximum. Curated by renowned bio-artist and author Dr. Marta de Menezes, the exhibition includes the work of nineteen artists from Europe, Australia and the America's, and is organized around themes of natural phenomena and living systems. Emergencias is an experimental art exhibition that synthesizes art, science and technology to develop new ideas on the future of art and exhibit powerful new discoveries occurring at the nexus of this creative triad.
Emergencias, was installed in the 50,000 square foot Sector G gallery space located inside the former industrial textile complex Fabrica ASA. The half-million square foot building was renovated and transformed beginning in 2010 by funds from the EU to make the former factory into a major international arts and culture complex that supports research, collections and exhibition in contemporary architecture, design, visual, and performing arts.
Voltar dramatically advances original research developed for the telepresence installation Alchymeia that the artist created for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. In Alchymeia naturally occurring steroids from the blood and urine of Olympic athletes were harvested to act as doping agents that seeded nucleation of extraordinarily unusual snowflakes, snowflakes whose heterodox architecture would otherwise never be found in nature. By engineering modifications into the physical structure of snow and ice - similar to those occurring in the athlete's bodies - the fierce physical and cultural competition of the Olympic Games allowed Alchymeia to amplify the uncomfortable debate surrounding notions perfect and imperfect, natural and unnatural, the sacred and profane in the emerging era of genomic research. The snowflakes in Alchymeia were unlike any that could be “found” in nature, because they were in-fact snowflakes that could only be "made".
Using ultra-pure water, and modified nanoengineering techniques employed in semiconductor manufacturing, Voltar creates a series of thin-section ice crystals, cloned and grown from ice-core samples taken at 1650m deep from the Greenland Ice Sheet at the NEEM ice coring camp located at, 77°27'N / 51°04'W. In ultra-pure water absolutely all impurities are removed. As a consequence, the effective freezing temperature of water 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 carefully "doping" ultra-pure, ultra-cold water with a tiny fragment of ancient ice, the unfrozen water locks on to the glacial sample and uses its prehistoric pattern like a blueprint to freeze from, instantly copying a primordial moment from ancient ice.
The method and effectiveness of freezing ultra-pure, ultra-cold water by doping is not like that of a snowflake created in nature, it is heavily determined by the similarity of atomic structure (or epitaxy) of the foreign substance used to nucleate freezing, and that materials specific behavior and efficiencies at precise water temperatures. The high efficiency of ice-to-near-ice nucleation in Voltar allows cloning to occur at temperatures significantly warmer than -41 °C, and in fairly predictable ways. Most importantly, Voltar allows the normative stages of freezing to be interrupted, redirected and controlled through doping, offering the ability to copy an existing crystal using an analogous method regularly exploited in the manufacturing of single-crystal materials.
In a remarkable environment for a project like this, Voltar was installed inside a portion of the new Sector G gallery that was the former water-cooled air-turbine facility of the factory. Giant turbine fans and water-cooling veins chill the air as it passes through the space creating the feeling the space itself is not fixed, that it is moving through space, or space is passing through the gallery as one view's the work. Using a specially designed upright Olitrem SA glass-door lab freezer, custom laboratory instruments and electronics, anti-cavitating fans, low-temperature LED lighting panels, and HD video equipment, Voltar's, brilliantly colored ice crystals physically speak to the impact of global climate change, creating a kind of poetic time-machine constructed paradoxically from engineered copies of moments from Earth's vanishing prehistoric past. The plastic cells used to grow and house Voltar's ice crystals are manufactured from special material formulated for ultra-low temperature work. Their optical properties insure there is little distortion of the crystal colors, and the near perfect surface provides no mechanism for the ultra-pure 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 can be nearly instantaneous, as the water shifts from liquid to solid in a flash.
At scales larger than atomic, likeness occurs everywhere in nature (trees, clouds, stars, etc.), sameness however (copies and clones of things) does not. Copying something with high fidelity and at a deep organizational level requires precise human intervention and sophisticated manipulation of nature. The freezing of a snowflake in the natural environment for example is triggered and influenced by an unpredictable combination of conditions including: temperature, contamination in the form of specific minerals, organic matter and other impurities in the air, heat dissipation, surface tension, and atmospheric water saturation levels, all of which work together to catalyze and sustain freezing. In nature no two snowflakes are alike because none ever take the same path, at the same time and under the same conditions. Each snowflake is a precise molecular recording of its creation, its unique shape a historical timeline chronicling the story of its fall.
When frozen, the glacier clones are reminiscent of rainbow holograms, with each ice crystal producing constantly changing, three-dimensional patterns of brilliant color. The colors are generated by the decreased speed of polarized light in ice specific to the elastic stress in the crystal lattice. Each wavelength (color) of light in the crystal slows to a fractionally different speed and exits at slightly different angles and locations, signaling the orientation of the crystal plane and the amount of energy expended aligning its atomic lattice to match that of the ancient glacial sample. Internet visitors to the exhibition can control a telerobtic camera to observe the crystals.
Like Alchymeia, Voltar uses the enigmatic and humble nature of water and ice to reflect on what it means to be human, yet poses very different questions to challenge the inescapable interdependence of man with nature and the environment. Applying research initially begun in Alchymeia toward radically new horizons in space and time, Voltar does not conjure what could never be found in nature, but reestablishes what dramatically once was, returning it to speak - if even for a brief moment – its voice of physical time and embodied history that is rapidly fading and will be forever lost.
Invoking the horror and salvation of medical interventions whose heroics generate scores of unintended life-threatening consequences in order to sustain a unresponsive life, or volumes of natural resources consumed at alarming rates to simply survive, knowing full well the consumption will someday be lethal, Voltar is purposefully designed to integrate constellations of volatile counterpoints. Concurrent paradoxical tensions and conflict exist in parallel offering the work an opportunity to embody spiritual, social, poetic, political, philosophical, ethical, technical, and scientific spaces all in the same resonant reflective moment. It juxtaposes an act of stupendous utopic hubris like "cloning a glacier", with the equally distopic outcome of unchecked climate change, bound up in a silent, shimmering window of light that allows us to encounter history and time that while as real as the moment we stand – exists so far outside of our everyday operational awareness that it seems imaginary.
While technological in its reconstruction of nature, Voltar is neither, scientific demonstration, data visualization, or traditionally crafted artistic object. Instead, it is a new kind of art, art that harnesses powerful laws of nature at the systems-level permitting us to engage with structures equally complex as ourselves, and providing the artwork the ability to dynamically create itself and moments from time long past. Voltar "is" a time machine -- and the ice cloned is not simply thousands of years "old", it is more remarkably thousands of years "ago".