Glacier trilogy Part 1 -  Re-imagining glaciers through AI (excerpt 1)
Channel: Studio Theresa Schubert
Date: 2022-07-08

Excerpt of screening video.

The "Glacier Trilogy" was developed within the STARTS4WATER programme funded by the European commission and as part of a residency at Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto.

During my residency, I decided to focus on glaciers as starting points of fluvial systems. They hold an extreme importance not only as storages of water but also as a ‘memory’ of our earths past and indicators of climate change. In the ice embedded is information about climate from thousands years ago, radiation, pollution, organic materials – and a lot of it will melt away with climate change at hand. In my three works, I am looking at glaciers from a different perspective with various media technologies in order to stimulate an emotional engagement of the audience with these topics. 

1. Re-imagining glaciers through AI (synthetic archive of glaciers)

This work is a video projection made by using a combination of 3 machine learning models (StyleGAN, VQGAN+CLIP) that shows the formation of synthetic glaciers. Starting from abstract imagery, slowly mountain landscapes with glaciers start to emerge. They are based on an earlier training process with historical images of the Italian Glaciological Committee in Turin and the Sella Foundation in Biella in combination with text input from the Italian geologist Arduito Desio. The machine learning can assign shapes to the meaning of words. What emerges are synthetic landscapes that don't exist, a kind of machine dream from the future that tries to imagine what glaciers looked like in former times.

Artwork by Theresa Schubert. 
AI support by Moises Horta Valenzuela.
Voice & singing by Joseph Schnurr.