An ongoing series of video art vignettes from a rapidly changing planet; artworks exploring the Anthropocene, anthropogenic global warming in the Arctic, rising sea levels and geoengineering.
AnthropoScene I : Breakdown (4 min version, 09.2018)
The traffic just seems to be getting worse every day at Iceland's iceberg lagoon, Jökulsárlón...
Dur: 4'08" / Cinema 4K HDR video with stereo audio. Made during a residency at SÍM Iceland. EMBARGOED: PLEASE DO NOT CIRCULATE.
(Shortened 1’00” version licensed by the United Nations during 2019 for the COP24 Framework Convention on Climate Change).
Australian artist-filmmaker Adam Sébire uses dark humour to approach the climate crisis at one of Iceland’s fast-disappearing glaciers, Breiðamerkurjökull.
Its astonishing iceberg procession is reimagined here as a traffic jam of cinematic proportions.
AnthropoScene II : Tideline
The tideline on an island's black-sand beach rises ever higher.
Dur: 2'30" / HD single-channel, stereo audio.
First exhibited as a work-in-progress at the SÍM Gallery in central Reykjavík during Nov/Dec 2017.
Filmed with a drone off remote eastern Iceland, reverse motion creates an eerie sense of prolepsis; a previsional prescience of inexorably rising sea levels.
Video © 2017-2018 Adam Sébire (AU) www.adamsebire.info
Music © 2018 Martin Franke (DE/NL) www.hethoutenhuis.org
AnthropoScene III : Hellisheiði
Video triptych, 2018. 3 HD screens (or 2 plus core sample in lit vitrine), 2.1 stereo audio. Duration: 3mins.
The Climeworks/CarbFix2 project at Hellisheiði, Iceland is the world’s first industrial-scale "carbon scrubbing" experiment to capture carbon dioxide (CO₂) directly from Earth's atmosphere. This CO₂ is mixed with water and pumped through domed injection wells into the volcano below, where it becomes petrified as new rock.
Most climate change policy tacitly assumes the success of such geoengineering experiments — despite their unknown long-term costs and consequences.
BACKGROUND:
At COP21 in Paris, December 2015, the world’s leaders stated their “aspiration" to limit global warming to an upper limit of 1.5ºC this century. On the planet's present greenhouse gas emissions trajectory there is no way to achieve this without geoengineering (sometimes termed climate engineering): using technology — most of it unproven and with unknown potential side-effects — to “modify" our climate.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is arguably the most benign of these technologies. But despite being both difficult and expensive it has proven politically attractive as a “technofix”, perhaps delaying decarbonisation. Indeed all forms of climate engineering potentially come with what ethical philosophers such as Clive Hamilton identify as “moral hazards”. Many forms of geoengineering essentially propose that we "hack" the Earth's systems.
Hellisheiði in Iceland is the other-worldly site of the CarbFix2 & Climeworks projects. Since October 2017 this test site has been capturing carbon dioxide directly from the surrounding air. It mixes the CO₂ with water, injecting it via domed wells into the basalt rock formations surrounding Hengill, an active volcano, where it mineralises: anthropogenic carbon dioxide sequestered as new rock.
Australian video artist Adam Sébire is drawn to this site for its modern-day alchemy and for its Promethean overtones: an unshakeable faith in the technological mastery of Homo sapiens.
In the video triptych, one of the three screens investigates the experiments at Hellishei∂i (the injection wells of CarbFix plus Climeworks’ white cube “carbon scrubber” DAC module, a prototype for what’s expected to be thousands spread across the planet). In another, a core sample of the sequestered CO₂ — now mineralised as calcite within the basalt host rock — appears as a quasi-mystical object in a vitrine. The third screen is ambiguous: also set in Iceland, but in a future geological era where complex lifeforms have disappeared and where the planet appears to be correcting an atmospheric imbalance. Geological processes reverse. After only a few hundred thousand years, equilibrium — homeostasis — will have returned.
(This final screen may also be exhibited as a standalone vertical video, Homeostasis — see below left).
Shown as work-in-progress at SÍM Gallery Reykjavík Dec 2017
More details and a discussion about geoengineering are available in a virtual exhibition featuring the work, curated by the Rachel Carson Center, Munich, in May 2019.
Above: Stills from the CarbFix2 / Climeworks pilot project site in Iceland, 2017. © Adam Sébire
AnthropoScene IV : Adrift (∆Asea-ice) (2019)
The calculus of one’s own contribution to a warming climate.
Citizens of developed countries are increasingly aware of correlations between our lifestyles and the climate crisis: witness the phenomenon of flygskam or “flying shame”. Borrowing a groundbreaking scientific formula* the filmmaker-artist calculates and saws off the exact amount of Arctic sea-ice (15.69m²) that will be destroyed by his carbon emissions flying economy return, from Sydney to Greenland, to film it (5.23 tonnes of CO₂e).
Adrift (∆Asea-ice) visualises and mythologises the consequences of a Western way of life. It touches upon disconnects — of cause from effect; of emissions here & now from melting there & then — that underly our psychological responses to global warming. Disconnects that have perhaps kept the problem comfortably abstract for us — until now…
ABOUT THE EQUATION:
Notz & Stroeve’s equation — ΔAseaice = dFnonSW,in / dECO₂ x ΔECO₂ — states that the total area of sea-ice lost equals a constant — derived from research into energy flux at the ice edge — of 3.0 ± 0.3 square metres per metric tonne of carbon dioxide emitted, multiplied by the sum of emissions. Inserting the artist’s own 5.23 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent into the equation, this works out at 15.69 ± 1.57 m² of sea-ice that will not regenerate naturally in northwest Greenland come winter. With less sea-ice to reflect sunlight back into space the ocean absorbs more heat, contributing to even faster warming in the Arctic.
Adrift (∆Asea-ice) is a video vignette from an Arctic tipping point, bearing witness to our own contribution to climate change. Its multiple screens explore cognitive dissonance; cause & effect; human & cryological time. The soundtrack comprises æolian sounds from an empty water tank at the artist's residence at Upernavik Museum northwest Greenland that 'sings' when it is windy.
REFERENCES & INFORMATION:
* Notz, D., & Stroeve, J. (2016): Observed Arctic sea-ice loss directly follows anthropogenic CO₂ emission. Science, 354, 747–750.
** An article exploring the ideas underlying the artwork was published in Flugschriften volume IV (April 2019):
Sébire, A. (2019). Adrift: Attribution & Responsibility in a Changing Climate. Flugschriften, 4 (Dispatches from The Institute of Incoherent Geography Vol.1), 27–38. (Download the complete publication from Flugschriften else view a PDF of just this article here).
The artist floats off into Baffin Bay, Greenland atop the 15.79m² of sea ice condemned by the carbon emissions from his flight to get there. © 2019 Adam Sebire.
Filming location: 72° 55' 53.84” N 56° 3' 34.19" W (map)
With grateful thanks to Knud Kristiansen of Upernavik Commune.
The 3-screen video installation premièred at the Max Planck Institute, Hofgartenstraße 8, for Long Night of the Museums, Munich, Germany, 19 October 2019. The single-screen version premièred at Gerald Moore Gallery London, 13 February 2020.
Versions (multi-channel versions are 8’05”, single channel is 7’55”)
➤ Video triptych (3 channel) (preferred) version: 1x 4K screen; 2x ½-size HD screens, 3x Lūpa media players, stereo audio. Split-screen preview above.
➤ Video diptych (2 channel) version: 2x 4K screens, 2x media players, stereo audio. Split-screen preview below.
➤ Single Screen (1 channel) version: UHD 4K screen, stereo audio. Preview below.
Videos are embargoed/hidden and embedded here only for preview purposes.
Publicity stills are available full resolution on request.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Adam Sébire studied documentary filmmaking at Australia’s AFTRS & Cuba’s EICTV before before making films for the Australian public broadcasters SBS & ABC. Since filming on the Pacific nation of Tuvalu for Film Australia in 2003 his work has focussed on climate change, particularly sea level rise.
New work: Feeling the Heat (15 mins, 3-channel video, 2020)
Thermographic (heat sensing) video triptych exploring how climate scientists, working on the front line of a problem that's invisible to most of us, respond to it as human beings, as citizens of the planet? More →
Adam’s works have shown at film festivals including Hotdocs, Montréal World FF, Paris FF, Havana FF, Flickerfest, St Tropez FF, Sydney FF and at the United Nations in New York. Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service & Sydney Opera House have commissioned numerous works from him. His Roads to Nowhere solo exhibition was presented as part of Head On & Vivid in Sydney’s Rocks district in 2012. In 2019 AnthropoScene I: Breakdown was purchased by the UN’s climate change body (FCCC). AnthropoScene III: Hellishei∂i was exhibited at the Deutsches Museum in Munich in 2018, and AnthropoScene IV : Adrift (∆Asea-ice) at the Max Planck Institute in 2019. Adam is completing a PhD which explores the problematic spatiotemporal dimensions of climate change through multi-channel ‘video polyptychs’. → CV/Résumé (PDF).
All works ©2018-20 Adam Sébire