PANGAIA SUPPORTS ANTARCTIC PAVILION WITH “COLD FLUX” BY BEN CULLEN WILLIAMS AT THE LONDON DESIGN BIENNALE
PANGAIA is pleased to announce its support of a new work Cold Flux at the Antarctic Pavilion by artist Ben Cullen Williams, due to be unveiled at the London Design Biennale. Cold Flux highlights the peril of our ice caps with an almost breathing film of the Larsen-B iceshelf. While Ben Cullen Williams was on an expedition to Antarctica with polar explorer Robert Swan, he filmed the Larsen-B Ice shelf that splintered off from the Antarctic peninsula in 2002 and has been disintegrating since.
Cold Flux is a three-channel AI generated video installation created from this footage. In collaboration with creative technologist Bryce Cronkite-Ratclif, the footage was used to train machine learning algorithms to generate the video landscapes which seemingly exist visually within a state of melting and freezing, forming and un-forming.
The resulting video is strange and uncanny, a familiar yet distant landscape, a prediction or a recording with echoes of the sublime. Cut into this video landscape is AI generated video of the surface of the sun; synthetic and uncertain.
Cold Flux presents to us the new digital materiality that is starting to exist alongside our own, while exploring its relationship to the natural. Accompanying the video is a haunting audio track by musician Gaika. The track is delicate, yet strong, digital but also human. This is paired with slow tracking visuals that show the sides of the icebergs, while the vast blocks of ice also move within the shots themselves.
The imagery moves from the recognizable to the indistinguishable, flowing and morphing within the steady frame. The camera looking at the sun is static, with the sun continually rotating within the frame, something seemingly impossible. The work maps the complex network between technology, environmental change and our understanding of the world.
Cold Flux questions whether the melt of our ice caps is reversible while serving as a stark reminder that action must be taken to halt the decline of our planet.
Cold Flux will be presented at the Antarctic Pavilion during The London Design Biennale from June 1-27 at Somerset House. Tickets can be purchased here.
