I think calling a glacier an archive is so literal, it is really a description instead of a metaphor. But it offers a different point of view from which to ask questions – e.g., how does a glacial system 'select’ which data to preserve. I am interested in whether these questions end up giving us the same physical explanations, or whether they can add additional perspective. Is this a way of recognizing agency in physical systems?
I didn’t sleep well enough last night to go any deeper. So instead, a slight pivot to a work in progress:
Glacier are archives, and also have been/are being archived, by glaciologists, artists, writers, governments, satellites, etc. As part of Glacial Hauntologies, and following from previous work, I have been interested in how images can be distorted to represent climate crisis impacts, how they themselves distort a view of a glacial landscape, and how photograph is kind of "foiled” by the white uniformity of the Antarctic landscape. Some experiments this week led to images like these:
I downloaded all Antarctic Single Frame imagery from USGS' Earth Explorer. Briefly,
1. Make an account on Earth Explorer.
2. On the panel on the left, below "Enter Search Criteria”, click KML/Shapefile upload.
3. Switch from KML to shapefile in the dropdown menu. Upload this shapefile file of Thwaites Glacier. This will upload an outline of Thwaites Glacier in which Earth Explorer will search.
4. Scroll down to the bottom of the panel and click on "Data Sets >>”
5. Below the blue box, click "Aerial Imagery”, then check the box next to Antarctic Single Frames. Scroll down and click "Results >>”
6. Voila, all photos from the Antarctic Single Frames archive are available for you to browse. If you want to download them, you can download them individually by clicking on the tiny harddrive, or click the brown box to add them to the Bulk Order.
I bought the Affinity Design/Photo/Publish last fall as an alternative to Adobe, because it is single purchase for a lifetime license (!!). This was my first time playing with it at length. As usually I did not read the manual or anything, I just started clicking around to try to learn how it worked. I took one of these photos and in the upper left of the screen there is a little squiggly icon that says "Liquify Persona” when you hover over it .
This brought up a the mesh/liquify tool. When you click on it, a mesh is overlaid on your photo. On the left are a bunch of options for how you can choose to warp the mesh. I got excited because I’ve been thinking about mesh’s quite a bit, especially with regards to photogrammetry and how we represent (simplify) 3D objects using them for a couple years now.
It’s a tool meant to fix distortion and perspective, but I am interested in using it to distort or add motion to an image, kind of like my old glitch work from 2018/2019. Once satisfied with the distortion, you can save your mesh and apply it to the photo. But the mesh itself is just a representation of how the computer sees the image, so the physical representation/grid disappears once you apply the mesh. I wanted to preserve that–it reveals the distortion and simultaneously creates an illusion of topography.
In order to do that, the best I could figure out was:
1. Distort an image using the liquify persona tool. Export/save the mesh and the warped photo.
2. Create grid in affinity designer that is slightly larger than the photo (e.g., extra 100 pixels wide and long). The grid is made from a series of squares, which are added by tapping the right arrow key to add rows and tapping the down arrow key to add columns. Set the stroke color and width to create the grid you want. Ensure the background is transparent and the squares are unfilled.
3. Warp the grid in Affinity Photo using the mesh saved from the image distortion as follows: (i) File ⟶ edit in affinity photo (ii) Group & rasterize. (iii) Liquify ⟶ import mesh. (iv) Apply the mesh.
4. Then import the warped photo as another layer in Affinity photo and overlay the mesh. If needed, you can also set the photo to mask the warped grid, so that it fits exactly onto the image. Export it and save!
Now I’m trying to figure out if I can record the application of the liquifying (e.g., a video of the original image being distorted). Other than recording my screen and haltingly re-winding the mesh. And eventually, I want to print these kind of large, and drape them over wire mesh. Tbd.
Cheers,
Elizabeth
this metaphor of glaciers as archives is so beautiful, i can't wait to see more writing from you about this