Gliding over glaciers with Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė
Melting glaciers are perhaps the most iconic image of climate change. Glaciers, where human survival is difficult, are the habitus of polar bears, an ecosystem suited to them, as they hunt while walking on the ice. As the ice melts, bears have to go hunting farther and farther from the shore, and food becomes unattainable. Images of emaciated polar bears were broadcast on television a quarter of a century ago in an attempt to warn humankind, too preoccupied with depleting Earth’s riches. The suffering polar bear seemed to testify that, as the climate changed, comfortable human life would also come to an end. In the words of John Fiske, this was the creation of a ‘media event’, aiming to direct television ‘flows’ toward a purpose beneficial to humanity1, as only humanity as a whole could stop climate change. But at the time this only succeeded in initiating a ‘discursive struggle’2, which continues to this day. In that struggle, the image of ice becomes a symbol of threat, a beautiful abstraction, constantly recreated by light which not only glints reflecting off the surface but also illuminates the depths of translucent darkness.
Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė’s photographic project Sunless Seas of Ice – a film, exhibitions, and a book3 – also participates in this discourse. Yet when pronounced in English it chills with the recurring sound of s. And rings cold. The artist herself, in the book, emphasises aspects of ice other than those discussed here. She is concerned with the problem of ice as an information repository. Ice, preserved in the moon’s craters and tunnels that the sun never reaches, stores information about the cosmos’ past4. Likewise, the ‘old’ ice covering the Earth stores the history of our planet, studied by extracting ice cores. These studies are linked by scientists’ driving desire to know. Yet this desire is never pure, for the research requires costly infrastructure, and funding is granted in the expectation that such knowledge will discover valuable mineral deposits. Thus, the information about potential resources accumulated in glaciers is itself a resource that must be extracted. The planet and its satellite should therefore be conceived as repositories of information-as-resource. We have already become accustomed to such a discourse of Earth exploitation, yet now even the concept of the moon as a resource overshadows its poetic and mythological meanings. If once the moon was ‘the screen of our imagination’, now the glowing sphere in the clear night sky seems veiled by a projection of future wealth and colonisation.
The landscapes shown in Kinčinaitytė’s work are encoded with a contradiction between aesthetics and economics. They are essentially empty, although in some, the surface matter shimmers, magnificent mountains rise, while in others, only the taut horizon string trembles. The uninhabitable surfaces of the moon are compared to the glaciated highlands of Iceland, shaped by volcanic processes. It is also recalled that in the lava fields of this harsh Earth location, astronauts train for space flights. Yet, if it were not labelled which is which, the eye would not distinguish the images of the human planet from those of its lifeless satellite. One might even believe the artist if she attributed these landscapes to other planets, from which satellites also transmit images. The similarity is created by a shared knowledge: civilised life is impossible under such conditions. Frozen glaciers are nearly as unfit for a humanly established order as the heat-spewing chaos of the stars. What we require is the predictability of natural cycles; ice must periodically melt, then expand and thicken again – only in this way can economic cycles be planned, and only in this way can the planet maintain climate balance. Ice, therefore, is both a sign marking the boundaries of nature’s dormancy and civilisation, and an element of the ecosystem that ensures conditions necessary for living beings. The ice zones, being those of dormant nature, must be neither too vast nor too small. The necessity of maintaining balance, like walking on a tightrope – that, too, is symbolised by those cold landscape horizons.
When leafing through Kinčinaitytė’s book, the most striking effect (at least for me) is the deceptive emptiness of the landscapes. Indeed, no human traces are visible here, except for the oil extraction technology centre in Cambridge, as the author herself notes5. Yet in truth it is precisely robots constructed by humans that explore the moon or Mars, sending their images to Earth – the very images we are looking at here. We see them and imagine, creating interpretations, while the robots do not see these surfaces – similar to how satellites constantly photographing the Earth’s surface do not see the reality framed by themselves. Along with Lisa Parks, one could say that such images exhibit an ‘aesthetics of emptiness and uncertainty’ which ‘buries the subject’ by erasing any human trace and inserts something unearthly into the landscape6. Earth, as seen through this gaze, becomes in the imagination an uninhabitable cosmic entity.
Looking at these subject-negating landscapes, the plan of the powerful to invent technologies that would enable the creation of an atmosphere substitute appear absurd. Allegedly, under a dome containing a miniature atmosphere, we could grow plants, raise animals, survive on harsh planets – and gradually occupy more and more cosmic territory, colonising the Moon, then Mars, and other planets that do not instantly destroy the living body with heat. Kinčinaitytė’s film Sunless Seas of Ice (2024) evokes such impossible environments in its scenes depicting the sun’s flares of heat, when ‘particles scatter to settle elsewhere’7. Like those particles, humankind intends to disperse throughout the cosmos, turning various planets slightly earthly. Thinking in this way, the photographs of glaciers highlight a paradox: the ecosystem that formed on Earth and nurtured humanity is being damaged and abandoned in favour of finding hostile planets to be appropriated, adapted, and, in a sense, violated to become earthly – while Earth itself becomes unearthly.
So in the landscapes presented by Kinčinaitytė lies humanity’s self-contradiction, most precisely expressed by the tension between the films Harmonic Tremors (2024) and Sunless Seas of Ice. In the book, she juxtaposes images produced by two different technologies: digital, high-resolution sterile frames representing Paul Virilio’s ‘eyeless vision’, and visions of a moving, migrating, unrestrained subjective gaze captured by a Super 8 home-movie camera8. The knowledge created by an impersonal rational mind and personal memories of subjective experiences seemingly try to cover each other’s shortcomings. It visualises what a human cannot experience while on Earth, yet can imagine and envelop in myth and metaphor. But those images were created by a mind critically aware of imaginaries – one that invents ever more sensitive instruments to verify its suspicions and that is already capable of resisting Earth’s gravity, sending research devices or even researchers themselves into space. The images received from there are far removed from human experience, yet humankind speaks to the cosmic bodies: You belong to me9. As if emptiness could one day be humanised, turned into a reservoir of memory, imagination, and expectation, establishing human consciousness there.
It is no coincidence that Kinčinaitytė describes the ice lying in the moon’s craters as a time capsule safely hidden from the sun, containing ‘deep time’. Time that began with the Universe and will end with it. Inseparable from space – spacetime as the expression of the laws and processes underpinning the cosmos, theoretically capable of changing direction if the Universe were to contract instead of expand. The theory of relativity drew attention to the flexibility of time: space is no longer a territory where time traces its trajectories; ‘space and time are themselves part of the cast’, they are ‘physical things, mutable and malleable10. The ‘substance’ of time itself is malleable. Time is constantly generated by chaotic quantum leaps, now into the past, now into the future, and our sense of temporal direction depends on the observer studying those quanta, so the unpredictability infects the experience of time with a tremor of uncertainty11. These are non-human and non-terrestrial scales. The mind can explain this, derive formulas, but at the level of conscious time, all of this is an imaginary of the impossible. The glaciers representing cosmic time capsules, therefore, emphasise the estrangement of scientifically derived answers from human existence. The emptiness of the cosmic landscapes selected by Kinčinaitytė seems already to have absorbed the earthly ones filled with memory and imagination, those still within the reach of the human gaze. These are visions of the end of times – for as the glaciers melt, the information of deep time faces extinction. In the liquefied time capsules, the past once separated by ice mixes into the present; the times ‘melt into the synchrony of the present’12, and then there are no more signs, nothing left to read, and no one left to read them.
This is a compelling tension between deep planetary time, reaching in imagination toward the pre-human past and the post-human future, and human consciousness time. After all, Kinčinaitytė visualises spaces and places that existed and will exist without the human. In the future, they may still be observed by machines even after humans are gone – broadcasting ‘sightless vision’,14 the ‘orbital viewing’13 that claims territories though it is no longer possible to say who has claimed them. These are visions no longer infected by the experience of subjective time, constantly melting in consciousness, and the flickering of shifting meanings. Yes, these landscapes are magnificent, inspiringly beautiful, but meaningless, at once attracting with the impossibility of meaning and demanding meaning. Such that would connect human time with the deep time of the Universe, although that connection is prefigured by the mark of loss. These hollows, surface folds, mountains, blackness of the sky carry a message that something has already vanished or not yet emerged. Here, the infinities of the non-human cosmic past and future converge and linger on the edge of time as it is experienced – created, reworked, processed – by transient beings.
This article popularises the results of the research project Observing the Earth: The Planet as an Environment for Creation, a Vulnerable Ecosystem and an Imaginary Place in Lithuanian Contemporary Art Practices, funded by the Research Council of Lithuania (Agreement No. S-LISm-25-12).
1 John Fiske, Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, pp. 7–8.
2 Ibid. 3 Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė, Sunless Seas of Ice, Vilnius: self-published, 2024.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 98–100.
7 Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė, op. cit., pages not indicated.
8 Ibid.
9 ‘You Belong to Me’ – the title of Kinčinaitytė’s project and book published in 2016.
10 Paul Davies, About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, London: Penguin Books, 1995, p. 16.
11 Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, trans. Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, London: Allen Lane, Penguin Books, 2018, p. 122.
12 Lilian Kroth, ‘Ice Narrated from Red: the Temporality of Planetary Data Archives’, in Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė, op. cit., pages not indicated.
13 Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose, Bloomingdon, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, British Film Institute Publishing, 1994, p. 59.
14 Lisa Parks, p. 78.
