In the spring of 2016, a group of young, Native activists began protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Their decision to protect their local waters set off one of the most impactful protests in recent history. I don’t know where you were during that time, but for me, as a college freshman, I was deeply inspired by their actions and compelled to learn more about their cause. Years later, while teaching at Vanderbilt, I showed the documentary about the protests, Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock, to my students, who I could tell were also moved by the fearlessness of this movement. As this episode brings to light, the fight for water is just as prescient now as it was in 2016, and it continues to be courageously led by Native activists, artists, writers, and thinkers. I hope that as you listen to this episode (our final episode of Season 1), you might also be inspired by their words, and find ways to get involved with the worldwide effort to protect water.

Maren

Please rejoin us for ten new episodes of Art of Interference in April 2024.

Today’s episode is special to me for two reasons: first, because it focuses on sound art, and second, because it features a conversation with one of my favorite people, Micaiah Johnson. As I planned this episode, I was thinking about a lot of intersecting factors: data science, science fiction, rain and drought. Episode 9 of Art of Interference ties these together by pairing Johnson, an award-winning science fiction novelist, with sound artist Jamie Perera, whose Anthropocene in C Major and Sonification tackle interconnected issues of climate, death, and grief. Jamie’s work asks us to consider the way we carry grief with us through our everyday lives: how we hold the tragedies of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic within our bodies as we go about our days. Or perhaps “consider” is the wrong word — rather than asking us to think deeply, Jamie’s work prompts us, first and foremost, to feel. It transforms data into an emotional experience.

As a weather event, rain can be contemplative, even meditative. It can evoke cherished, cozy memories even as it might also excite fear and anxiety — about flash floods, downed trees and power lines, overwhelmed stormwater management systems. This episode attempts to reckon with the strange simultaneity of those emotions, with the comfort and the chaos of rain in the age of the anthropocene. I hope you enjoy it.

Tori

I’ll always remember the first time I heard George Duffy talk about snow. We were out for a beer with colleagues—back when George was still a Ph.D. student in Vanderbilt’s Earth and Environmental Science department—and I asked him about his research. George lit up while talking about his work. Not only is he incredibly articulate on the subject, but he was able to explain complex scientific processes in vivid and imagistic terms that made his love for snow absolutely infectious. The English lit scholars in the group sat in rapt silence as we listened to George narrate the complex atmospheric processes that result in snow—something many of us take for granted each winter but perhaps shouldn’t in the face of an increasingly warming climate. When it came time to work on this episode, I knew that George had to be a part of it.

I felt similarly transported upon discovering Simon Beck’s breathtaking snow art, as featured in episode 8 of Art of Interference. While brainstorming for this episode, Tori suggested we all watch the “Snowfall” episode of HBO’s A World of Calm series for inspiration. And while I may have been initially hooked by Cillian Murphy’s hypnotic narration, I was further drawn in by the segment that featured Beck’s impressive drawings. I had the pleasure of connecting with Beck over Zoom back in November to discuss his process, hopes, and fears as the world’s pre-eminent snow artist. He was holed up in his apartment in the French alps, patiently waiting for the main season to begin and his beloved snow to arrive. It was clear after talking to Beck for a little over an hour just how committed he is to this work—which really amounts to something like a life practice—and to bringing public attention to the beauty of snow, mountains, and winter.

Beck’s artworks are stunning, to be sure, but they are so in part for the attention they bring to the marvel of snow itself. As George reminds us in this episode, “Snow can be a work of art that doesn’t even involve human hands.” I’ve never been more excited for winter in August. We hope you enjoy the episode. Please share your favorite snow memories in the comments below if you feel so inspired.

Jen

While the seventh episode of Art of Interference on “Ice” (S1E7) focuses on the use of the medium of ice as an archive for storing materials for future generations, ice—and glaciers in particular—are also being engaged as sites for mourning loss as an ongoing feature of a warming planet. Since 2019, funerals have been held for glaciers around the world that have or are in the process of melting due to rising global temperatures, with public ceremonies taking place in Iceland (2019), Switzerland (2019, 2021), Oregon (2020), and Mexico (2021). A glacier is considered “dead” when the ice is no longer thick enough to flow. Funerals serve as a ritual for grieving ecological loss and processing environmental guilt. Their corresponding media coverage helps to raise awareness and spur environmental action.

The first glacier funeral took place at Okjökull in Iceland in 2019. Organized by anthropologists Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer, the funeral included a hike to the dead glacier—attended by hundreds of people—as well as a ceremony with speeches, readings, and the placement of a memorial plaque at the site. The memorial is titled “A letter to the future,” which eerily echoes the name of Houston’s time capsule project. In this context, the letter is the memorial itself and the absence to which it attests. The plaque’s text, written by Icelandic author Andri Snaer Magnason, reads:

Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.
In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.
This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done.
Only you know if we did it.
August 2019
415ppm CO₂

For more on glacier death and funerals, see:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/10/glacier-grief-how-funerals-and-rituals-can-help-us-mourn-the-loss-of-nature-aoe

https://www.notokmovie.com/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2019/08/19/iceland-commemorates-dead-glacier-with-ceremony-and-letter-to-the-future/?sh=6f9b1999131b

We recorded our interviews for episode 6: “Oceans” across vast stretches of water (and land). Our conversation with Juliana Snapper and Andrew Infanti was literally all over the place. Juliana was in Izimir (Turkey), Andrew in Paris, my cohost Joy Calico in Nashville, and I was in Montevideo (Uruguay), looking down on the muddy waters of the Rio de la Plata. And when we talked to Melody Jue, we brought Santa Barbara into the mix as well. Both conversations lasted for quite some time, but by their respective ends both Joy and I felt they could have gone on for much longer because we so much enjoyed talking with our interlocutors!

The Rio de la Plata is an odd body of water. From our apartment window, it looked as if it was an ocean, expanding all the way to the horizon line. A string of great town beaches curve around the shape of Montevideo. Local people use them as if they were the most pristine ocean beaches you could imagine, despite the water’s rather uninviting color and the absence of anything that could really be called a wave. During my three-week stay in Montevideo, I really learned to love the city’s waterfront: the sight of thousands of people strolling down the so-called Rambla every night to wind down after a busy day; kids playing soccer in the sand at the edge of the water; the big sky above the water. The options for swimming, let alone diving, were rather limited. So, there was no way to experience the kind of buoyancy Melody describes in this episode as a crucial element of the life aquatic, of transcending he demands of gravity and bi-pedal terrestrialism. And trying to sing under water, like Juliana, trying to push the body’s and voice’s limits to their extreme, didn’t really appear wise either.

And yet, even though neither Juliana and Andrew, nor Melody had the Rio de la Plata in mind when thinking about what oceans can do for us—and what we have done to the planet’s oceans—the image of the river’s oceanic width and drama will remain edged into my memory when recalling the making of this particular episode.

Lutz

I first encountered Carolina Caycedo’s work–which is at the center of episode 5–while doing some research for my Master’s thesis, which focused on the aesthetics of water reclamation in the western United States. Caycedo’s work struck and inspired me from the moment I saw it. At that point in my research, it sometimes didn’t feel like anyone cared about rivers and the destructive effects of damming on them. But Caycedo is someone who has dedicated her art practice to the subject, and in turn, the work she creates is tender and personal, yet vibrantly political, courageous, and defiant. I am continually inspired by her art, but I was equally compelled by the conversations I had with experts about her art—Lisa Blackmore is a brilliant scholar who, like Caycedo, leans into interdisciplinary environmental work, while Carla Acevedo-Yates curates Caycedo’s work with extreme care and expertise. And my discussion with geomorphologist Frank Magilligan about the current and future practices of damming brings even more insight to our understandings of rivers and how we might envision a potential, hopeful future without dams.

Maren

The Columbia River near Bonneville Dam

Carsten Nicolai’s work as a sound artist, composer, musician, and installation artist has fascinated me for many years. I visited one of his quite experimental perfomances in his native city of Chemnitz, Germany, in fall 2016, and I have written a bit about his installation tele of 2018 in my book on Resonant Matter. So, I was really grateful for us to feature some of his past and more recent pieces on sound waves and interference patterns in the fourth episode of our podcast . . . and do something the whole team at first thought was rather bold and adventurous, perhaps even impossible: juxtapose Nicolai’s experiments with sound waves with Karin Ingersoll’s thinking about surfing and the cosmology of floating with the waves of the Pacific Ocean.

At some point in this episode we discuss Peter Richards’s wave organs in San Francisco. We had just finished our production of this episode when we learned this: Richards’s wave organ is partially made up of repurposed tombstones from the graves of miners and immigrants, which were relocated to free up real estate in the city in the first half of the twentieth century. Emma and I had a lot of fun discussing the gurgling sounds of Richards’s organ when recording this episode. I am not sure, however, where this additional information would have taken us. Let us know if you have any thoughts about this.

Here are two pictures I took a few months ago while traveling along the Patagonian Fjords in Chile. The waves aren’t big enough to surf them; the water is also pretty cold. But when looking at these images now, I wonder about the sounds these interfering waves and ripples would produce if you fed their visual appearance–their wave form–into some kind of audio generator. I suspect both Nicolai, Ingersoll, and Richards would have something intriguing to say about how to listen to waves with our eyes and to attend to sounds beyond the threshold of the audible. . .

Lutz

Artist Eve Mosher shares her work High Water Line, a public performance in which a blue chalk line indicates future flood and storm surge vulnerabilities. The project began in New York City in 2007 and has grown to encompass related and inspired pieces around the globe. These high-water lines pay no heed to our senses of place, running through main streets, public parks, neighborhoods, and empty plains alike.

Mosher’s invitation to meditate on the real and increasing dangers of flooding point us to examine the innovative methods scientists, researchers, Dutch neighbors, and others are leveraging to prepare for a watery future. 

The flood myth is significant in many global cultures and tellings of history. In this episode, we present some flood facts that we hope can be significant in the story we are writing together through creative responses to climate change.

Tori and Emma

I am so excited announce the release of Art of Interference’s second episode, which focuses on the strange and enchanting phenomenon of fog. For this episode, I traveled to Munich, Germany to experience Fujiko Nakaya’s enchanting fog sculptures at the Haus der Kunst, which we study throughout the episode. Seeing Nakaya’s sculptures in person was truly mesmerizing, and one of the most interesting art exhibitions I have ever been to. 

In addition to hearing about Nakaya and fog, we also hear from Tori and Emma about some of fog’s cultural implications—how it might represent the weaponization of air in the twentieth century. Exploring the multifaceted nature of fog, we hope to gain a better understanding of how to live in a world affected by climate change. In this episode, we also offer some thoughts about the ancient theory of the elements–water, air, earth, and fire–that inspires our podcast and our perspectives on art and climate change.

Like fog itself, Nakaya’s sculptures are inherently ephemeral, evolving, and mysterious pieces of art. They transform space and help us to see the world in new ways—and we hope this episode can do the same.  

Maren Loveland

This is a short film I recorded in Munich, showing a surfer on the Eisbachwelle right next to the Haus der Kunst. We discuss this in this episode of Art of Interference:

We—Jen Gutman, Tori Hoover, Maren Loveland, Emma Reimers, and Lutz Koepnick—have been collaborating over the past year to bring you stories and interviews with artists and scientists about climate change and what contemporary art can do to address this most pressing issue of our time.

Our first season focuses on Water in all its various forms. From dew to snow, we will journey through the changing manifestations of this element over ten episodes (released roughly every other week) and hear inspiring insights from inspiring artists, activists, and scholars around the globe.

We hope you enjoy this first episode and spread the word!

Your AoI Team