Antarctica
while you were sleeping
A life-size iceberg, returned to the centre of a city.
- Medium
- Architectural projection, four-channel sound
- Premiere
- Auckland War Memorial Museum, March 2017
- Projection surface
- 8,800 m²
- Audience
- ~20,000 over the run
- Music
- Rhian Sheehan
Antarctica — while you were sleeping explores the intersection between humans and nature with projections of enormous icebergs onto prominent architecture in urban areas, enabling the audience to experience the size and sound of a colossal life-size iceberg up close.
We live in an era in which human behaviour is the most dominant factor in shaping the environment, and expanded megacities are largely erasing the nature on which they are built. To highlight this we place gigantic icebergs in the centre of important urban areas, empowering people with the awe and reverence with which we should be treating our environment.
The ice was photographed and mapped over twenty days along the Antarctic Peninsula in early 2015, aboard the Australis. The bergs were named A to Z after people the crew admired — Ernest, Nelson, Ulysses, Jacques, Valentine — and it is those recordings, of a ten-thousand-year journey from snowflake to calving, that the installation is built from.
8 images · click any to view
A truly awe-inspiring installation on a grand scale that gives a real sense of the majesty of Antarctica. Visitors hear the creak and crack as sections of ice carve away — all set to a dramatic sound score. It is a powerful experience.
Nigel Watson
Executive Director, Antarctic Heritage Trust
A four-part RNZ podcast, Voice of the Iceberg, made from the same expedition, won Best Creative Feature at the 2018 New Zealand Radio Awards.