Melting Worlds: What using Arctic ice to visualize global warming says about our position in a changing world

Melting worlds

What using Arctic ice to visualize global warming says about our

position in a changing world

Matthijs van Rumpt

MA Thesis Comparative Cultural Analysis

Supervisor: Joost de Bloois

Table of contents

Introduction 3

1: The spectacle in melting 7

2. Attaching to melting ice 19

3. The melting World 32

Conclusion 44

Introduction

If you try to picture global warming, there is a good chance you think of images of big, white, melting ice sheets in the Arctic. Every once in a while, news media report about the

vanishing Arctic ice, in order to show the results of global warming. It is difficult to report on global warming; it is such a long and slow process that it is hard to capture. It expands us in such a way that it becomes hard to grasp (Nixon 6). While it is something that impacts every part of our lives, we are having troubles with sensing it, or seeing it happen. It is a form of what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’: a violence that ‘occurs gradually and out of sight’. This sort of violence is hard to sense because it is stretched out vastly through time and space (Nixon 2). It is not one identifiable act that has immediate violent results on something or someone, but a multitude of acts, with different results, over different time spans. The fact that carbon emission only already causes changes on so many levels at different and widely spread timescales, shows how hard it is for us to sense this slow violence in global warming. That is why often when we try to make sense of this, we think of a phenomenon that captures an effect of global warming in a direct, spectacular way, like the melting of ice sheets.

Through ice we are able to react to climate change. They are “the canaries in the coal mine of climate change” (Danowski & Castro 10), they alarm us for what we cannot see. In this thesis, I will ask what the usage of the phenomenon of melting ice says about the way we view ourselves as human beings in the world. What do the melting ice-narratives of climate change tell us about how we understand our human position and responsibility in a changing world? How does the melting of arctic ice enable an affective attachment for human beings to global warming? How can this phenomenon of melting ice help in acknowledging the role of the material, the nonhuman?

To answer these questions, I will discuss three different works in which ice is

represented. Through three different ways, these works present Arctic ice in places outside of the Arctic, which therefore shows how the far away ice are, as a phenomenon, considered relevant. The melting ice evokes a certain awareness of the influence we humans have on the ice and the way the ice influences us. Throughout this thesis, I will argue that ways of

thinking climate change like this are often very much about ourselves. The way ice is

represented in these objects is often focussed on the way we influence the ice through the big increase of CO2 emissions. The way ice influences us is in these objects mostly seen as a backlash, a result of our influence on the ice. It is therefore easy to think of this as simply influencing ourselves, facing the results of our own deeds. In this thesis, I will try to nuance

this perspective by focussing on the relation between humans and the ice. If we think of the materiality of ice and ourselves as constantly influencing both ways, rather than ice as a tool through which we impact ourselves, we position ourselves differently. In this thesis, I will therefore look at how the materiality of ice influences our conception of it, and how this can help in a move away from human-centeredness.

As the face for climate change, the materiality of ice is specifically interesting. Even though it is used in order to make climate change understandable, its double conditions on primary aspects express ways in which it inevitably exceeds our conception. If we think of time, ice is both a ticking time bomb for climate change as it is glacial, something that exceeds humans immensely on a temporal scale. Bubbles in the ice can show that the ice is thousands of years old, a temporality that exceeds our imagination, and at the same time there is an imaginable idea of finitude in its melting. When we think of spatial conditions, ice is on the one hand far away in the Arctic, the wilderness outside of the human world, and at the same time it is so close, a constant threat that will flood our coasts when it melts. Images of melting Arctic ice can generate a feeling of distance, hold onto the divide between the wild nature out there against the familiar culture of human life. Yet, its melting reminds us of its transformational aspect, which leads to rising sea levels, that brings the phenomenon of melting ice into familiar surroundings. These double binds are similar to how we think of climate change, something so abstract and yet so concrete. They have characteristics of what Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects. Morton uses climate change as an example of a

hyperobject, which he explains as that what is ‘massively distributed in time and space relative to humans’ (Morton 2013 1). A hyperobject is real: it can be thought and computed, but because it is so massively distributed that it is impossible for us to directly see (Morton 2013 11).

I will address the questions of how the phenomenon of melting arctic ice as a

narrative for global warming speaks about how we place ourselves in the world through three chapters. In these chapters, there will be three different forms of relations with Arctic ice in and outside of the Arctic: a video of an ice calving in Greenland, an artwork with Arctic ice in urban public spaces, and the already melted ice in a future prediction video of the rising sea-level.

In chapter one, I will focus on a scene from the documentary Chasing Ice (2012), in which there is a big ice calving shown. Images and videos of an ice calving are very often shown in relation to global warming. The big breaking ice sheets clashing in the ocean are spectacular to look at, but what does it mean when we use a spectacle as a face for global

warming? I will argue that creating this spectacle to speak about climate change, brings the viewer into the role of a spectator, which generates a feeling of distance. Even though the images can affect us through their concrete imagery, I argue it distances us from the ice because it is based on showing an event that has already taken place, in an unfamiliar place far away from what we consider life. But how wrong is this distance, and are there other ways to overcome it?

That is what is explored in chapter two, in which the focus will be on the artwork Ice Watch by artist Olafur Eliasson. I will argue that this art installation is a different attempt to visualize the slow violence it is part of, in which close and direct experiences are central. I will explore how this participatory artwork, through this ‘experiencing’ of ice, offers a different position than that of a spectator. I argue that placing the blocks of Arctic ice in Paris and Copenhagen might spectacularize the spatial and temporal aspects of melting, but in such a way that it allows for different affective attachments. These attachments towards the

formless and changing materiality of ice, show how discursive frameworks are part of the ice as a phenomenon. The ice becomes an object of desire, something which we long for and are melancholic towards, in order to deal with a strange new ecological awareness. Through holding onto the ice, as done literally in the artwork, we hope to hold onto the world that we thought we knew.

Chapter three will be centred around the politics of fear and facing ice as a threat. By looking at a video by Science Insider, called “How Earth would look if all the ice melted”, this chapter focusses on the relation between the transformational aspect of arctic ice and its role in the use of end of the world-narratives. In speaking about ice through its role in sea level rise, videos like this evoke apocalyptic thinking that then generates self-interested environmentalism. We fear that the danger in ice will cause a sudden change that will flood of our cities, and we try to stop it to save ourselves. However, if we focus on the

transformational character of ice, we can think of our role in the unpredictable future differently. It explores new ways of thinking responsibility in a world in which humans are no longer thought of as the only ones with agency.

All these different objects are common ways in which ice is seen in the light of global warming, but all objects show ice in a different way. However, what these objects have in common is that they all centre around transformation. In all the objects, the melting and breaking is central in the ice and its ‘identity’. In this transformation of form, time and space are key elements. These aspects, then again, are different in every of the objects, creating different sorts of affect. In the first artwork, ice is something alien, far away and unfamiliar.

The loud sound of cracking ice and images of chunks clashing into the water creates a very spectacular image that has almost become the showpiece of global warming. This is very different in the video of the ice calving. Here, the ice is something to hold on to, something fragile and close, in the familiar space of us human beings. The exotic object finds itself in the familiar space. Third, there is the animation in which ice is only addressed as a threat. The ice now has become invisible and all that remains are its effects. Through its

transformation to water, it has become a threat for the land and therefore for human beings. This focus on transformation will show that the usage of melting arctic ice might not help us to better understand climate change, but it could help us better understand ourselves. The way we get affected by or attached to melting arctic ice tells us about the way we deal with responsibility, self-valuation and coping with an unknown future. This thesis will not provide answers to questions about how these representations of melting ice are different from what climate change actually is. Rather, it asks what these representations say about the ways in which we position ourselves in relation to matter. It asks whether thinking about climate change and melting Arctic ice can generate a sense of ourselves as inseparable from our surroundings and in constant transformation. With a rapidly changing climate, we are forced into rethinking the world as we know it and our position in it.

1.

The spectacle in melting

There are many ways to visualize the fast decrease in Arctic ice and glaciers, but the most common one is probably this: big chunks of ice breaking from a glacier or an ice sheet into the ocean. It is a phenomenon called ‘ice calving’ and it creates a spectacular and violent image. The videos of these ice calving are often used in news media to show what global warming looks like. It is shown to visualize the urgency of discussing rapid climate chance. The shocking images show that the ice is melting now. The way we contribute to global warming is in this image becoming concrete. It allows us to ‘experience’ our role in climate change and lets us ‘face the results’. It gives climate change a face.

This reading of the ice calving-video fits well in the new era of the Anthropocene, a term coined by Paul Crutzen in 2000 which describes a geological period in which human influence is acknowledged. What happens to the ice in the unknown, far-away parts of our planet is considered as a result of human activity. We accept ourselves as a geophysical force (Chakrabarty 12), we as the human species have an impact on our surroundings. Taking our human activities together, we transform into geological forms: “everything that we used to call bedrock is beginning to be humanized – or, in any case, to bear traces of a tempestuously remodelled humanity” (Latour 304). While this idea of the human as a geophysical force is purely nonontological, a force through collective existence (Chakrabarty 13),

Anthropocentric media often addresses our individual agency. A video of an ice calving is therefore a typical form of an Anthropocentric image, which main purpose is “to raise

awareness of the “human activities” that have disrupted the earth’s natural systems in our era of climate change” (Demos 19).

This is what the documentary Chasing Ice touches upon. This documentary follows a photographer for National Geographic, named James Balog. Balog works on a project in the Arctic called EIS (Extreme Ice Survey). For this project, he installed cameras on timers that captured the decreasing of glaciers through time-lapse photography. He realised that the melting of ice went fast and therefore he asked his employees to camp at a glacier to capture a glacier calving in real time. They recorded a 75-minute calving of the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland, making it the ‘largest iceberg break-up ever filmed’ (Carrington). In the

documentary, this is partly shown in a scene of about four minutes. This short scene has since then become one of the most famous ice calving captures.

By using the calving scene from the documentary as the object here, this chapter will focus on the idea of visualising global warming through the documentation of melting ice. The film focusses on the actions of ice that happen far away, outside of our knowledge, and tries to make it visible. It stresses the idea of making visible what is happening at that moment, while we are not present. The filmmakers waited and camped at a glacier just as long until the ice would break, so that they could capture what was going on in front of them. The ice calving-video, partly shown in Chasing Ice, is the result, showing the breaking of a piece of a glacier in 75 minutes. This chapter will focus on ice calving-videos like this one as a representation of a hyperobject. What does the fact that ice calving is used as a symbol for global warming mean for our conception of this immensely big phenomenon? What is the impact of this idea that every time you see a video of big sheets of ice cracking and clashing into water you think of this bigger picture? What is there in these images that make it so applicable as a representation of this hyperobject?

Inside the hyperobject

As discussed in the introduction, global warming is something that is impossible to

understand for human beings. Because it is a hyperobject, it exceeds our conception of what an object is. They are ‘things that are massively distributed through time and space relative to humans’ (Morton 2013 10). Essential to the idea of an hyperobjects for Morton is that ‘they are not just collections, systems or assemblages of other objects. They are objects in their own right’ (11). With this definition Morton supports the theory of object-oriented ontology (OOO). In that idea, a hyperobject can stand and act totally on its own.

Why the idea of a hyperobject is of importance in talking about images of ice calving, is because these videos are an attempt to visualize the hyperobject of global warming. It shows the intense position we are in. We are in the middle of global warming, so we have to deal with it. Even though we could never grasp it, even though every form of handling it will be full of gaps. The ice calving is the alarm bell that makes us aware of this, without giving answers.

Morton gives five aspects of a hyperobject: it is viscous, nonlocal, interobjective, phased and temporarily undulated. A hyperobject is viscous, it is tied to us as we are tied to it (32). The more we know of the hyperobject, the more entangled with it we realize we are.

(Morton 28). It is not a matter of ‘entering’ a hyperobject, but realizing that you are already inside it (32). A hyperobject is also nonlocal. In this video of calving ice, it is not global warming that can be seen. We can never see global warming itself, only its aesthetic effects. The hyperobject of global warming is so vastly distributed through space, that it is impossible for us to understand the gigantic scale of it. Accepting this means that not only everything is interconnected, but also that acting reactionary is impossible (Morton 43).

This is related to another aspect, interobjectivity. With this, Morton stresses the idea that hyperobjects are not objects as we know it, ‘it floats among objects’ (69). Another reason why we can only see pieces of hyperobjects at a time is that they are phased. They occupy a high-dimensional phase that makes them impossible to see as a whole on a regular three-dimensional human-scale basis. (60). The video from Chasing Ice shows this. They captured a real calving even, the event has been documented and research turns out that the glacier is indeed melting a lot faster than before. Following Morton, this is only a snapshot of the very complex plot of the hyperobject that is working in this high-dimensional phase (60).

This phasing is also related to the fact that hyperobjects are temporally undulated. The timescale of a hyperobject exceeds the minds of humans. Global warming is not simply a linear story with a beginning and an end. That is what makes it so odd. “Because we can’t see to the end of them, hyperobjects are necessarily uncanny” (49). We know how melting of ice works, but this is a strange form of melting. This melting is not just that natural process in the Arctic that we can fit into our seasons. It does not fit into our theoretical models anymore and has unpredictable results. Global warming in that sense is supernatural, it is more than we can ever fully learn about and yet we have to deal with it right now (59). A hyperobject is not infinite, that would be easier to think of. Instead, it offers a very large finitude, which makes it is concrete enough to see its unimaginable aspect (53). It is a future future: “a time that is beyond predictability, timing or any ethical and political calculation” (67).

This temporal problem is especially interesting in ice representing global warming, for ice is temporally stretched as well. Ice can carry bubbles with air from thousands of years ago. By creating deep holes into the ice and cutting out cores, the ice can capture its

processes up until around 800.000 years back. The ice and trapped gases hold information about a time that outgrows us immensely, exposing the structure of an ice sheet or glacier, the rate of growth or decline, the mean surface temperature and air temperature at that time (Antonello 182). More than this showing how such a long period of time can be archived in ice, this shows how the ice is a very strange temporal relation with human beings. There is a need to try and fit this immense history into a human conception of time, because we cannot

think of this giant leap of time. Reading an ice core as an archive is an example of this processing of the temporal dimension of ice (Antonello 185).

Ice in that sense is in itself a hyperobject too. The example of ice cores make clear how viscous it is: the more we learn of ice, the more we realize we do not and will not know. It is in our conception ever-changing, but always there. Ice does not have a simple beginning or an end. If you think of ice, you can think of the ice sheets and glaciers, but these are the aesthetic results of the process of ice. Also, ice in this video is a very abstract matter. Its shapes are unclear and always different, they rise up from below the water and the sounds they make are dystopian and alienating. There are big surfaces turning upside down and the scale of them is hard to depict. It is all this strange white and grey landscape that can be of any size. We lack a point of reference to make sense of it. The calving has something otherworldly. The image of ice calving is very much about the idea of Nature, an immense force that is outside of us. This is confirmed clearly when in the scene one of the narrators tries to describe the size of it. He says, “imagine Manhattan and all of a sudden all those buildings fall off” (Calving Ice). Just after the scene, this comparison is made again, but visually [image 1]. You can see the ice glacier, with the lower tip of New York Manhattan drawn onto it. It is being explained that “it is as if the entire lower tip of Manhattan broke off”, but that the height of it is three times higher than the buildings of Manhattan (Calving Ice). This shows how we try to make sense of this world outside of us. It shows that the Arctic in that sense is a hyperobject too. We cannot see the Arctic in its fullness and it is constantly changing form through melting and freezing. In order to better read what we are dealing with, it is compared with something from ‘our world’, a borough of a city. It is used in order to help us to better understand the arctic ice, to know what we are dealing with. It lacks referencing points and therefore we use known conceptual frameworks to get the impression of comprehension.

The discursive agency in ice

These conceptual frameworks are an aspect that Morton does not focus on. Morton argues that hyperobjects are real whether or not we think about them (Morton 11). For Morton, there is a world “out there”, full of objects that act on their own. However, it is not the question of what it means to ‘be’ an iceberg, for there is no metalanguage (Morton 13). The only way we can imagine objects is through language, and therefore we can never fully understand it. We have to accept that an iceberg acts outside our knowledge.

This idea means that language and discourse are not influencing the hyperobject for Morton. A critique to this object-oriented ontology is that there is a different way of thinking about the material than it being a pre-existing object. Thinking of agency pre-existing in an object, would undermine the deep relationality between humans and humans, and non-humans with non-non-humans. If you think of everything as standing on its own, the relations between these things do not seem to matter. However, if you acknowledge the phenomena around something such as the ice, you see how we as humans contribute to what ice ‘is’. Karen Barad explains this with her term intra-actions, which expresses a relationship that, contrary to ‘interaction’, does not presume the prior existence of independent entities (Barad 2003 815). Rather it is ‘from within’, through these specific intra-actions that phenomena come to matter (817). The way we act with the ice is therefore influenced by both the material conditions and our conception of the ice. The ice thus has an active role in shaping us and other matter materially and conceptually.

To better understand what it means when ‘phenomena come to matter’, as Barad mentions to explain intra-action, it can be good to look at the concept of matter. What is understood here by matter is based on Claire Colebrooks reading of Judith Butlers notion of iterability. Matter, ‘what is’, is not something that exists in itself and is represented. “Rather, in order for some identifiable thing to be repeated it must already be, and something is insofar as it is iterable” (Colebrook 71). It implies that, indeed, there is ‘nothing outside language’ for us human beings, and this language refers to something outside of it. But matter is not something that is mediated through language, it is a materiality on its own, but it is a ‘nonidentity’ that is not simply the signifier but “characterizes all that is” (Colebrook 72). Matter thus refers to the materiality or materialization of phenomena, not to fixed and independently existing entities (Barad 2008 139). According to Barad, phenomena are what constitute reality. “Reality is composed not of things-in-themselves or

something that really happens and has real consequences, but every form of visualizing or describing it is part of its identity. This visualisation is not a representation of the ‘real’ thing, it is part of the ‘real’ thing. This idea that our conception of matter is co-constituting it is an important critique to Morton’s useful concept of the hyperobject, for it stresses what can be seen in ice calving video’s like this: how the ice presents itself to us, becomes our reality.

Barads agential realism gives space for thinking of melting ice as more than a reflection of human action or action of other entities. From the idea of calving ice as simply being the result of human actions, the ice as matter is passive. The human is central to its environment. The surroundings are seen as a site to act on, but not as something that acts back. How can we move from the idea that we control the melting of the ice, but still show our responsibility? In what ways can we imagine the ice as controlling us back, consider our relation to the ice as not subject-object but an intra-action? It is this that lacks in the image of ice calving, because we are so bounded up in seeing it through the Anthropocentric, human-centred lens of global warming. That shows how the material and the discursive are

interwoven. The materiality of ice speaks in relation with the conceptual.

The materiality of the ice influences the way we understand it. It is active, it is melting and therefore we are able to learn (in a very limited way) about processes of the hyperobject of global warming. Agential realism argues that within our language, we too influence the materiality of the ice. The frameworks we have of the world as we know it are always imposed on the material. For someone familiar with the image, it is impossible to see an iceberg melting and breaking into the ocean and not think about global warming. This relation stresses the fact that matter is active and mutable (Barad 2008 120).

This is a big theoretical difference with Timothy Morton. Morton does speak about the interconnectedness of objects, a “mesh”. Through intra-action we move away from the idea of distinct objects, which takes the interconnectedness further in the sense that ‘objects’ have become inseparable (Hekman 104). Also, it takes the power of language through which we see the world into account (Hekman 104), without moving back to social constructivism. It creates an ontology that “rematerializes the social and takes seriously the agency of the natural” (Tuana 188). This idea is what makes the ice that is far away out there something we are involved in. The Arctic ice is not only its materiality and location, but also the discourse around it, in which we connect this materiality to global warming. These two aspects are what makes the Arctic ice a phenomenon that is something we do take part in. We might not be in the nearness of the Arctic, but we take part in a discourse about it that influences the materiality of it for us.

Melting and finitude

With the importance of conceptual frameworks in relation to matter in mind, we can look at the affective discourse around melting of Arctic ice. Ice calvings are strange forms of

melting. While melting may be thought of as something slow, quiet and peaceful, ice calving is violent. Melting here is not silent, but creates deep and loud sounds. The violence as seen in the ice calvings has the typical characteristics that Rob Nixon ascribes to violence: “immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and […] erupting into instant sensational visibility” (Nixon 2). The violence in ice calvings is therefore quite the opposite of what Nixon calls slow violence. It is a short span spectacle and its effects are somewhat accessible. It is a strange form of violence though. In this very concrete form of violence, the perpetrator is unclear. The violence as seen in ice calvings are therefore considered violent, because they are a symbol for a hyperobject and with that its own slow violence, “a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its

calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (Nixon 2). To make this slow form of violence visible is therefore done by redefining speed (Nixon 13). The melting of ice is framed as a spectacular, speedy and violent image. In itself, ice calving is not violent per se. Its spectacular character is considered as violent because of its conceptual relation to the slow violence of global warming.

Through the breaking and melting, the ice calving offers an idea of finitude. In this way, ice calving creates a powerful linear story. It is an interpretation or explanation of the incomprehensible hyperobject. Not only of the hyperobject of global warming, but also of that of ice. The ice is part of the world as we know it – or World, our idea of an authentic world (Morton 2013 87)- and its melting rapidly. Melting therefore is deleting, a vanishing of what we know as part of World. This is based on the illusion of something such as an

authentic world and in that it simplifies the working of ice and meltwater. Melting ice in that idea harms the World, instead of creating new worlds. That is why the image of ice calving is so applicable to an understanding of global warming. It offers an apocalyptic narrative, a clear end. I will come back to thinking the end of the world and what it means for our affective relationship with climate change in the third chapter.

Distanced from the spectacle

So how does ice calving imagery understand the relation between human and ice in global warming? For this, we have to move back to one of Morton’s aspects of a hyperobject, which is viscosity: once we learn more about the hyperobject, we realize more our entanglement with it (Morton 28). This is an important point in analysing these ice calving videos as a symbol for the hyperobject of global warming; this complex and massively distributed thing is being simplified into a small event through more accessible imagery. We therefore risk losing entanglement by repeatedly using the image of melting ice when speaking about global warming. In other words: simplification of the hyperobject is not making it more accessible, but creating a bigger distance. It might shock us and make us aware of this effect, but makes it hard to feel attached.

Besides this repeated simplified portrayal of the hyperobject of global warming, there is also something in the ice calving video in specific that generates this distance. In this video, the documentary makers capture the calving when it happens. They have waited for it, camped on a mountain next to it, until the calving would happen. This shows that the ice chooses its own time and is therefore active. However, in the perspective of global warming, the calving of the ice is seen as a reaction of the actions of the human. We as humans damage the world, which results in melting arctic ice, that then again has catastrophic results for our idea of existence. This idea is simply a caricature of a real object, a story we tell ourselves to make sense of the massively distributed hyperobject we are finding ourselves in (Morton Hyper 86). In this way, the activity of the ice is still not given full potential. In this image, there is a big gap between us and the ice. The melting of ice is something we are responsible for, but are distanced from. It’s again the viscous character of the hyperobject: by getting closer and closer to the ice, we only see more and more the distance between us. This ‘double-bind’ is an important aspect of a hyperobject such as global warming too: it is right here and we have to deal with it, but at the same time it is very far from us and abstract (Morton 2013 109). We are seeing the melting happening in front of our eyes, and it is this that allows us to think of ourselves as separate, or as they say in the documentary scene: “we are just observers, two little dots on the side of a mountain” (Calving Ice). This distance that we create allows us to generate a theoretical framework in which things can be explained: World, “an aesthetic effect based on a blurriness and aesthetic distance” (Morton 2013 87). The role of the human is imagined as adapting nature in its ways, while staying outside of it. The ice remains some sort of wilderness far away in the Arctic. Wilderness might be a

strange way to describe a place that is normally considered a polar desert. The Arctic is interesting in the way that both names are applicable to it.

The desert is often thought of as a place where life is not present, instead of a wild, vibrant place of life. Anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli takes the desert as a place of

conceptual tension; you can think of the desert as something produced by capitalism, making it a place where life is not possible. This generates the idea of ruin. It holds on to the

distinction between what is considered ‘life’ and ‘nonlife’ and offers an atmosphere that dramatizes the idea that life is constantly at treat from this place of nonlife that the desert has become (Povinelli 22). Povinelli argues that this place of nonlife helps us in thinking ways to maintain life: “The Desert is the affect that motivates the search for other instances of life in the universe and technologies for seeding planets with life” (Povinelli 23). On the other hand, it works as a threat: “it drives the fear that all places will soon be nothing more than the setting within a Mad Max movie” (Povinelli 23). An important distinction between the deserts that Povinelli speaks about and the Arctic as a desert, is that with a sand desert, life can be brought back if we use technology and resources in a proper way (22). In the Arctic, it is more complicated. In the case of the Arctic, it is not the becoming of a desert that can be thought of as the result of capitalism, but the disappearance of this desert. Therefore, the resulting threat does not lie in becoming a place of nonlife like the Arctic desert, but in the effects of its melting. Transformation is a key aspect here. Not in the sense of a human agency to transform something such as a desert, but in the idea of thinking things as constantly changing, thinking of a desert as a multitude of ongoing processes instead of something stable. If you think of the Arctic as a place of nonlife, it expands its desert through melting, transforming into water, rising the sea levels. It threatens life in the way that it

floods places of life further away. It is the strange paradox of desertification through losing a desert. Within this case, the imaginary power we have to bring back life into the desert is much more difficult to think of. The Arctic desert never was considered a place of life. However, like the sand deserts, the Arctic too is considered a sign of human exhaustion, but in a more indirect way. This desert cannot be brought back to life like a sand desert. This desert is not a site on which we can ‘seed life’. This Arctic desert thus is the very contrast of other deserts; it is not a place that gives us the illusion of being in control of transformation, but a place that shows us we are not.

Wilderness, on the other hand, has more of a connotation with life and active matter. This concept, however, is more focussed on a different division: human-nonhuman.

Wilderness refers to the idea of a place that requires a way of thinking outside the human perspective. “The signifier ‘wilderness’ has connotations of a space outside culture and civilization. As such, the wilderness is diacritically opposed to culture—setting up a nature/culture binary –it is therefore a place that humans can go to” (Bryant 2011,

September). The Arctic is a wilderness in that sense, because there is no human starting point in it (Bryant 2011, June). Through this ontology, Bryant addresses an agency that is not human.

I therefore want to argue that the Arctic is considered and portrayed as a combination of both: a wild desert. It is a place of ‘nonlife’, and this characteristic is not the result of human actions. It is a site of threats to ‘life’ or human beings, but a distant one. It is not a familiar site that has lost life, but a site outside the human world, a site of nonlife all along. Thinking of the Arctic ice as a wild desert therefore renders us isolated, it pushes us into thinking that we are on the outside.

This brings us back to spectatorship. Watching these images of an ice calving in Greenland does not only lead you into the position of a spectator through their spectacular and violent nature, but also through portraying something so unfamiliar and outside our idea of the living world we consider ourselves part of. Guy Debord speaks about this in his famous essay The Society of the Spectacle: “What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the centre which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate” (Debord 29). The spectacle according to Debord is about externality (Rancière 2007 274). One spectacular video of an ice calving can suddenly make us realize what is happening in the Arctic when we are not looking, but at the same it generates an awareness that we are most of the time not looking. The idea comes to us that we are separated from it, a spectator.

This spectator-spectacle relation is what Morton’s speculative realist concepts can quickly lead to, and which is especially visible in ice calving imagery. This documentation carries a sense of ‘pictorial realism’, the idea that the world exists in itself and that the human being is only the observer “for whom all of creation renders itself visible” (Cubitt 6). This makes that from a human-focused perspective videos like this appear nostalgic. This

nostalgia is based on a clinging to a historical epoch before industrial capitalism, that is seen as the reason for this disappearing (Cubitt 6). Ice calving videos form this nostalgia through showing something of Nature, a glacier, that was gone right after it was documented, and therefore all that is left of this glacier is this documentation of it.

This is something that is in the essence of documentation in video or photography, it is a capture of ‘that-has-been’ (Barthes 77). Roland Barthes describes in his book Camera Lucida how photography (so documentary too) is different from other systems of

representation, because in order to have a photograph, there has to necessarily be a real thing to be placed before the lens (Barthes 76). It is undeniable that the ‘thing’ has been there, but by taking the photograph (or by filming the ice calving), the ‘thing’ directly deferred from it: “It has been here, and yet immediately separated” (77). This shows that even though the video documentation of this ice calving is used to address what is happening right now, it essentially stresses its historical aspect. And it is this aspect of the now-gone glacier that puts us in the inevitable position of the spectator. Barthes stresses the division of history: “It is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it – and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it” (Barthes 65).

It stresses the idea that the world which we see is in fact already gone, the slow violence of global warming is not stoppable. We are always looking at parts of the hyperobject in retrospect and are therefore always distanced.

Should we overcome spectatorship?

Through these videos, it is impossible to escape this spectatorship. It “places us invariably in a purely human mode of perception, framing the demand of the non-human other, nature, as that which must be represented, but which can only be said to represent itself if it does so for us” (Cubitt 6). It is therefore clear that the spectacular ice calving videos are not a sufficient sign for global warming. Of course, it is too easy to say that the videos of ice calvings in Ice Watch are ideological. We know that whenever we try to show the real, it is always a

to expose – in this case, climate change – into an instrument of ideology” (Grebowicz 3). The ideological or political goal in the way ice calvings are portrayed is clearly present and obvious, but it is this power that comes with it is what makes it interesting. Environmental humanities scholar Rob Nixon sees this and asks questions that follow on the above described theories. He regards the problem as strategic and representational: “how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world? How can we turn the long

emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political interventions, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time?” (Nixon 3).

We should think about how we can create these spectacles to understand the hardly visible threat of global warming. But how can we overcome the distance that comes with the spectacle? Through what way can melting ice put into action a closer engagement between us human beings and global warming? Or is the idea of a closer engagement with this

hyperobject by overcoming distance simply a myth? Jacques Rancière argues that the distance is not something we should get rid of, because it is normal, necessary even, in communication to have this distance. He even says that in trying to suppress the distance you constitute the distance itself (Rancière 2007 277). By claiming that we should dismiss the oppositions between looking and acting and understand that looking too is an action, that “‘interpreting the world’ is already a means of transforming it”, Rancière speaks of the spectator as not passive, but emancipated (Rancière 2007 277). I agree that a spectator is not fully passive and always contributing to discursive frameworks, but this focus on

emancipation does not bring the spectator in a very different position. Even if a closer

engagement is a myth, an illusion of closeness can form meaningful affective attachments. In the next chapter, I will proceed on these thoughts through an analysis of a participatory artwork called Ice Watch, in which people can actively participate with ice. The question then is: how does this change the way we are involved with Arctic ice, and is it any different?

2.

Attaching to melting ice

In 2014 and 2015, the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson created an installation called Ice Watch, in which he collected twelve large blocks of ice from a fjord in Greenland and placed them in a public space in Copenhagen and Paris. The blocks of ice were placed in a circle, also described as a ‘clock formation’, and were displayed during UN conferences on climate change until the blocks had fully melted and disappeared. The space was open to everyone and visitors could come close and touch the artwork. On his own website, the artist explains that “the work raises awareness of climate change by providing a direct and tangible experience of the reality of melting arctic ice” (Eliasson).

In this chapter, I will analyse this art installation and open up through multiple concepts. I will argue that the work of art is another attempt to visualize the slow violence of global warming that it is part of. This time, however, the visualization focusses on a “direct and tangible experience”, rather than the spectacle of ice calving video’s. Through this participatory work, the spectator thus becomes a participant. In this chapter I will ask in what way this participatory relation to the ice in Ice Watch is different from the spectator

perspective discussed in the previous chapter. I will argue that the work creates space for a political shift through the ability to experience and its changing of time and space. The ice that is ‘experienced’, then, gets ‘sticky’, for we are attached to it as a phenomenon with a certain affect. This attachment is cruelly optimistic and stimulated by the work itself. The attachments to melting ice reveal how we make sense of us as humans in a constantly

transforming world. In this chapter I will see how the participatory artwork wants to get rid of the distance between the spectacle and the spectator, how this offers space about thinking in interconnectedness and matter as active and how the phenomenon of melting ice exposes our difficulty with these new ways of thinking.

By using the artwork by Olafur Eliasson in this chapter, there is a focus on the politics of climate change. Eliasson is known for his environmental artworks that focus on experience and phenomenological encounters (Hornby 64). He has worked together with Timothy Morton a couple of times and is political in the sense that it questions what we render valuable and worthless, living and non-living. Ice Watch actively rethinks the relation between the human subject and the nonhuman object. It creates a discussion about the

passivity of objects and talks about both the human and the chunk of ice on the public square as active agents. The artwork reshapes the aspects of time and space of ice and with that tries to overcome the difficulty of ‘experiencing’ climate change.

I am interested here in the correspondence between arctic ice and human beings in places where arctic ice does not ‘belong’. I want to focus on the meaning of this inevitable human perspective in these representations of arctic ice in a new space and how these manifest in conceptions about the ice. Even though I am far from the Arctic, there is a

connection between the ice and me every day. How can these representations imagine the ice as an everyday object? Is it fair to call ice an object? Does that not stress the ‘established divide between object and subject’ (Alaimo 13)? This approach raises questions about what representations say. For this, I will turn to Karen Barad who pleads for representation without representationalism. The representational view contends that there is a distinction between ‘representations and entities to be represented’ (Barad 2007 46). Barad rejects this, and says that representations and entities to be represented are intertwined and inseparable. Ice, then, is a thing-in-phenomenon; the material thingness of the ice is inseparable from the way it appears to us as a phenomenon (Barad 2003 817). Therefore, our attachment to the melting blocks of ice that this work brings up is important in what ice is to us.

With a process like climate change that is almost too slow to capture, the melting and breaking down of pieces of glaciers and ice sheets can create more direct images. In the previous chapter, I have argued how this spectacle renders us distant, creating a spectacle that we are somehow responsible for, yet not really a part of. Even though the process of melting of ice is not a result of climate change only, but also simply a natural seasonal process in the current climate system, it is hard to capture the decreasing ice sheets in other ways. This is a process that exceeds human scale so immensely, that trying to feel the interaction we as humans have with the ice sheets, as a geophysical force, is impossible (Chakrabarty 12). It is thus difficult to recognize the long process of less freezing of ice and more melting of it, an example of what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’: a violence that occurs “gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an

attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2). In his text Nixon focusses on ways to render slow violence visible, taking the example of attempts to recast ‘glacial’ “as a rousing, iconic image of unacceptably fast loss” (Nixon 13).

Given the fact that the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland here is a result of slow violence, the art work by Eliasson aims to overcome the slowness in the transitional violence of the disappearance of ice sheets. The slowness in the visibility of this violence is what creates the insidious workings of it, since our attention towards spectacular and unspectacular time is unequal (Nixon 6). Ice Watch is playing with these forms of time, not only through the time-related title and its ‘clock formation’-shape. With the installation, the unspectacular time that the melting of arctic ice takes is adapted in spectacular time by placing separate chunks of ice in a warmer place. This magnification allows the visitor to witness the melting of the ice in a shorter and understandable timeframe. Also, the locality of the ice has been brought to our familiar space, the public square in a city. Therefore, the ice can now be seen and felt in a direct way, rather than through a video of a place far away. The question

remains, however: in what sense is this saturation of time and space different from the idea of the spectacle?

Participating with ice

That question leads to specifying what kind of artwork we are dealing with here. The placing of Arctic glacier ice on a public square in Paris and Copenhagen makes the artwork a case of installation art. This is a form of art in which art intervenes traditional art spaces in order to address and question the institutional conditions for producing and receiving art (Novak 23).

One way in which Ice Watch addresses the assumptions that go with art, is by the way it engages with its audience. His work of installation art transforms detached viewers to engaged participants, through its atmospheric qualities (Novak 26). The twelve blocks of ice form an atmosphere to participate in, consisting of various components such as “spatial proportions, light, colour, sound, textures, smell, etc. including the presence of living

beings.” (26). You are not only witnessing this atmosphere of the artwork, but you have to be able to position yourself in it (26).

Ice Watch is therefore also a work of participatory art, in which the audience is no longer simply a ‘viewer’ or ‘beholder’, but more of a co-producer or participant (Bishop 2). This participation has again a lot to do with the transformational aspect of the ice. Through the interference with the ice, the visitors are co-creating its taking shape, they take part in the forming of the ice. Ice Watch has a lot of aspects that can be linked to Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’, which in short focusses on “the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” (Bourriaud 14). The relation and interaction between human and matter is where the focus lies in Eliasson’s work, and it stresses the idea that the artwork as already something on its own. However, what differentiates participatory art from relational aesthetics, according to Bishop, is that participatory artists focus more on “the creative rewards of participation as a politicised working process” (Bishop 2). This work is specifically participatory, because by touching and hugging the artwork, the participant contributes to the forms the ice takes on in its process of transformation. A participatory artwork therefore moves beyond the idea that a work of art is something discrete and standing on its own even more (2). “Instead, it often focusses on process over a definitive object. It tends to value what is invisible: a group

dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, a raised consciousness. As a result, it is an art dependent on first- hand experience, and preferably over a long duration (days, months or even years)” (Bishop 6).

This immediately creates an analytical problem here. While talking about the participatory artwork by Eliasson, there is a clear gap between us and the artwork, since we are not there. The work has to be analysed through images, by which the very central aspect of the participatory artwork is missed. The images provide only a small fragment and does not capture the ‘affective dynamic’ of the artwork (Bishop 5). There is no chance in engaging in the artwork, everything stays in its place. These images of the artwork do not allow for a similar rupture that the artwork does, and so create an idea of bodies in their ‘good place’.

These representations are therefore part of what Jacques Rancière would call an ‘ethical regime of images’, instead of the disruptive ‘aesthetic regime of art’ (Bishop 38).

Besides that, the artwork is constantly changing. Apart from the clock formation these chunks of ice are placed in, the ice is shapeless. Similar to the ice calving documentation from the previous chapter, the photography through which we now see the work of art only shows a very short fragment of what then immediately was gone. This stresses the shapeless characteristic of the work. The ice is not sculpted in any way, but is simply the material ice, changing form through its melting. Art critics Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss speak about formlessness in their catalogue Formless, and use Georges Bataille’s example of spit to give an idea of what is formless (‘informe’). The ice in this artwork matches this example, because of its “inconsistency, its indefinite contours, the relative imprecision of its colour, and its humidity” (Bois & Krauss 18). Creating a work of art out of formless matter is

interesting, because of its performative character. According to Bois and Krauss, the formless ice in itself resembles nothing, “especially not what it should be, refusing to let itself be assimilated to any concept whatever, to any abstraction whatever” (Bois & Krauss 53). What the matter ‘is’, is only its operation (Bois & Krauss 18). With this formlessness in Eliasson’s work and its stress on the act of its delivery, the participatory aspect is especially of

importance. The participant is part of the continuous transformation of the form of ice and it is this, more than the ice itself, that is central. As said in the previous chapter, we are also outside of the artwork always part of this ongoing transformation, but within this work this participation is very explicit and direct.

This shows that participatory art has a double ontological status: “it is both an event in the world, and at one remove from it” (Bishop 284). That is why it can address both

participants and spectators, and elicit experiences that allow us to better understand the world (284). Bishop notes that participatory art is not an easy way out of the ‘society of the

spectacle’. Idealistically it indeed offers a rehumanisation of a society under capitalist

production, by thinking of things in a different way than objects to be consumed by a passive bystander (11). However, when a participatory artwork is only ‘right’ when people

participate, it is not so much different from passive spectatorship, for it leaves them no choice not to participate (Bishop 93). I would argue that Ice Watch in that sense does create

participants, because of its location in an open and public space, with the possibility to

engage. Yet, you could argue that every action a visitor takes in relation to the blocks of ice is fact a form of participation, but in that sense the participant does have an active role, contrary to the passivity of the spectator.

As this shows, the boundaries of participatory art are not set, but that participatory art is a complex and political terrain: it is “uncertain and precarious as democracy itself: neither are legitimated in advance but need continually to be performed and tested in every specific context” (Bishop 284). This uncertainty lies in the fact that participatory art has what Bishop calls a ‘third term’, which allows the experience to influence the public imagery (284). This is what Jacques Rancière elaborates on by focussing on aesthetics in the sense of aesthesis: “an autonomous regime of experience that is not reducible to logic, reason or morality” (Bishop 18). The focus on the aesthesis translates the idea of an artwork as autonomous, to the experience in relation to an artwork as autonomous (27).

Political aesthetics

Therefore, what Ice Watch does well is interfere with the ability to see and experience. This demonstrates how the attempt to visualize slow violence in this artwork is highly political. Jacques Rancière calls this the ‘political aesthetics’, which he describes as “the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience” (Rancière 2004 13). Since what the artwork does is change the locality or space of the ice, by placing it in an urban public space, and with that the time of the ice, by accelerating its melting in a warmer climate, the artist creates an experience that is political. Hence, what is at stake in Ice Watch, is not giving a “direct and tangible experience of the reality of melting arctic ice”, as Eliasson says on his website (Eliasson), but rather changing the delimitations of time and space and the visible and the invisible. It presents an experience, not of the ‘reality’ of melting arctic ice, but of its politics. It lays out the fact that the melting arctic ice is political, since it is about “what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time” (Rancière 2004 13). By changing the general time and space of the chunks of ice, the artwork intervenes, in its own “doing and making”, the “general distribution of ways of ‘doing and making’, while in meantime it maintains to the ice’s “modes of being and forms of visibility” (13). In the end, the artwork simply consists of actual parts of ice from the arctic, re-placed on these public squares in Copenhagen and Paris, forming a circle. By doing that, however, the artist lays out the politics of who has the ability to experience and participate.

Rancière argues for what he names ‘genuine participation’. Participation is normally seen as an act that is reduced to a counter-power, dependent on the dominant order, filling in the blanks left empty by power. What Rancière calls ‘genuine’ participation is more than that. It is about the unpredictability of a subject, not limited to a fixed space of allocated

participation or a set of choices (Bishop 283). By placing the blocks of ice on a public square, instead of inside a museum, it stays in the open space. In this way, it creates the illusion of allowing unexpected encounters, for the visitor is not necessarily confronted with the work through certain expectations, like he or she would have when entering a museum exhibition. However, a public space too has its own presumptions and rules of behaviour. The public space might seem like a neutral site, but this is only because the ‘set of choices’ that we render possible are less clear. Therefore, these presumptions in participation on these squares in Paris and Copenhagen do feel less allocated, because of the unclear boundaries of the public space.

What does this aesthetic experience say about the human in relation to ice? What is the political here? Its focus on experiencing and participating in the artwork as an atmosphere allows to rethink the ice as active, living matter. The artwork is not something stable, but an atmosphere in which participants and the work interact and are positioned on a more equal basis. Jane Bennett focusses on the activeness, liveliness and vibrancy of materiality with her idea of vital materialism (Bennett xiii). She uses Rancière’s idea of the political to combine it with her notion of affective bodies. “For Rancière, then, the political act consists in the exclamatory interjection of affective bodies as they enter a pre-existing public, or, rather, as they reveal that they have been there all along as an unaccounted-for part” (Bennett 105). Because Bennett pleads for an imagining of materiality as active and vital, the idea of

political aesthetics is very applicable and useful here. The way Rancière speaks about people who have been there all along, but were not fully acknowledged as political actors, is very well fitting to nonhuman actors. It is a paradigm shift that Morton also talks about as ‘the ecological thought’: “It’s a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings– animal, vegetable, or mineral. Ultimately, this includes thinking about democracy. What would a truly democratic encounter between truly equal beings look like, what would it be– can we even imagine it?” (Morton 2010 7)

Through this reading, Eliasson offers through this aesthetic experience a possibility for a political act in which ice can escape its framework of a passive object. the atmospheric setting that forces the audience to participate and localize themselves in it, offers a chance to get a sense of aspects of ice in a way that cannot be done through language or images. The

artwork is therefore different from the spectacle, it images a closer relation between the ice and the human visitor than Rancière’s idea of the ‘emancipated spectator’. Despite its artificiality, the work offers a conception of the ice as close matter that we are entangled with.

Affective Attachments

This aesthetical experience brings the visitor into an awkward position. By getting a sense of the ice as something active, it allows for an affective attachment between the human and the ice. Affect is a concept that, as Patricia Clough describes, “refers generally to bodily

capacities to affect and be affected or the augmentation or diminution of a body’s capacity to act, to engage, to connect, such that autoaffection is linked to the self-feeling of being alive – that is, ‘aliveness’ or ‘vitality’” (Clough 2). Jane Bennett uses a similar, but broader

definition that draws on the Spinozist notion affect, seeing affect as ‘the capacity of any body for activity and responsiveness’ (Bennett xii).

Affect has often been used to describe a human reaction to something or someone. However, as I described above, affective bodies do not have to be human bodies. Jane Bennett argues for an impersonal affect or material vibrancy, an ‘affect’ not specific to human bodies (Bennett xii). This relates to what Patricia Clough has called the ‘affective turn.’ She agrees that affect is not specific to the human body: “Affect is also theorized in relation to the technologies that are allowing us both to ‘see’ affect and to produce affective bodily capacities beyond the body’s organic-physiological constraints” (Clough 2). Nigel Thrift adds to this with his idea that “affect is not simply emotion, nor is it reducible to the affections or perceptions of an individual subject” (Thrift 219). With this he builds on to the

ideas of Gilles Deleuze who sees affect as becomings that go beyond those who live through them (219). This turn in affect theory is important here, because it shows that the attachments I will speak about are not one-sided, but influence both the human and the matter.

There is something cruel about this attachment to something that is breaking or decaying. As described above, we feel the need to experience ice (and thus its melting) to create the sense of experiencing global warming, to be affected for the bigger thing. We need to witness the disaster to be able to grasp it, but by that we participate in it, whether it is by transportation of the ice to us or by transporting ourselves to the ice. This is a case of what Lauren Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’. Berlant uses this term mostly with a focus on the individual, explaining a relation of cruel optimism when “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your own flourishing” (Berlant 1). I would like to argue that this is also applicable in relation to this object, considering the human in the light of the Anthropocene. The chunks of ice here are our object of desire, we are optimistically attached to it. Within the object of the ice, we find promises like ‘awareness’ and ‘experiencing the reality’ in relation to climate change. This desire is therefore a strange kind of desire, for the object of desire is not really the ice itself, but these abstract promises. The object of desire is therefore better explained with what Jacques Lacan calls the ‘objet petit a’. This objet petit a is a fantasy, it is the “ephemeral, unlocalizable property of an object that makes it especially desirable” (Kirshner 84). Lacan uses this concept for that what we seek in something (desire) that is beyond the possible gratification of instinctual wishes (Kirshner 84). The desire for ice cannot be fulfilled by the presence of ice, but also the desire for experiencing and getting a sense of global warming through the ice is unattainable. Through the concept of objet petit a, it becomes visible that desire here is a longing for a fantasy. This is a fantasy of having contact with the “real”, in this case the hyperobject of global warming itself, which is in its nature inaccessible to thought (Kirshner 86). It is therefore that only through this fantastical desire that we can make sense of the “real”, even though it is an unattainable desire that always falls short.

What is so cruel about the optimistic attachment to these objects is that while we aim to fulfil these promises, we harm what we in the end want to fight for. However, we are not able to let go of our attachment to this object of desire, because it gives us sense of our being in the world (Berlant 24). The participation in Ice Watch show this cruel attachment in the most visual way: the participants touch and hug the blocks of ice, in order to ‘experience’ their objects of desire. However by doing so, the participant shapes the blocks of ice through this contact and accelerates its disappearance. Experiencing that what is longed for, thus

means sensing its unattainable aspect. We need the melting lumps of ice, in a graspable period of time and in a direct solid space, to ‘feel’ and ‘comprehend’ the environmental slow violence. There is a hope in here that this will help to take action against climate change, even though we know that this experiencing works against this promise. Ice Watch, therefore, enriches the optimistic attachment to the block of ice and its affective structure, by feeding the thought that “nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way” (Berlant 2). This nearness that Ice Watch creates, is what makes the object political and ‘sticky’ with affect, but this all will still be the obstacle for the underlying goal, the environmental ‘right way’.

Besides this attachment of cruel optimism there is another form of attachment that is more focussed on its melting and dying. The relation between the audience and the ice in Ice Watch is a deeper attachment than one to these specific twelve blocks from a Greenlandic ice sheet. It is more than an attachment to arctic ice in general, too. The ice in Ice Watch is a symbol for the hyperobject of global warming. It is the fantasy, the objet petit a, that makes it accessible and desirable. The melting and disappearing of the chunks of ice on the squares in Paris and Copenhagen therefore generate a strange feeling of loss. The visitor can mourn the ice, but his or her mourning would not be specific to this chunk of ice, slowly ‘dying’ in its out-of-place context. There is a feeling of loss that cannot be connected to a specific object.

This shows the ‘stickiness’ of ice. Through the artwork, people in Copenhagen and Paris can experience the ice and its melting and therefore be affected by it. They can see and touch the ice and evaluate the object. The object can move us, but we would be affective not only toward the ice, but in what it includes: its new temporal and spatial form (Ahmed 2010 33). These forms can circulate and change, for the affection by the ice is linked in the way we are in contact with it. The ice therefore is ‘sticky’, we have an affective attachment to it (Ahmed 2004 11). The experience of a melting block of ice thus already carries a certain affect that seems to already reside in the object (11), but is produced through our historical contact with the block of ice. This ‘stickiness’ does not imply that our reception of ice is something that is in the sticky object itself. “It is not simply that the subject feels hate, or feels fear, and nor is it the case that the object is simply hateful or is fearsome: the emotions of hate and fear are shaped by the ‘contact zone’ in which others impress upon us, as well as leave their impressions” (Ahmed 2004 194). Anneleen Masschelein uses this ‘stickiness’ too, but in relation to concepts, and stresses that the stickiness of something attracts new

associations and variations that are often not ‘sticked’ to it consciously or deliberately (Masschelein 13). This theory helps when thinking of ice not simply as an object, but as a

phenomenon. It shows how ice as a phenomenon are not static, but dynamic and a cluster of ‘heterogeneous conceptual elements’ (Masschelein 13). Seeing this ice melt quickly in a familiar space is therefore not just seeing or sensing ice, but ‘experiencing’ the ice in both its material and conceptual ways. In its new forms it amplifies affect, people start hugging the ice on these squares(Eliasson). Its melting is seen in the light of the slow violence it takes part in, creating a sense of the ice as beneficial and something to cherish. Through the combination of that material transformation and the conceptual idea of loss in relation to climate change, Ice Watch allows for another attachment, through melancholia.

Melancholia is best explained by Sigmund Freud in his famous essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. Melancholia is about a feeling of loss of an object that perhaps has not actually died, or about a kind of loss in which you are not sure what it exactly is that you have lost (244). This is a feeling towards what you could call a hyperobject, it allows us to feel something for an object that is so big that we cannot grasp that what we have lost, and is fed by spectacular images of melting ice as the concrete face of a hyperobject.

Freud describes that where mourning is about suffering a loss of an object,

melancholia points to a loss in regard to one’s ego (Freud 246). In melancholia, the shadow of the abandoned object has fallen upon the ego, as though it were itself an object, “the forsaken object” (248). This is in some ways very similar to the above described objet petit a by Lacan, in which what we long for is something localizable and impossible to be fulfilled by the presence of an object (Kirshner 84). But what is different here, is that Freud’s idea of melancholia stresses that this attachment of us may be induced by the ice, but is in fact an attachment to ourselves, our own ego. In this longing for the ice, there is not necessarly a