Mediating climate change: Intuitive interventions as defining strategies in visual arts

tackling challenges in visualisation and storytelling for understanding and communicating the effects of a warming Arctic based on observations in North West Svalbard

Heidi Morstang ‘Landscapes of Deep Time’

Title: Mediating climate change: Intuitive interventions as defining strategies in visual arts

Funded by: AHRC Impact Acceleration Award, and the Swedish Research Council

Location: Svalbard, Norway

Dates: 2023 – ongoing

Project partners: Dr Heidi Morstang , University of Plymouth, and Professor Tyrone Martinsson, HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Dr Heidi Morstang investigates Arctic landscapes filming in situ and via electron microscopic artistic interventions, drawing attention to visual perception and imagination. Her films and photographic work provide a unique visual interpretation of landscape that is not visible without optical devices. This artistic research is part of an innovative image-making method in ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration with scientists, offering audiences imaginary insights into deep time and current time of living with and in climate crisis.

Heidi’s work 'Landscapes of Deep Time' explores the High Arctic landscape through remote field work using electron micrographs based on 400-million-year-old rocks that have emerged from melting glaciers in northern Svalbard. The images convey microscopic data transformed to imaginary views of deep time and will be the base for a 360˚ immersive moving image for Wisdome Gothenburg.

AHRC’s Impact Acceleration Award supported Heidi’s ongoing collaboration with Professor Tyrone Martinsson at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She made several visits to Sweden during the Autumn of 2023 to develop new visual techniques in remote field work in response to Martinsson’s fieldwork in Svalbard.

The purpose of the research project is to tackle challenges in visualisation and storytelling for understanding and communicating the vast effects of a warming Arctic based on observations in the focus area of North West Svalbard. The project explores ways of creating immersive virtual experiences of long historic developments and contemporary issues in Svalbard.

Images of the project were first exhibited in International Photography Festival Imago Lisboa 2024, in the exhibition 'A View from No-Place: Time in the Age of the Anthropocene'.

How can visual arts research practice in a transdisciplinary dialogue critically engage with the tools of imagining the future and initiate new strategies for mediating a new Arctic?

How can virtual remote research, within immersive visualisation, support transdisciplinary research to enhance storytelling?

We aim to address these challenges through visualisation and storytelling using XR-technology and full dome XR-storytelling developed with Visual Arena and Wisdome in Gothenburg, Sweden. Exploring long planetary developments and historical and contemporary issues in Svalbard, visual arts tackle the challenges of mediating these impacts in relation to scientific facts but working within the realm of the poetic.

Landscapes of Deep Time, Heidi Morstang