The concept of ice fabric served as inspiration for one of the central pieces of Signal, a large-scale textile collage modeled after a working sail. Made from cyanotype prints on fabric, the sewn prints feature scientific figures, diagrams, declassified aerial photographs of Thwaites glacier, and experimental cyanotype prints made from glacial erratic boulders left behind by the Laurentide Ice Sheet in coastal Rhode Island, USA.

The textile collage references sails as tools of navigation and transport across bodies of water, flags as modes of remote communication and signifiers of cultural identity, and quilts as intimate, handmade memory-keepers. Using rope systems and rigging, this piece is installed differently in each space. The “sail” is tethered to the architectural features of the room, and can be tied to other objects like ceramic knots, found rocks and geologic material, glacier fieldwork equipment, and suspended ice-core-like sculptures, the latter of which slowly melt. The dripping sounds are amplified and projected back into the exhibition space. Observers witness the shifting tension within the rigged system, as the gradual change in ice mass subtly impacts the positioning of the other objects in space. As a whole, the installation invites a deeper awareness of the ways in which bodies and glaciers, respond to forces both seen and unseen, holding within them histories of strain, adaptation, and resilience.

A death rattle is the sounds a human body makes at the end of life when fluid enters the lungs. The sounds associated with this process and the parallels between human and ice bodies led to our work using seismic recordings of glacial calving events to compose a death rattle for Thwaites Glacier. 

Calving events are triggered by the progressive growth of cracks and void space in the ice at the terminus of marine-terminating glaciers (Schulson, 1990; Vaughan, 1993; van der Veen, 1999). 

To build this composition Andrew applied an automated “event picker” (Winberry et al., 2020) to identify calving events in broadband 3-component seismic data collected between 2009 and 2020 from a remote station anchored to the surface of Thwaites Glacier (76.45 S, 107.78 W).

For each event, the seismic recording was shifted to human-audible frequencies. Tyler then converted these timeseries to audio files and mixed them into compositions designed for live accompaniment with ringing bells, vocalizations, and amplified sounds of rocks in contact with one another.