Dr. Susan Schuppli recently visited the Digital Democracies Institute as a virtual presenter, part of our ongoing Spring Speaker Series. She shared some projects with us that build upon her book Material Witness: Media, Forensics Evidence, published by MIT Press. Towards the end of the book, she explores a concept of media that could account for technicity of ecological materials themselves. Overall, Susan noted, the book starts to engage with broader epistemic questions around what constitutes evidence. From this starting point, Susan posed the question, “what could accountability frameworks capable of adjudicating climactic violations or crimes that have longer temporalities look like?”
These questions led to Susan’s undertaking of the project “Learning from Ice,” which is a series of documentary film projects that emerge out of fieldwork and workshops. For Susan, two key coordinates that shaped her current arguments and cases away from the more conventional legal media that she explores in Material Witness, towards the realm of ecology within the Circumpolar North. Firstly, within the 320 articles of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, there is minimal acknowledgement of the condition of ice. “In the articles that govern how states interact with water, just one paragraph in the hundreds of pages recognizes that water freezes,” Susan said. Secondly, a key moment for Susan was the provocation by Inuk environmentalist Shelia Watt-Cloutier who submitted a petition to the Inter-American commission on human rights seeking relief from violations resulting from climate change on behalf of herself and 62 Inuit in the Canadian arctic. While the petition was unsuccessful, Susan said, “the right to be cold is a powerful and provocative concept, and acts as a point of critical reflection.”
The first project Susan outlined in relation to this research was on ice cores. She noted that ice cores are some of the most compelling Earth evidence that can testify that the earth is warming, and it is the go-to material for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Ice cores contain material residue from ancient climactic past in air bubbles that are captured when annual layers of snowfall compress to form ice. Susan explained that ice cores are considered high resolution data sets in environmental science as they have archive Earth’s atmosphere from millions of years ago in a bi-annual stratigraphy. Ice cores are thus different then data proxies like tree rings that can only provide indirect measurements of precipitation.
Susan noted that ice is also compelling because of its familiarity. “This project allows us to explore different knowledge practices mediated by the simple material we call ice, though it is also extremely complicated in the life-worlds it sustains,” she added. She also showed us clips of her film, footage shot in the Canadian ice core archives at the University of Alberta. They depicted ice cores as a diminishing resource, used up as worked on in the archive. As Susan narrated in the documentary, “[the archive] is a space of preservation where cores lie in purposeful wait; whereas the lab is the domain of destruction, the site where ice is cut, crushed and melted so that its internal life-worlds can be released and studied.” Ultimately, she said, this film also documents the labour practices at the lab and archive.
Another project Susan highlighted was shot in the Svalbard Arctic archipelago. Susan and musician Mohamad Safa tried to develop an acoustic vocabulary to indicate that there might be something at stake that cannot be perceived within the visual field. In such locations, 1000 km south of the North Pole, one cannot easily see the ways politics saturates the environment, unless one is very aware of what one is looking at. The area is traversed by British and Russian nuclear submarines that move in stealth mode under the sea ice, and is home to Europe’s largest telecommunications satellite station. Once again, transmitting information that is not perceptible within the visual field. “This presents a challenge as an artist. Can I work with sound to trouble the field of the image?”, her project asks.
Next, Susan highlighted a related project called “Listening to Ice” where she asked, “What possibilities could emerge from acoustic practices for monitoring of glacial change?” This question led her to the Drang Drang glacier in Northern India. She then also played clips documenting a range of activities for recording glacial recession using acoustic instrumentation. Using acoustic sensing to monitor climate change in a glacial lake is somewhat experimental as it has only been deployed in ocean environments. This was also a significant project for Susan because it centred on work with local communities rather than exclusively scientists. As an artist it is important for Susan that her practice produce conditions of hospitality that can bring non-experts or lay communities into the worlds of science. Susan explained that this ongoing research employs different situated “listening” practices for scientific research, that includes local experiences and inter-generational knowledge of glaciers together, and has been meaningful for all involved.
Susan also showed clips from two videos produced recently, from a project titled “Cold Cases.” She explained that these are points of departure in this project as “Learning from Ice” was about knowledge practices, while these cases deal with the weaponization of cold in production of harm, sometimes with deadly consequences. In this context, she raised the question, “how can we think about the representation of harm in relation to affected communities, bodies, and racialized bodies in particular?” The first clip she showed in response to this question showed the history of freezing deaths and abandonment in Canada, focusing on the 1976 case of Saskatoon police abandonment of three First Nations people. The police dropped one 8-months pregnant woman and two men outside the city in cold nighttime temperatures as “punishment” and the three were forced to walk back. In response to this incident involving a well-known practice, called “taking someone on a starlight tour”, the officer responsible for this was fined $200. Susan’s project maps a pattern of abuse in which cold plays a strategic role in producing violence against bodies. She noted that, “these ‘cold cases’ are in effect climate crimes, and that the real cause of death of those who have been killed or harmed was structural racism and settler-colonialism rather than findings of hypothermia as determined by autopsy reports.
The second clip on the theme of abuse of cold was the weaponization of water against water protectors at Standing Rock in November 2016. Morton County Sheriff in North Dakota released a “cold weather warning” on November 18, 2016, aimed at protestors involved in the NODAPL movement. Despite this, law enforcement used water hoses at night in subzero temperatures, resulting in 300 people being afflicted with hypothermia in one night alone. Susan and her collaborators, Forensic Architecture, were able to calibrate drone footage obtained by Unicorn Riot, as well as numerous photos and videos captured from ground and air on the night of November 20, where a 12-hour assault against water protectors occurred. “They used tear gas, concussion grenades, less-lethal shotgun rounds, a sound cannon, and water. They drenched protestors throughout the night to push back water protectors attempting to clear the blockade,” Susan explained. She noted that authorities were clearly aware of potential harms of using the water cannon in freezing temperatures, but nonetheless they went ahead anyway, in a move of “plausible deniability”.
In closing, Susan pointed briefly to a third case she has documented, which is ICEBOX detention at the US-Mexico border. While temperature is legally inscribed in regulatory frameworks of detainment, guards threaten to turn down temperature as punishment of detainees. What these three cases have in common is the use of cold and modulation of temperature, from clandestine practices in Canada, to violations of regulatory frameworks at the US-Mexico border. As Susan’s multi-year projects continue to develop, we look forward to seeing how she and her teams represent ice and the weaponization of cold as her projects unfold. The Digital Democracies Institute is grateful to Susan for sharing her work with us, and we will continue to consider the questions around climate accountability frameworks, acoustic representations, and representations of harm posed in today’s presentation.