Glacial Hauntings and Seismic Signals: A Practice in
Quantum Listening

Tyler Rai

Death Rattle (Audio):

Glacial Hauntings and Seismic Signals: A Practice in
Quantum Listening

To accompany someone or something implies a travel, a willingness to venture into a shared territory. To accompany can also mean to be present or occur at the same as (something else). The act of accompaniment necessitates a shared time and space.

 

For the last year, I have been listening to the sounds of calving glaciers. These sounds of masses of ice breaking away from the main ice sheet, are both discrete events as well as an accumulation of changing
conditions.

 

I listen to geologic time condensed into momentary timeframes and wonder what new information can be heard, can be sensed. These moments occur, dappled in frequency over many years. The sound files in my computer are labeled with dates years apart – but I listen to them, all at once. As a listener informed by dance and performance practices, I am trained to listen qualitatively – for communications transmitted through tone, texture, rhythm, pitch, spaciousness, and velocity. My listening is distributed – dispersed throughout my entire body – extending beyond the sphere of my aural organs. This kind of listening accounts for information that is both internal and external to my body – blurring the signals
through the permeable boundary of my skin.

 

My human listening is always approximate – a sensing built on accumulations of past experience and reference points. How can my body listen to what it has no reference for? When I listen to the sound of glaciers falling into the sea, I hear Other sounds. My listening becomes associative, almost mythological. I hear moans, and cracks, the popping of microphones, and the ringing of bells. I imagine monsters. I imagine mourning. I listen to glacial ghosts in-the-making.

 

I think about listening to the dying – for those who have the opportunity to die slowly, in care – I think about the death rattle which occurs once fluid enters the lungs. It is a sound that cues a changing state; a sound that signals transition between one world and another.

 

Touch and hearing are the last senses to go when we die. Does this imply we are meant to listen to the world until the very end? That our ability to hear the world is in fact more critical than our ability to articulate it?

 

Listen. Be touched. Our bodies declare.

 

At the end of life, listening can become the main form through which we accompany. A way that we can
acknowledge change through bearing witness. What if listening was more about accompanying than comprehending? Becoming a way to witness immeasurable change.

 

This writing is influenced by my work with a collective of artists and glaciologists on a project called Glacial Hauntologies. You can read more about Glacial Hauntologies below:

Glacial Hauntologies is an interdisciplinary collaboration between early-career scientists from the International Thwaites Glacier Consortium (ITGC) – Elizbeth Case and Andrew Hoffman – and two New England-based environmental artists – Hannah Mode and Tyler Rai.

 

Interweaving glaciology with artistic practice, we translate, subvert, and repurpose tools from many disciplines to explore geophysical data and glaciological archives. On Thwaites Glacier – one of West Antarctica’s vulnerable outlet glaciers – scientists record radar, seismic, magnetotelluric, and gravity data about the ice and bed. In New England, on the bed of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, we look up through the spectre of ice that last covered the landscape 10-18,000 years ago. We are interested in how ice – past ice, current melt, and future glacial disappearances – reoccurs as a persistent hauntology across 21st century landscapes, scientific data, and day-to-day life.

 

Working across print, sound, textile, movement, and math, our work confronts male-dominated, colonial histories of Antarctic research by centering expansive, embodied, collaborative practices that create alternative relationships to, histories of, and ways of doing research about glacial change. This work includes recordings of dripping meltwater overlayed with sonified seismic data, large-scale, sewn cyanotype fabric collages, zines of body outlines for recording deep field experiences, and other multimedia work.

 

https://glacialhauntologies.com/