sila (Greenlandic for both “weather” and “state of mind”) is a generative installation that combines printed images, sound, and sculpture. The work draws on material from Clarke’s 2012 Arctic residency, when she traveled the Greenlandic coast with anthropologist and native Greenlander Lene K. Holme, gathering data, images, video, field recordings, and interviews with hunters and other residents.
This source material is transformed through custom software and generative algorithms and presented in an immersive environment. A glass sculpture—echoing calving ice, the surrounding landscape, and local infrastructure—evolves as oil and water drip onto its surface. Sections joined with water-soluble paper gradually dissolve, causing shards to fall and reassemble into new “neo-landscapes.”
A projected video, built from thousands of ice photographs captured on the trip, employs a custom computer-vision algorithm that averages, erases, and deposits pixel traces to create speculative imagery of ice, water, and land. The soundscape layers field recordings, data sonification, and analog–digital processing. Additional video stills and photographs of Greenlandic life and ice are printed and displayed throughout the space.
sila was commissioned and premiered by Eastern Bloc, Montréal, Canada.
Installation Images, Eastern Bloc, Montreal CA.
Video stills printed as cibachrome prints.
Video stills and images from Greenland printed as cibachrome prints and the generative video, Stream Gallery, Brooklyn.
Video stills and images from Greenland printed as small cibachrome prints, Eastern Bloc, Montreal CA
Installation without projection, Reverse Gallery, Brooklyn NY.
Sila Documentation: Eastern Bloc, Montreal CA; with additional sound and visual from the process.
Sila the published book follows the path taken following the west coast of Greenland.
