The Arctic Noise project consisted of an art installation presented in three art galleries (Vancouver, Saskatoon, and Toronto) of three asynchronous video projections loops, with one of the videos playing an accompanying audio track. In Saskatoon, the piece was presented in its most minimal form as a three piece audio/visual installation. There were additional didactical and aesthetic elements in the other two iterations . This consisted of another video played on a CRT TV in an orange painted antechamber with a plant in Toronto; picture prints of stills from the main video alongside a flat-screen TV played in Vancouver along with the corollary video.
ARCTICNOISE, Trinity Square Video, 2015. Photo by Jesse Boles.
The central video of the exhibit contained a remix primarily of Igloolik-Isuma archives content - as well as other related sources directly connected to the Igloolik-Isuma VHS archives acquired by the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. This video played in a loop between two other accompanying videos of different lengths looping asynchronously in the art gallery space. In editing, the audio tracks from the source videos were separated from the video. While they sometimes appear to sync in the playback - the audio and video are usually from divergent sources — or at the very least different timestamps from the same movie. There are three slight variations done to the edit which comprise the loop. The five sources for this central video piece were “Atanarjuat,” “The Journals of Knud Rasmussen,” “Inuit Knowledge & Climate Change,” “Kiviaq vs Canada,” and “Inuit-Cree Reconciliation,” as well as the addition of two musical interventions by Geronimo Inutiq.
Links to the video sources from to the Igloolik-Isuma archives:
Inuit-Cree Reconciliation on YouTube
To the left of this principal video played “Left Channel” - a compilation of VJ style video edits of archival films. The presence of this channel alludes to the “noise” part of the project - and the Igloolik-Isuma content as the “arctic” dimension. This “Left Channel” also speaks to the emergence of a panoply of post-WWII telecommunications technologies, content, and infrastructure that reached its way up north through geopolitics and the Cold War. Sourcing primarily the Prelinger archives, video rips of digitized film were treated through RGB filters and image plugins in an alternate channel surfing stream.
Completing the trio of videos in the principal Arctic Noise installation was a piece titled “Travel Window.” This consisted of scenery from Le Parc de la Vérendrye shot from a car window by the artist with a consumer digital camera. The presence of this video was in direct reference to the fact that “Idea of the North” was performed and recorded in train headed from Southern Ontario to Northern-most Manitoba. For “Arctic Noise” the idea of the dialogue is inverted - going south from the north.
The “Arctic Noise” project was conceived in dialogue with the audio work “Idea of the North” by Glenn Gould. Where Gould, tapped the conversation of the intellectual elite of his circles to compose the audio for the score of his piece, the Igloolik-Isuma videos are the source of the voices of the new dialogue created in response with “Arctic Noise.” The methodology employed by Gould of passages of solo and superimposed dialogue by various characters in the long train ride north forming the score of the piece was the model employed for the repurposing of both the audio and video sources from Igloolik-Isuma in this dialogue.
ARCTIC NOISE, grunt gallery, 2015.
There is a direct quote to “Idea of the North” at the beginning of the main video piece - with a time stretched sample from the composition superimposed upon a scene from Atanarjuat. The movie was played on a portable PC and the video was recaptured with a smart phone. The idea of using both visual and audio archives as raw material is a process that permeates Geronimo Inutiq’s artistic practice. Remixing the archives - born out of an urban, hip-hop context where Inutiq made beats for rap crew Presha Pack in the mid-90s - became the praxis for instrumentalizing both Inuit culture and the realities of modern living and all the technologies it entails and our relationship to it.