Can 740,000 years of climate history be conveyed in music? Impossible? Not at all. With his project “Antarktika” Frank Halbig shows how a score for a string quartet – and thus a special sound event – can be composed with the aid of data from 3,500-metre-deep ice cores from the South Pole that enable deductions about climate change. Halbig transposed the abstract figures and complex measurements into musical notes, thereby transforming them into palpable sound spaces – a speciality of this particular artist from Karlsruhe.
A lecturer at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, Halbig has already visualized the data of two solar cycles and set them to music for another project. Antarctica is a very special place in Halbig’s view: “The Antarctic and the history of its exploration have always been a source of fascination for me.” In order to implement his project Halbig crossed disciplinary borders and collaborated with the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven, which provided him with the data from the ice cores. An open and fruitful dialogue with the institute’s polar researchers about their work quickly developed and proved very inspiring, explains Halbig. Finally, after a good two years, the sound experiment was ready and in late 2006 “Antarktika – eine klimatische Zeitreise” was premiered. The ethereal composition was performed by a string quartet at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe – in conjunction with a video installation of impressions of the eternal ice (videocast at www.antarktika.at).
The Antarctic will always be a magnet for Halbig. He is already working on the next project with an artist from the United States. If all goes well, their sounds – broadcast live from the North and South Poles – will be heard at concerts all over the world.
