Life Under the Ice is a project supported by the Antarctic Artists and Writers program. The Principal investigator will create an interactive web exhibition for the public to experience the unadulterated visual beauty of Antarctic ecosystems that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye. Life Under the Ice will bring to light the microscopic world of Antarctica. The goal is to collect various types of photo and videos of extremophile microorganisms endemic to Antarctica and present them to the public in a novel way, by turning viewers into Antarctic explorers. This exhibition will seek to elicit the same sense of wonder that scientists feel about how even the smallest, simplest life forms of Antarctica, shaped by their harsh home environments, are also immensely complex.
The Principal Investigator, a multidisciplinary artist who has made a career out of being an effective liaison between art, technology and science, will participate in active fieldwork with researchers studying extremophile organisms in the Dry Valleys and on the sea ice. At these sites, the PI will collect original, in-situ compound and stereo microscope photography, video, and macrophotography. The PI will then design, deploy, and widely circulate an immersive web exhibition that intermingles the captured photographs and videos in a seamless digital terrain that invites and encourages viewers to explore these ecosystems in their own way. The idea of this proposal is to use a Google Maps-like panning interface to display the photos and videos collected. The web exhibition will deliver the experience of observing microorganisms through the lens of a graphic artist, magnifying and highlighting their forms, colors, and movements. The artist's outreach efforts will target social media and online communities, traditional media outlets, as well in-person events. All the photographs and videos captured in Antarctica will be licensed under a Creative Commons license, enabling the public-at-large to reuse and remix it for communicating science themselves.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
