INTRO
AUFBRUCH at Futurium in Berlin, 14–23 November 2020: the interactive MOSAiC installation by XENORAMA, created together with the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar Research.
A large, glowing ice floe is projected onto the floor and accompanied by atmospheric arctic sounds. When visitors step onto the floe, the movement of their feet crackles and breaks the ice underneath them; as they move on, they pull a trail of light behind them and expose the water below, which slowly closes again.
Highlights
Ice that cracks under every step
Second life of a farewell piece
Shown as the researchers came home
Back from the ice
At Futurium the floor was shown again, extended, for ten days. The researchers had come back to Berlin only a few days after the expedition ended, and Futurium held a day on which scientists “took visitors with them into the eternal ice and told them about their experiments and international cooperation” (Futurium).
The installation was first developed for the farewell of the MOSAiC expedition in Tromsø on 20 September 2019, where hundreds of scientists from 19 nations set out on the POLARSTERN icebreaker to drift frozen in the Arctic ice for a whole year. There it accompanied the boarding of the captain and the expedition leader, while XENORAMA turned the ship's facade into a projection canvas: footage and animation from polar research, archive material from the Fram expedition and, at the end, an abstract previsualisation of the data the voyage would collect for climate research.
