Explorations in the Icy North: How Travel Narratives Shaped Arctic

Science in the Nineteenth CenturyWhat was the purpose of nineteenth century

European and Euro-American Arctic exploration, and why publish accounts of the voyages? In 1842, the second secretary of the admiralty John Barrow reflected that “by the copious details” contained in

travel narratives, covering “every branch of astronomical and nautical science, of geography,

meteorology, and other physical researchers, —the charts and prints by which they are illustrated—

they are made highly valuable to the man of science and taste, and well adapted for public

libraries.” As indicated by Barrow’s quote, travel literature served multiple purposes and,

accordingly, had multiple audiences. In my new book, Explorations in the Icy North, I show the

significance of travel narratives in shaping European and Euro-American knowledge about the Arctic, and how narratives offered a space for

the co-construction of Arctic imaginations, scientific expertise, and national and imperial identities. In this presentation, I will draw on

examples from my book that show how travel writing also was a way for the so-called explorers

to portray themselves in desired ways, as the narrative format enabled them to hide the fact that they drew heavily on Indigenous knowledge about the Arctic and relied on the expertise of Indigenous

peoples to fulfil many of the official duties of the expeditions, including scientific research.

Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at

Aarhus University, Denmark, where she holds a Carlsberg Fellowship for the project “Economizing Science and

National Identities:The Royal Greenland Trading Department and the Making of Modern Denmark and Greenland”. She received her PhD from the postgraduate

program in Science and Technology Studies at York University, Canada in

2017. Her research centres on the intersection of Arctic exploration, race,

print culture, science, religion, and medicine in the modern period with a

focus on the British, North-American, and Danish imperial worlds.

Dr Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund

Ice (St)Ages 3 Abstract and Speakers

29 & 30 September8-11am (CEST) – 4-7pm (AEST)

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Icy Peregrinations and Polar Panoramas in the Arctic The Arctic panorama has often been framed by conversations of the Victorian imperial imaginary, and was originally conceived to showcase Anglophone exploration, heroism, and settler colonialism. This

talk explores the complementary and multifaceted visual representations of Arctic ice, from the Victorian spectacle of the panorama to contemporary time-lapse photography. With this I look at how glaciers have been depicted, documented, and presented within panoramic media over the past two centuries. I explore how ice moves through both time and space, confronting climate histories within

physical and spatio-temporal ideas of movement. Alongside the materiality of ice, I consider the modes of observation involved in creating and viewing these panoramic pictures. In making tangible and visual an Arctic glacial history, this talk does not simply seek to document ice loss, but looks to the panorama as a means of communicating ice as a substance, an aesthetic sublime, and as an object of scientific

study.

Isabelle Gapp is an Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. She holds a PhD in History of Art from the University of York, UK (2020). Her research considers the intersections between landscape painting, environmental history, and climate change in the work of

Indigenous and settler women artists living within the North American Arctic. Her latest publications include "A Woman in the Far North: Anna Boberg and the Norwegian Glacial Landscape" published in Kunst og Kultur in 2021. Additional forthcoming articles relate to Arctic map-making, panoramas, coastlines, and

wilderness ideologies.

Dr Isabelle Gapp

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Comics on IceA constant marker in popular visual culture—Ice Age, Slava’s Snowshow, Disney on Ice, Frozen—the theme of ice appears more specifically in association with comics from the earliest of visual narratives to contemporary creations. Pieter Bruegel’s winter

scenes can be seen as telling a story, and the ‘proto-comics’ of early-modern emblem books, such as that by Geoffrey Whitney (1586), often reference ice in the

narratives of life’s dangers and decay. The first modern comic, the Glasgow Looking Glass (1825), includes a

frozen pond scene reminiscent of Henry Raeburn’s The Skating Minister, and in the early twentieth century

Winsor McKay’s Slumberland fantasies (1905-1911) take us to icy realms. More recently Nicolas de Crécy’s Période glaciaire (2005), and Marc Azéma and Gilles

Tosello’s La Caverne du Pont d’Arc(2015) have used snowscapes as the

central setting. As well as providing a melt-in-the-mouth overview of the topos, we will consider

connections that might suggest why the theme of ice and the format of comics should be defrosted together:

the eternal nature of storytelling and of snow; the intrinsically hybrid

and changing nature of these forms; the ability to express non-visual emotions visually.

Laurence Grove is a Professor of French and Text/Image Studies and Director of the Stirling Maxwell

Centre for the Study of Text/Image Cultures at the University of

Glasgow. His research focuses on historical aspects of text/image forms, and in particular bande dessinée. He is President of the International Bande Dessinée

Society. As well as serving on the consultative committees of a number

of journals, he is joint-editor of European

Comic Art. Laurence Grove (also known as Billy) has authored (in full

or jointly) twelve books and approximately sixty chapters or articles. He co-curated Comic

Invention (Hunterian, Glasgow) and Frank Quitely: The Art of Comics

(Kelvingrove, Glasgow) and is co-author of their accompanying books. He hopes one day to see a National

Comics Centre for Scotland.

Prof Laurence Grove

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Occupying more than 20 million square kilometers of the Earth's high-latitude and high- altitude landscapes, permafrost – or frozen ground – is not only a key component of our global climate, but it is

arguably the most overlooked, invisible component of the cryosphere, or the world of ice. Yet, just as ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, or mountain glaciers around the world, which are very often depicted in the general media, permafrost regions are highly sensitive to climate change and human activities, and permafrost research is therefore of considerable scientific and societal importance. The “Frozen-Ground Cartoons” project was born with the urge to make permafrost science accessible and fun for the general public, especially for school kids, students and teachers. The creation and release of a booklet of comic

strips (in English) was the original outcome; however, the project quickly evolved in a series of ‘by-products’ including translations into several languages, augmented reality materials (maps, photos,

videos, 3D drawings), a board game, an audio-book, etc. And this is not over!

Frédéric Bouchard is an Assistant Professor in climate change at the Department of Applied Geomatics, University of Sherbrooke, Canada, and is also an Affiliated Researcher at Geosciences Paris-Saclay

(GEOPS), Orsay, France. First trained as a geologist, he later specialized in physical geography (geomorphology, climatology) and water sciences (sedimentology, paleolimnology), specifically in high-

latitude regions. His research projects explore the multiple impacts of permafrost degradation on aquatic ecosystems and northern communities across the circumpolar Arctic (northern Canada, Siberia).

Bouchard is a founding member of the Frozen-Ground Cartoons project and is deeply involved in scientific outreach, communication and education about permafrost and Arctic research.

Ylva Sjöberg is an Associate Professor in geography at the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is trained as a geographer and

specialized in Arctic hydrology and permafrost during her PhD and postdoctoral studies at Stockholm University and the U.S Geological Survey in Alaska. Her research on the water cycle in Arctic permafrost

environments leverages on both field-based and modeling techniques. Sjöberg is also a founding member of the Frozen-Ground Cartoons project and has been involved in art-science collaborations, including an

audio- based project exploring permafrost from the perspective of a mosquito.

Dr Frédéric Bouchard

Dr Ylva Sjöberg

Frozen-Ground Cartoons – Revealing the Invisible Ice

“Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.”

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Disney Pixar represents a corporation that is in the business of selling messages to the world. Claims about social issues, really. Most of us may know these for being wrapped in entertaining storylines that cultivate a sense of connectedness between the content and the viewer. From the sleeping princess without agency to the world-saving daughter of the chief who examines a young child’s perception of

old vs new, the embedded coloniality in Moana, or an examination of shifting parental roles in The Incredibles. The significance of Disney’s global film fare, despite discrepant views about it,

simultaneously mirrors social trends and reshapes them. Each individual Disney movie presents a coding system that popularises a message. Some of them deviate from the dominant paradigms of thought, thereby introducing into mainstream culture what Walter Benjamin hoped were counter-

hegemonic images that would engage bourgeois sensibilities. Sergei Eisenstein echoed this sentiment. He argued that the medium of animation held unique currency by shaping worlds and

characters to suit ideas, express feelings in “the rejection of the constraint of form”. I engage in this presentation both Benjamin’s and Eistenstein’s concepts, arguing that Disney animation film, as in the example of Frozen (2013), allows for the cartoon-mediated articulation of queer identities and liberation from constraint on their form. Frozen’s main characters, Elsa and Anna, buck seemingly entrenched

social orders: of gender, of sexuality, and of straight, and dominantly male, power. It is their representation, and especially Elsa’s animated ice powers, that I will focus on to reflect this queering

message through the concept of ‘plasmatic feeling’—the ability of emotion to take on a myriad of sublimated forms in Disney’s ice queen remake.

Dr Benjamin Nickl is a lecturer in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney (CompLit and Translation Studies). His areas of research and teaching include comparative

culture and trends/histories in popular entertainment. He is working on transnational television and film, global literature in translation, humour, and cultural technology.

Dr Benjamin Nickl

Queer(ing) Ice

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Walt Disney’s computer-animated Frozen (2013) is a film shaped by the creative potential of snow and ice. The CGI frost shading, the refraction of

light through transparent ice blocks, and the controlling variations of snow strength (soft,

crunchy, viscous, powdery) developed as part of r digital production are matched onscreen to protagonist Elsa’s capabilities of cryokinesis,

which regularly explode from her wintery body. However, nowhere is the spectacle of ice more pronounced than in the snowman Olaf, whose playful capacity for regeneration marks a return to the ‘plasmatic’ sensibility that defined Disney

animation in the 1930s and 1940s. ‘Plasmaticness’, formulated as both a political and aesthetic

category by Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1986), describes the ‘protean’ and

shapeshifting nature of animated bodies that can effortlessly morph into new configurations. By

examining Olaf’s unstable ‘polar’ and ‘plasmatic’ transformations as a form of resistance –

alongside how Frozen persuasively represents snow and ice within a digital space – this paper

argues that Olaf’s snowy peculiarity fully embodies the orderly, chaotic, and sensorial

elements of ice.

Christopher Holliday teaches Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King’s College London,

specializing in Hollywood cinema, animation history and contemporary digital media. He is the author of The Computer-Animated Film:

Industry, Style and Genre (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and co-editor of the

collections Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres

(Routledge, 2018) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on

Production, Reception, Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2021).Holliday is currently researching the relationship between identity politics and

digital technologies in popular cinema and can also be found as the curator and creator of the

website/blog/podcast www.fantasy-animation.org.

Dr Christopher Holliday

“Some People Are Worth Melting For”: Digital CG-Ice as Plasmatic Resistance

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In mainstream US comics the antagonistic dynamic between (super)hero and (super)villain is, obviously,

the key plot element that captures the readers interest and perpetuates the story towards the

eventual victory of the forces of Good. Many of the colorful villains the heroes constantly face own

powers based on patterns or themes, that often turn them into the mirror image of the hero. The

dichotomy between the dark and brooding Batman and the supposedly bright Joker is a prime example for this dynamic. Other villains are based on certain categories of powers, for example superstrength for

characters that take on super strong heroes, like Superman or Thor. However, the villains analyzed in this paper are all bound together by a different power as they master, to various degrees, a truly elemental

force, the cold. From the frost giants of Norse mythology and their king Ymir, mainstays in the

Mighty Thor comic book cosmos, to modern high-tech villains like Flash-archenemy eponymous

Captain Cold, cold-themed villains play a major role in the constant struggle of Good vs. Evil. They all

represent and command a force that in its extreme is the opposite of life itself: the Cold.

Frozen FiendsCold-themed Villains in Mainstream

Comics

Stefan Buchenberger is a Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural Studies of

the KanagawaUniversity. He earned his PhD in

Japanese Studies from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich in

2004. He is involved in the study of graphic narratives at the International Comparative

LiteratureAssociation (ICLA), where he is co-chair of

the Research Committee on Comics Studies and Graphic

Narrative. He writes regularly on graphic fiction, on his second major field of study:

mystery anddetective fiction, and on popular culture

and literature in general.

Prof Stefan Buchenberger

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Dr Anna-Sophie Jürgens

Dr Anne Hemkendreis

Rishika Nair Prabhakaran

Anna-Sophie Jürgens is an Assistant Professor at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science of the Australian National University (ANU). She was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the

ANU and the Free University of Berlin, Germany from 2017 to 2020. She has published on the cultural meanings of science, humour and science, and comic performance and technology in culture across

numerous academic journals. Anna-Sophie is guest editor of two special, themed journal issues published in 2020 with the Journal of Science & Popular Culture (on popular performance and science) and Comedy

Studies (on violent clowns). Her recent books include Circus, Science and Technology: Dramatising Innovation (editor; Palgrave Macmillan 2020) and Manegenkünste: Zirkus als ästhetisches Modell (coeditor;

transcript 2020)

Anne Hemkendreis works as an academic researcher at the transdisciplinary research group 948 on “Heroes, Heroizations, Heroism” at the University of Freiburg (Germany). Her current research

interest lies in the depiction and meaning of snow in Arts from the 19th century until today. Prior to this, she gained her PhD with a thesis on the visualisation of privateness in Vilhelm

Hammershøi’s interior paintings (Fink Verlag, 2015). She also worked as a postdoc-fellow and research assistant at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg of Greifswald, the Klassik Stiftung of

Weimar and the Leuphana University of Lüneburg (all in Germany). Anne is also regularly a passionate Lecturer at different institutions, including the University of Arts in Berlin.

This event is brought to you by…

Rishika Nair Prabhakaran is a Science Communication student at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science of the Australian National University and the event assistant of the Ice

(St)Ages 3 online conference. She has a life-long passion for educating STEM related courses. She is also interested in building bridges between disciplines and in exploring the cultural meanings of science in different media and on different stages in how science can be communicated through art and popular

culture.

Designed by Rishika Nair

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