Map

Space

Pamen Periera, Spanish
Vistas isometricas del continente, Dibujos de humo impressos sobre tela, 2006

Antarctica is mapped in different ways by those who have observed and experienced it. Satellite images take pictures through mechanical eyes.
Humans see it differently.

Pamen Pereira's maps describe an emotion. They were not generated from live data, but inspired by spending three days completely alone in a small hut on a Antarctic glacier. They map Antarctica as both internal and external landscapes. Extremes of dark and light, and highs and lows, represent the extremes of human emotions and the physical environment. They come together here to represent one place.

Exaggerated lines of force suggest movement between internal and external realities. Depicting the continent from the east and the west suggests the enormity and three dimensional nature of experience it.

Antarctica, the artist says, is a place that lends itself to us knowing...

...(its) relationship with the mysterious forces of Nature and the subtle energies connected with consciousness...

In relation to the Antarctic Continent the objective was to interpret the interior shape of a landscape that shows opposites simultaneously - void and plenitude, finite and infinite, freezing and boiling, visible and invisible, light and darkness. To reach its internal structure and to understand the relationship between the immanence and transcendence of the consciousness through matter and its divine resonance.

I have now verified that the core of the Earth beats loudly under the overwhelming white coat, that the frozen mountains and the ice floes of my sculptures and pictures exist, that the Moon also travels over those seas and that the glaciers are poets of light and air. Poetry in its essence. It’s an ideal place that accompanies the ice burning in our inside, which some times purifies us and some times consumes us.

Pamen Periera, Sur Polar presentation, Buenos Aires, March 2008

Map of convergence between Antarctica (centre), Animations (moving around it), and Dialogues (extending beyond).

This is an interface being considered for viewing the data on this site.

The map resembles a type of zooplankton, and the line of Antarctic convergence. The Antarctic convergence is where the colder bottom water from Antarctica reaches the warmer ocean surface of the Southern Ocean. It is a zone of high marine life productivity that influences the whole food chain.

The image represents connections made by some to the Antarctic landscape, and responses made to these by others. [LR, London, 2008-03-30]