Scratching the surface (2025)

The performance explores the changing landscapes in the Arctic as presented by a year's worth of data collection from 2019 to 2020 by the research expedition MOSAiC. The performance makes use of the research and practice-based platform Klimaton's unique sonification device/music instrument KLIMATON ARCTIC≈ 2020.

Scratching the surface is about curiosity. It is a piece composed for — but in many ways, by — KLIMATON ARCTIC≈2020. In our art, we often aim to give agency to machines and other objects. In this case, the instrument played us, the artists, ever since we learned about it. It made us curious about the ongoing processes in Antarctica and the troubles in scientific communication; its undulations inspired Elza’s movements on the floor; its quasi-autonomous nature prompted a dialogue with Kris in composing the piece.

Ultimately, just like the Klimaton platform and the MOSAiC research, we too have only barely scratched the surface of the big questions surrounding the future of our planet — what that means for us (humans or other carbon-based life forms), and the moral and philosophical implications.