Honorable Mention
Bio
Catherine Rannou is a video artist and an architect, she teaches at the “l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Bretagne” (ENSAB) (Higher National School of Architecture of Britany) in France. She is conducting a research in collaboration with the French Polar Institute (IPEV), a glaciology scientific laboratory (LGGE), the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) and a technical research office (T.E.S.S) in the Antarctic continent, that she started in 2006, during her artistic residency « art at the poles », at the French Polar Base Dumont d’Urville.
32K
During her “Summer Campaign”, thanks to a grant from Cultures France Villa Médicis hors les murs, on the French base of Dumont d’Urville (DDU) and the franco-italian bases of Prud’homme and Concordia during the austral Summer 2008/2009 (October 2008 – February 2009), Catherine Rannou proposes to five persons, close to her working field, to be associated to her research through a communication protocol and exchanges about the research conducted in situ and during her travel.
Antarctica scientific bases, if they are first and foremost working places, are also, du to their isolation and the forced confinement, living and intimate spaces.
Data communication, constrained by the extreme isolation of the Antarctic continent from the rest of the world, is difficult and not in real time and exchanges through the usual means of dialogue (telephone, mail, email) is restricted to the utilitarian necessities, mostly technical.
This specific difficulty for dialogue from the Antarctic continent with the rest of the world, which favors mediated exchanges of digital datas against the expression of the body (voice, gestures, …) is taken into account in the protocol that has been defined.
«Digital samples » are simultaneously sent by Catherine Rannou to the five chosen addressees during her whole journey: from her departure from Paris to her arrival at the Franco-Italian base of Concordia, to her return from Concordia to Paris.
Those « digital samples», no matter their content (digitalized drawings, digital photographs, videos, texts, ….) are restricted to the authorized maximum size for emails from Antarctica, that is 32Ko.
Those exchanges are like beacons or signals which, in return can be interpretated, annotated, expanded and thrown back by the addressees to the sender as well as to the other addressees participating in the project. The distance, growing with the journey, disconnections and other transmission difficulties are distording the exchange.
A parallel space should appear, as an inprint, like a radar that registers the echo of the waves that are bouncing on obstacles.