Bound for Antarctica, Connie Samaras Will Use Her Camera to Capture the Intersection of Nature and Technology
Connie Samaras, a UC Irvine studio art professor, will travel in November to the barren icescape of Antarctica and turn her creative eye on a new research station under construction at the South Pole.
Samaras, an accomplished artist, plans to create photographs that emphasize the threshold between life-support architecture and the extreme climate in Antarctica. The National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artist and Writers Program will fund her travel and monthlong stay at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Only six proposals a year are accepted by the program.
Her project's title, "Vast Active Living Intelligence System: Photographing the South Pole," which she borrowed from science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, reflects her interest in depicting Antarctica as a place of multiple and often contradictory intersections of technology, culture, nature, space and time. Samaras will lecture on her project in April 2005 at the UCLA Hammer Museum.
Samaras calls herself a "speculative science fiction artist." Her work explores feminism, contemporary art and culture, media, technology, and most recently landscapes. Her last exhibit, shown in 2002 at the San Francisco Art Institute, probed the connections among surveillance, military and entertainment technologies on everyday urban landscapes in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York. She also has an interest in the supernatural, having authored a paper on UFO culture.
The Amundsen-Scott station is one of three permanent, year-round research stations in Antarctica. Geographic isolation, pristine air and other environmental conditions make Antarctica a unique, world-class laboratory for studying subjects ranging from the development of new species to the evolution of galaxies. Antarctica is the highest, driest, coldest, windiest and emptiest continent. November is summertime at the South Pole, and the average temperature will be minus 50 degrees F, with 24 hours of daylight. Samaras will share the difficult living and working conditions with about 230 others, including support staff, construction crews and science research teams.
The Antarctic Artists and Writers Program is the component of the U.S. Antarctic Program that provides opportunities for scholars in the humanities to be in Antarctica or on the Southern Ocean - at research stations, camps, ships and wilderness areas - to make observations needed to complete their proposed projects. The purpose of the program is to enable serious writings and augment the arts that increase understanding of the Antarctic and help document America's Antarctic heritage. The National Science Foundation funds and manages the U.S. Antarctic Program, which is devoted mainly to scientific research and education.
About the University of California, Irvine:
The University of California, Irvine is a top-ranked public university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Founded in 1965, UCI is among the fastest-growing University of California campuses, with approximately 24,000 undergraduate and graduate students and about 1,300 faculty members. The third-largest employer in dynamic Orange County, UCI contributes an annual economic impact of $3 billion.