Synergy between art and science: Collaboration at the South Pole

Abstract

We present the result of a cross-disciplinary collaboration between Prof. Donald Fortescue of the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and the Dr. Gwenhael de Wasseige of the IceCube Collaboration. The work presented was initiated during Fortescue's US National Science Foundation funded Antarctic Artists and Writers Fellowship at the South Pole in the austral summer of 2016/17. One outcome of this collaboration is the video work Axis Mundi - a timelapse movie captured during 24 hours at the South Pole, combined with a simultaneous sampling of IceCube data transduced into sound. Axis Mundi captures the rotation of the Earth in space, the transient motions of the atmosphere, and the passage of subatomic particles through the polar ice, to provide a means for us to physically engage with these phenomena. We detail how both the timelapse and the transduction of atmospheric muon data have been realized and discuss the benefits of such a collaboration.