Ice Hours is a series of 6 film vignettes featuring stunning Antarctic landscapes and the surrounding ocean. Through close encounters with inspiring and endangered features of our changing planet, Ice Hours articulates that humans are not separate from nature.
Ice Hours is built upon a decade of video footage captured by National Geographic photographer Camille Seaman, then transformed by film artist Kim Miskowicz and set to the music of composers Kristina Dutton and Nathan Clevenger.
A multifaceted production suitable for cinema, performing arts, and educational contexts, the project premiered as a live concert event at San Francisco's Exploratorium in March 2019. The sold-out event featured a live music score for 9-piece chamber ensemble with strings, percussion, and piano.
The live performance was followed by a 6-week installation in the Exploratorium’s Webcast Studio in Spring of 2019, and in the Osher Gallery from November 2019 to January 6th, 2020. It is an evolving work with a versatile design meant for film, installation, and cutting-edge online platforms.
The project was conceived by Dutton after she and Seaman collaborated on an improvised work at a TED salon event. Ice Hours takes its cue from the origins of the conservation movement which, according to the National Park Service, was catalyzed by the work of artists and photographers such as Ansel Adams & Thomas Moran. Their artistic representation of landscapes caught the eye of Congress, resulting in the preservation of such places as Yellowstone National Park. Similarly, Ice Hours shows the evolving beauty and changing shape of the Antarctic. It captures our relationship with our environment through the personal, theoretical, & impressionistic.
The project is supported by New Music USA and the Fleishhacker Family Foundation, in partnership with San Francisco's Cinematheque.
