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“Phase Change is an installation created by the artist collective Futures North for the 2016 Northern Spark all-night arts festival, whose theme was Climate Chaos | Climate Rising. Climate Generation and our youth leaders supported this project through consultation and providing youth volunteers to engage with visitors during the night of the festival.”

grist-logoby Heather Smith

Sometimes you have to melt some ice to make a point.

The art collective Futures North just won the Art + Interaction prize at SXSW Eco for Phase Change, a project that combined pre-industrial ice harvesting techniques with 21st-century computer modeling to create a physical model of a changing climate.

Here’s how it worked: Futures North cut blocks of ice from a Minnesota lake during the dead of winter and stored them in an old-fashioned ice house.

When June rolled around, the team stacked the ice blocks under a lattice of infrared lights programmed to turn on and off based on three climate scenarios: one where the industrial era never happened; one based on today’s climate; and one future based on the most disastrous forecasts.

Less visible was how climate change put every step of the project in doubt. “It was such a warm winter that we weren’t even sure if the ice would be thick enough,” said Molly Reichert, one of the project’s leads. “It was such a warm spring, weren’t sure if there would be any ice by June.”

Visitors got to take bottles of meltwater home. “It’s beautiful,” one visitor said, “to see such a tragic thing come to life.”

Read the full article online here.

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