Introducing the Series “Considerations of a Sonic Continent: The Arts in Antarctica”

For most people, Antarctica will always be a place experienced through others’ responses and representations: narratives, scientific reports, documentaries, photographs, and the creative arts. Most of us will never travel to Antarctica. Instead, we encounter the continent vicariously through the images, sounds, and stories created by those fortunate enough to visit. Creative outputs are in this sense a key way in which people build their perceptions of and attitudes toward Antarctica. Works of visual art, music, and literature can question our presumptions, engage our emotions, and inspire us to think innovatively about our relationship with the South Polar region.Now, more than ever, people need to connect aesthetically and emotionally with the ice continent. Antarctica is no longer seen as an unknown territory to be conquered but rather a place where the fate of the planet could be decided: Its ice cores hold the clues to past climate patterns and its increasingly unstable ice sheets could raise future sea levels by many meters. Antarctica’s international governance system is threatened by global political tensions and its wildlife and environment by human activities such as tourism. In the face of such threats, the task of keeping Antarctica in the forefront of the public mind has become increasingly urgent.1While the international governance of Antarctica foregrounds science as the key human activity in the continent, it also recognizes the importance of the arts as a way to connect people with a place that is otherwise alien to their everyday existence. The Antarctic Treaty System includes resolutions that encourage the activities of artists, writers, and musicians, and several national programs have for decades supported dedicated writers’ and artists’ residencies. Tourist operators have more recently opened up further opportunities, sponsoring artists on an ad hoc basis as part of their enrichment programs, offering specialist arts-themed cruises, or providing systematic residencies.2This long-term investment, alongside individual artists’ and writers’ dedication and efforts, has produced a very rich corpus of work across many languages and cultures. This has in turn generated a body of work synthesizing and interpreting artistic and literary response to the far south (sometimes in isolation and sometimes in relation to the Arctic or other icy regions). These include accounts of particular artistic traditions, media, or genres;3 politically inflected analyses;4 explorations of the relationship between scientific and artistic knowledge;5 and works showcasing Antarctic-based works for a wide audience.6The role of the creative arts in an Antarctic context has also become a regular focus of discussion in the formerly science-dominated Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). The biennial SCAR Open Science Conference (OSC) is a major international platform for the dissemination of Antarctic research in all academic disciplines, but the creative arts have appeared as topics of academic attention only in recent years. The arts had a particularly strong presence at the 11th SCAR OSC in Pucón, Chile, in 2024. The HASS disciplines were well represented by Victoria Nuviala’s plenary lecture, “Mapping Memories: An Architectural Biography of Antarctica.” The International Polar Year (IPY) planning group representatives highlighted the arts as a valuable dimension of polar research and public engagement during their panel “IPY 2032–33: From Vision to Action.”The “Antarctica and the Arts” parallel session, co-convened by the authors of this introduction, hosted a record 19 papers across three session blocks, with speakers from Asia, Africa, Australasia, Europe, North America, and South America, with a significant representation of researchers from the latter. The papers spanned a broad range of research topics and art forms including and not limited to critical analyses of cultural representation in literature; data visualization and public engagement through printmaking and animation; reviews of Antarctic arts residency programs; interpretations of the arts of historic expeditions; more-than-human perspectives; and creative exploration of human impact, environmental histories, and conservation. Audience numbers far exceeded the room’s seating capacity, a testament to the level of interest in these fields of research.Several of the papers presented in the “Antarctica and the Arts” parallel session included sound or music either as the primary area of focus or as part of a discussion of multidisciplinary work. In this special series of Resonance, musicologist and Resonance editorial board member Carolyn Philpott curates a selection of peer-reviewed articles that were first presented in one form or another at the 2024 SCAR OSC. These essays consider a diverse range of sound-related topics, beginning in this issue with two articles that, when considered together, explore quite different approaches to engaging with Antarctica through sound.In the opening piece of the series, “Sounding Antarctica: The Sea-Ice Record,” sound studies scholar and artist Diana Chester, multidisciplinary scientist Sean Minhui Tashi Chua, and climate scientist Petra Heil report on the findings and lessons from their collaborative research project Sounding Antarctica. Developed over a three-year period, this transdisciplinary project combines long-term sea-ice datasets with field recordings and live performance, offering a unique approach to sonification that serves as both scientific inquiry and artistic composition. Their collaborative work aims to address the challenge of effectively communicating the urgency and complexity of climate change data to diverse audiences. By drawing on data and sound recordings collected by scientists in Antarctica, their work also minimizes the environmental footprint of their resulting creative outputs, which in itself provides an exemplary model for how artists may approach working on Antarctic and climate change–related projects in the future.The next essay, Patrick Shepherd’s “Representing, Curating, and Celebrating Antarctic Artists and Ambassadors Through Discussions with Four Composers from Aotearoa New Zealand,” draws on his interviews with Chris Cree Brown, Phil Dadson, and Gareth Farr, as well as his own experiences, to interrogate how composers and sound artists can use Antarctic residency experiences to become ambassadors for the region’s future. The topic of Antarctic ambassadorship has received considerable attention in recent years, especially in light of claims made within the tourism industry that a visit to Antarctica can lead to ambassadorship among tourists. Shepherd’s article, which stems from his broader work on creative artists who have held residencies in Antarctica in his book Artists in Antarctica (2023), offers a timely consideration of how this concept might be adopted by artists and serve to benefit the Antarctic environment, especially in the context of climate change. Moreover, it provides fascinating insights into how in-person experiences of place can directly inform compositional practice and lead to outcomes that otherwise may never eventuate.As Antarctica becomes increasingly central to conversations about climate change and its related worldwide impacts, listening to its vast and varied soundscapes, as well as to sound-based works directly inspired by the icescape, has never seemed more important. It is our hope that this series inspires readers to listen to Antarctic-related sound works and to reflect on the many benefits that can be gained by engaging with this rich corpus of work—for listeners, artists, and researchers, as well as for the Antarctic region itself.