Ice Blink

the long version

Travelling to Antarctica, from RAF Brize Norton via Ascension Island and the Falklands, Simon Faithfull recorded the displaced and disorienting world he encountered. He filmed the view looking out from his cabin porthole on the RSS Ernest Shackleton, taking in passing icebergs and frozen seas, and responded to his surroundings with Palm Pilot drawings transmitted each day to e-mail inboxes around the world. Combined with diary entries and notes, these drawings and films have been incorporated into a series of lectures presented in Edinburgh, Helsinki, Norwich, Berlin and London. Also reproduced in book form, Ice Blink: an Antarctic Essay is a dispatch from nowhere, exploring the Antarctic as a hole in the imagination, combining Antarctic myths and fictions, histories of colonial endeavour, lifecycles of icebergs and the very real effects of global warming, with images of contested and uncharted territories.