Interrogating our climate crises, slow, steady video art offers viewers new ways to consider the scale of a landscape and the scale of their anxieties. Tracing the history of the medium and examining three contemporary examples, this essay is an exploration of how video art is a quiet reckoning and a means to shift our perspective.

Once upon a time (in 1965) the Sony Portapak was invented. This is where our story begins—with the first camera capable of simultaneously electronically recording sound and video, uniquely carried and manipulated by one person. A camera remarkable in its instant playback ability and its (relative) affordability. In the late sixties and early seventies, experimental artists flocked to the Portapak, and video art flared to life.

The origins of video art are rooted in material innovation; when first invented, video art was distinct from cinema because it was an electronic art form, whereas movies were recorded on film. However, with the invention of digital recording devices, defining video art by its medium alone has lost its accuracy; now, museums, galleries and cinemas display pieces that are recorded digitally, loosely defining the pieces as video art, short films, or movies. In discussions of contemporary video art then, what defines video art? The immaterial materials. The critical characteristics of video art, a sub-genre of time-based media, are the playful use and manipulation of time and space. Historically and to this day, video art has allowed artists to experiment with and depict time in new ways; the portability of the art form allows for art that is accessible, timely, and innately focused on a sense of place and environment. With this history in mind, video art has always had the potential to be a critical tool for interrogating and depicting our current climate and, increasingly, our climate crises.

Beyond this, video art is impactful where video alone falls short. Documentaries and newscasts are each tools for educating people about our environment, but they are forms constrained by an obligation to be factual. Despite the sensationalization of the news at any hour of the night, journalistic moral obligation limits the effect. For example, consider the polar bear:

“In 2017, Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier captured a video of a polar bear ambling across an iceless archipelago in the Canadian Arctic and feeding from trash cans. The bear was skeletal, with a patchy coat, and weak to the point of collapsing. After National Geographic published the video, overlaid with the text “This is what climate change looks like,” it was viewed by an estimated two and a half billion people” (Moses).

For many, the polar bear is the symbol of climate change. And yet, “because we see pictures of the Arctic melting every day, we block them out—we don’t have empathy for the place anymore” (Dafoe). That is, if we ever had empathy for the Arctic to begin with—so few of us have ever been there. While the polar bear first garnered positive attention to the issue of climate change, it is also an overused image on the verge of the mundane. Unlike journalistic media coverage, video art has the potential to be grounded in reality or experimental, and so it is a form that can break free from cliché. This essay explores the ways in which video art gives a new voice where digital media (such as journalism) is already saturated with content by offering both critical and humorous re-imaginings of our landscape. In the tradition of many media outlets iconizing and championing the polar bear, I’ll start with two videos which depict glacial habitats.

“Nummer acht, everything is going to be alright” (2007) is a single-channel video by Guido van der Werve, a dutch artist whose video work attempts to approach the sublime through recording slow processes. Critic Tom Morton describes the piece best:

“Here, we see the artist walking steadily across the frozen waters, while behind him looms a vast ship, its prow smashing through the ice, then rearing up like a monstrous killer whale. Filmed in long shot, van der Werve seems frail and tiny, forever about to be swallowed by the abyss opening up behind him, forever hearing its great creaks, gulps and rumbles ringing in his ears. The icebreaker, though, lags continually behind, and we get to thinking about the effortlessness of his passage when compared to that of the behemoth to his rear. We might read it as a parable of man’s superiority to machine, until we remember that without the protective shell of the ship, van der Werve would never have been able to reach this inhospitable zone in the first place. This is not an image of man at one with nature, then, but of an excessive survival strategy, both sublime and ridiculous.”

The sublime is a sense of ultimate awe that is inspired by something boundless and difficult to comprehend, traditionally nature or a natural phenomenon. “Nummer acht” captures the sublime: the landscape is devoid of context, of identifying landmarks. The starkness is unsettling. The original audio of the work is the white noise of ice breaking, the ground shattering. When a viewer sits down to watch the full video (ten minutes and ten seconds), they are confronted with an equation of scale. We are tiny—and yet? What are the limits of mankind’s reach? What and where can we reach through industrialization? Just because we can reach a place, should we? The cinematography, the boat’s pace, and the man’s stride are all reliable and steady things, but we understand that the ice, once broken, is unreliable; and there is an underlying sense of anxiety, an ominous tone established by the audio. The horizon functions as an event horizon; as the ice cracks behind the artist, every step forward becomes a new point of no return. However, diverging from traditional narrative arcs, there is no climax or plot twist in the video; only steadiness.

In a similarly ridiculous project, Julian Charrière’s current SFMOMA installation Erratic, features drone footage of Icelandic mountains, Swiss alps, and antarctic glaciers, montaged together into a collective and fluid landscape; “a series of sculptures made from boulders displaced by glacial ice;” and photographs from Charrière’s attempt to melt an iceberg with a blowtorch (Dafoe). The blowtorch is the aspect I find the most ridiculous in this multifaceted video installation.

During the performance of melting the iceberg, Charrière works for eight hours, and he doesn’t necessarily “succeed.” At first, the viewer is likely to revolt—as if the arctic needs any help melting! Absurd! SFMOMA describes it as “a confrontative performance of burning fossil fuels in [an] attempt to melt the iceberg” (Harris). Charrière only partially melts the iceberg. He is but one man, and what this performance reveals is the actual impact a singular person holds on the environment. While it remains true that every individual holds some responsibility for the climate crisis, the futility of Charrière’s project illuminates the individual impact in both directions: destroying our environment and saving it is beyond individual power. When we consider machines against nature, we have to consider the influence of collectivity. This artwork subtly critiques capitalist systems that enable corporations, large-scale production processes, and a lifestyle that relies on them by asking the viewer to consider the scale and the reach of their own actions.

These two glacial video pieces illustrate different ways of thinking about climate change. Van der Werve’s video shows anthropocentric thinking: the viewer confronts a geological epoch where man is the driving force. Man walks ahead of his beastly machine; man and his machine impact the world around them. The steady camera work imitates the gaze of a man in the distance, nearly eye-level. In contrast, Charrière’s work embodies post-anthropocentric thinking. The video elements (and sculpture too) are abstracted, amorphous and tangled. Drone footage deviates from natural human perspectives, and the shots of Charrière with the blow torch (extreme long shots) dwarf him against the landscape, implying that despite his bold actions, he is not the driving force. Similarly, the choice to construct an exhibition with stone, metal, video and photography emulates the postanthropocentric goal of acknowledging the diverse tangle of elements and creatures, living and nonliving, that make up our environment. Charrière’s work emphasizes powers resistant to human forces: the sublimity of the landscape. Ultimately, the goal of post-anthropocentrism is to challenge our (human) perspective and move away from the human ego—for some theorists, this means “to give voice to a vitality intrinsic to materiality” by describing things like dead rats, latex gloves, and bottle caps, with “an active, earthy, not-quite-human capaciousness,” and for others it means to acknowledge interconnectedness where we’ve been taught to see hierarchies (Bennett 3). For Charrière, it is to twist the narrative on an environment that few people can relate to. In interviews, his work has been described as “deal[ing] with ecological concerns on a more philosophical level,” and he himself has denied the (innately hierarchical) classification of being an environmental artist (Dafoe). Rather, he is “creating the work as a discourse about climate change. It addresses a lot of different questions about time and perception, about what we can learn from a place, how we’re reacting to our world” (Dafoe, emphasis mine). Charrière’s work is narrative and observational in a way that subverts solution-motivated approaches to climate change.

The poetic, abundant, sometimes abstracted language of post-anthropocentric theory can get boggy and it is difficult to understand without an underlying understanding of the conditions of the anthropocene. Each mode, anthropocentric and post-anthropocentric, enriches the other with contrast. And in this contrast, the underlying themes and concerns of the two perspectives illuminate their own commonalities. For example, in consumer media narratives, there is the root idea that innovation can lead to a climate solution—but both van der Werve and Charrière’s videos convey a sense of futility which often pervades conversations of climate change.

Anxiety is the uneasiness, distress or dread that preambles an event. In moderation, it helps us stay alert and aware, and it dissipates when the event passes—either when the event turns out to be ok, or when the ramifications are defined and no longer an object of speculation. Climate Anxiety, however, is a different beast, looming on a monumental scale with no singular attainable solution. In the light of this futility, what is the power of video art against our environmental fate? It’s more conceptual than tangible. Video art is an unbounded medium that can uniquely depict potential. It is a tool for translating narratives and dreams, and critically reimagining reality. Video helps to communicate on a temporal scale unlike any other medium. Video paces the viewer. In a video loop the passage of time is replaced by duration, a radical and more relational reimagining of how we experience our surroundings. While the idea of futility is yawning and wide, it is not an insurmountable concept. Video art can leap over the chasm and into speculative futures.

Video art has been and is continually scaling and translating various and diverse landscapes and habitats—not only are the empathic and representational powers of glacial landscapes slim (glaciers only cover roughly 3% of the Earth’s total surface, or 11% of the Earth’s land area), but for most artists they are inaccessible (USGS). Melting glaciers are only one of many climate threats; wildfires rampage, storms strengthen, fresh waters run toxic with who-knows-what, plankton near extinction, and sadly so much more. Other environments face threats regardless of their visibility (both to the eye and to mass media), and video art both depicts these environments and their respective threats. As a reader, keep this in mind—leave room for tropics, prairies, marshlands, global urban environments, and more to enrich your understanding of environmental video art as you gallery hop and find yourself in odd rooms of museums. The way in which video art “structures such a particular and direct relationship with the viewer is reflected in the process of writing about such work. It becomes apparent that it is difficult to discuss pieces that one has not experienced first-hand: in most cases, you had to be there” (Bishop 10). And so our next video landscape is India.

Tejal Shah’s Landfill Dance (2012), a single monitor video projection with a run time of 5 minutes and two seconds, is sometimes screened independently and sometimes as a five video series titled Beyond Waves. The collection of videos is described as “taking inspiration from the multiple swarms of vitalities surrounding us” and exploring how “posthuman relations in which queer futures and intimacies may be embodied and all forms of life and nonlife are interdependent” (Fonderie Darling). Landfill Dance is the epilogue of the installation and is set in a speculative future. It is post-apocalyptic and post-anthropocentric as moony dancers wearing cockroach print clothes (costumes all made from found-objects) dance across a mountainous landfill, a habitat that Shah describes as “an archeological site of the future… an accumulation of our refuse that [is] sometimes transformed by structures built on top… like the plan to build an amusement park on top of the landfill in my video” (van den Berg). Set in a commercially attractionless future, this video depicts a successful world; not in the way that the climate crisis has been avoided, but in the way that it has been succeeded by some life form and some life rhythm. Objects take on a vitality by cluttering the landscape, spilling underfoot, taking the foreground of a shot with dancers in the distance, or by being transformed into bizarrely balanced costumes. The scale of the landscape dwarfs the dancers in long shots, and the movements are slow, nearly static, and in this way are similar to “Nummer acht,” the sense of the video’s sublimity gradually growing. Without romanticizing the place, Shah taps into the ridiculousness of the scenario too: “I decided to work with contemporary dance in this project to create seemingly nonsensical movements within the setting of a landfill to think about the futility of our gestures of sense making and recuperation in the Anthropocene (with a sense of humour of course!).” Far from the clean and sharp shots of ice, Shah describes their art along the same themes that pervade van der Werve and Charrière’s work: futility, sublimity and ridiculousness. But they offer something more futuristic too, in their saturated video art—an element of something suspended—not just time in suspense, but suspended expectation.

While futility can be a consumptive feeling, the fact that videos and video installations like “Nummer acht, everything is going to be alright,” “Erratic” and “Landfill Dance” depict futility is proof of the opposite. Isn’t criticism born from hope or belief in an alternative way? If a video is made that critiques a current system, there is room for a radical alternative, and this idea is only magnified in fictional video art pieces. And so, innately, there lies hope at the bottom of Pandora’s black box cinema.

Photo of camcorder by Thomas William on Unsplash

Emma Fuchs (rhymes with books) is a poet, printmaker and aspiring filmmaker. Emma has many homes but she currently lives in New York City and dreams of endless summer. She is a poetry reader for TriQuarterly and the winner of Foundlings Press’ 2022 Ralph Angel Poetry Prize. Her work is featured/forthcoming in Figure 1, perhappened mag, Pidgeonholes and Public Parking.

Website: https://emma-fuchs.com
Twitter: @emma_fuchs
Instagram: @rhymeswithbooks

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