Once a Glacier

A Virtual Reality film that tells the story of a relationship between a girl and a piece of glacier,

where as the girl grows up, the existence of the glacier is threatened.

“In traditional Inupiaq stories, the glaciers carry memories from the past and communicate their memories through the glacier’s songs. They circulate. They transform. They are living.”

Interactive Virtual Reality Film (15 min)

Once a Glacier tells the story of a relationship between a girl and a glacier. As the girl grows older, the existence of the ice is threatened, and the viewer is taken on a journey through her seemingly futile efforts to protect what was once an entire glacier. The story is inspired by Jiabao Li’s own experience from two years she lived in Alaska, where she was the young girl protecting a piece of ice in the freezer. In Inupiaq tradition, a tribe of indigenous people from northwestern Alaska, glaciers carry memories from the past and communicate them in song. The climate crisis has become a terrifying reality that includes seeing the end of glaciers—the end of these sung histories—happen before our eyes. Once a Glacier shows a gesture of nurturing, and whether the girl’s efforts are successful, the work suggests a poignant level of grace and humility for moving forward into the future.

The team recorded the sound on the glaciers in Alaska and modeled the glaciers from the satellite data of Matanuska glaciers, to document the disappearing nature. The VR film relates the life of a human to natural phenomena. We think of nature's time scale as millions of years and humans’ are under a hundred, yet with the current speed of climate change, many glaciers are vanishing within our lifetime. Glacial time, once was slow, is now fast. By telling the story of the life journey of a piece of glacial ice and its glacier of origin along with the life of a girl, the film makes this human-nature timescale tangible.

The film has received critical acclaim at SXSW, IDFA, and Raindance, was nominated for Best Immersive Experience, Best Immersive Experience for Social Impact, and won the Best VR Short award at Cannes World Film Festival.

Exhibition view at Today Future Biennale: To Your Eternity

Live performance at IDFA, Amsterdam. Augmented with motion capture, the dancer embodies the glacier, tracing the memory of glacier from ice age to Anthropocene through her ice core. The audience confront the birth and death of glacier through the girl’s point of view.

Once a Glacier at Times Art Museum in Chongqing, China.

People can kayak to control the progression of the story.

The glaciers are modeled from the satellite data of Matanuska glaciers, to document the disappearing nature.

I could hear a distant song

calling me to cross bright threads

of silt-thick water

as they ribboned valleys new.

The music came from blue-

white sleep and green-

blue rough.

Through and through,

I brought myself

as near I could

to brightness, brilliance,

and near-silence

changed by what

was and what is,

between ice and water,

water and the dazzled air.

She raises into view,

luster and frozen elixir.

A tattering gown,

a crown of blue

like drowned sky,

hue of lupine

crushed underfoot

into teal gem—

nothing could be only cold

in her beautiful light.

Transformation

pouring at the brink,

her white gleam

of infinite winter

into water—

not a thaw or melt,

but the threat

of disappearance.

It all began with snow

remembering winter,

opening into the dazzle

of endless still blue after

countless storms.

At her feet

I understood

the ravishing mystery

as brilliant as hard stars

flickering into a river

shifting into veins

of cold,

enduring

love.

I am not alone.

I am the keeper of frozen memory

brimming always, of time

that should never end, of blue

ice pure to its blue core.

I am not alone.

A fragment of her beauty

still true to her vast, distant

splendor. I must work against

thaw, against the shifting

of everything to nothing.

I am not alone.

A purpose can be slow,

incremental. She is but a part

of winter, one I wish to protect

from dissolving into careless spring.

I am not alone.

I become patient and predictable,

I administer kindness

without thought for the breaking

ice that might want to be broken.

I am not alone.

I can make something whole again.

I can control my own affection,

always growing, always reminded

of the shimmer of need.

I am not alone.

Maybe my increasing purpose

is the custody of a certain kindness.

Caring for the girl in me,

the girl in the glacier,

we are not alone.

Together we remember

the parents we never really had,

the children we were, the small

perfect details we protect.

Preparing for return as sudden as a sheet of lightning,

to be alone.

What was love I could not leave to neglect and then abandon,

at best uncertain, at worst, dire.

The whole world disagrees with me.

Horrible and fast,

I see everything darkening.

There is nothing that remembers snow.

Oblivion. Obliteration.

Observing the world gone to ruin.

The glacier, too, is orphaned.

Did I imagine I could return perfection to a flawed swamp?

Did I think that I could restore the light of the unseen heavens reflected,

the firmament burning into hopelessness?

Parched and diminished,

I could not have had worse fears burn us.

I kept alive the deceit of restoration.

Instead, a wreck and devastation.

In a dream, I would see the guilty world

forgiven of its grime and waste.

In a dream, some purity amid pollution.

There is no sleep here, however—

I hover into nothing

while I grind the inevitable

facts into my own mind.

Old. Weak. Sick.

A glacier I might pronounce like grief.

I shut myself into my sorrow.

We recorded the sound on the glaciers in Alaska. In the local indigenous culture’s language, Tagish, both is the name of their tribe and means “the sound of the break-up of ice”.

This VR film relates the lifetime of a human to natural phenomena. We think of nature's time scale as millions of years and humans’ are under a hundred, yet with the current speed of climate change, many glaciers are vanishing within our lifetime. Glacial time, once was slow, is now fast. By telling the story of the life journey of a piece of glacial ice and its glacier of origin along with the life of a girl, the film makes this human-nature timescale tangible and warns the audience that climate change is happening right now and the consequences are within our lifetimes.