“Virtual reality allows us to illustrate the temporality around the disappearance of glaciers” – Jaibao Li (ONCE A GLACIER)

ONCE A GLACIER (a 2023 SXSW selected experience) is a VR Film that puts the viewer in parallel with the perspective of a glacier, which have a life-span of tens of thousands of years, but are disappearing within the lifespan of a human. Interview with director Jaibao Li.

ONCE A GLACIER, a glimpse of Alaska and an ecological disaster

Jaibao Li: ONCE A GLACIER tells the story of this relationship between a girl and a piece of glacier ice. As the girl grows up, grows older, the existence of the glacier is threatened, and its viewer is taken on this seemingly futile journey of trying to save this one last piece of glacier.

JL: I’m an artist, designer and creative technologist. I’m also a professor at University Texas-Austin. I work a lot on designing the headset part, what’s happening inside both the software and the hardware. I’ve also made some games before, but this is the first time I’ve made a film.

JL: I lived in Alaska for a year and I would go to glaciers every week and it’s so gorgeous, but at the same time so sad. You hike for 10 hours and you realize where you started your hike is where the glacier was 10 years ago. Looking back, I don’t know how many times I cried just looking at that. And that’s where I got the idea to make a VR film about the disappearance of glaciers. When we think about geological time or glacier time, we think about maybe it’s millions of years, but they are actually disappearing within our lifetime.

In Inupiaq tradition, 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. Glacial time, once was slow, is now fast. By telling the story of the life journey of glacier ice along with the life of a girl, the film makes this human-nature timescale tangible and warns the audience that the consequences of climate change are within our lifetimes. “Once a Glacier” shows a gesture of nurturing, and whether the girl’s efforts are successful or not, the work suggests a poignant level of grace and humility for moving forward into the future.

Involving the Inupiaq people

JL: Because of our myopia, our perception of the now, we don’t see that. So in this film, we are trying to compress time to have this girl’s lifetime be in the same trajectory of the glacier’s lifetime. And you can see that change of time as the glacier disappears. I wrote the story first and I collaborated with an Inupiaq poet, Joan Naviyuk Kane, who is from Alaska and grew up around glaciers. She helped turn the story into a poem.

JL: There are several Inupiaq people involved with the film. There is Joan, the poet, as well as the voice over of the grandma that you hear later in the film. We learned a lot from her. She likes telling a lot of stories that were integrated into the film.

JL: 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.

Sound design around a glacier

JL: It’s interesting to think about sound. There is a lot of research using AI to understand what difference species and nature are doing. Like listening to the sound of a bubble bursting and trying to figure out the melting rate of glaciers this year. But also in indigenous culture, there is this concept of deep listening and you grow together with nature. There is a parallel with deep listening AI research and deep listening in indigenous cultures.

JL: There’s a big emphasis on the sound in the film. Different glaciers have very distinctive characteristics, they have different sounds, different visual styles, and there are different ways to hike on them. We hiked around glaciers capturing their sounds. There’s also this chirping sound you will hear in the film. It’s not a bird; it’s not the forest. It’s simply the bursting of ice bubbles when the sun is coming out. You don’t usually hear it much if you’re not paying attention to it. We would hold the microphone super close to the ice bubbles in order to capture the sound.

JL: I couldn’t find the right word to describe this chirping sound. Later, I found a word in the indigenous language, “Tagish”, and this word is both the name of their tribe and also means the sound of the breaking of ice. Language shapes how we perceive nature and how we perceive reality. I’m trying to avoid anthropomorphizing glaciers, but instead you are like a buddy, you grow along with the glacier. You’re trying to relate the lifetime of the girl with the lifetime of the glacier. It’s a gesture of nurturing.

JL: There is a live performance dance version that showed at IDFA in Amsterdam. There is a dancer, covered in motion capture sensors, and she is the glacier. When she dances, you can see a particle system that looks like she is the glacier. There is also a girl and you can feel the relationship intensify, like an intimate moment, between the girl and the dancer.

https://www.jiabaoli.org/once-a-glacier