Hey thanks for doing this. Could you share a little bit of information on what you're working on, what the organization you work for does, and maybe a little bit about yourself and how you're settling into Norway—essentially what you've been up to and what you're doing?

Sure. So I'm an Earth scientist, I guess. If we zoom in a little bit, I mostly focus on the cryosphere and polar regions. At the moment, I'm working at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center here in Bergen, Norway.

It's a polar research-focused institute, mainly studying the Arctic, the ocean, ice and atmosphere, their interaction and how these variables are changing in the Arctic. The Nansen Center is named after Fridtjof Nansen, a famous Norwegian polar explorer. I'm specifically working with satellites, particularly synthetic aperture radar satellites, trying to develop a new sea ice drift product in the Arctic with my colleagues. This involves navigating data landscapes, crafting code and cross-referencing realities between these digital representations and the `real world`.

Before that, I was conducting similar research in Antarctica, though with more focus on fieldwork. I’d fly down to the base, then head out onto the ice in a tracked vehicle or helicopter. We’d drill for ice cores, measure snow depth, analyze snow characteristics—things like that.

The work that you're doing, what is the half-life of a project that you work on? Is it mostly for research purposes, or do you often find that the stuff you're working on is to solve a specific issue?

Yeah, it's both. The projects are all on multi-year timescales, and things move pretty slowly. They move even more slowly in research, especially when you need field measurements—it's really hard to get them. Say you come up with a hypothetical model, and you implement it on your computer, writing code, analysing satellite images and comparing to other studies.

Then, when you want to ‘ground truth’ it, checking the model’s errors, you need to go into the field to see what's happening. Getting down (or up) there is a huge process, so everything progresses pretty slowly. I think this dichotomy between model representations and the ‘truth’ is interesting and deserves some questioning. In terms of the purpose of this work, part of it is about answering research questions, which broadly fit into understanding the planet more and hopefully making good decisions based on this information. Then there's also an operational side, like the sea ice research I'm doing—it’s also used for ship navigation. It’s not quite Titanic avoiding icebergs but more identifying areas of impassable sea ice and finding the most efficient paths through these areas. So, it's mostly research, but there are these practical applications.

Nilas.org was such a cool project. You mentioned this when we first started speaking. We wanted to ask about the project. I know you shared some details. Could you talk about what went into the project and how it’s put together?

Yeah. So, Nilas is a website—a web platform—made by my colleague Anton Stecketee and I. It came about because we work with satellite data a lot. There are these satellites orbiting the Earth and imaging it all the time. You can access some of it through Google Earth, but I would say most of it, particularly the cool stuff, is really inaccessible to the average person. 

You need specialized software and skills, and often, you need to know how to code just to look at a single image or download it. We made Nilas to try and create a user interface similar to Google Maps or those mapping tools that people are used to, but with much more complex and specialized data. Nilas focuses on Antarctic sea ice. It’s got a little calendar where you can flick through different images from different times, overlay all the products, and if you’re on a boat down there, you can drop your location in and plot things over the top.

The point was to make the simplest, easiest platform we could. Making it was fun. I had to learn JavaScript and a few other things because I’ve never really been a front-end person—always hiding in the shadows and I don’t know much about “design”. Anton did a lot of heavy lifting on this project, particularly when it came to natively rendering satellite data in the browser.

These are synthetic aperture radar images of sea ice and ice shelves along with sea ice drift vectors around Antarctica.

You moved over to the dark side ever so slightly, haha. I love front-end. I think it’s an interesting aspect of coding because it’s very fast-paced. You can do back-end work, and the industry doesn’t change all that much, but front-end changes rapidly. 

While it can be daunting as a career prospect, it’s also interesting because every year, there are new things happening with what’s possible on the web.

As technology develops, as our phones get better, and as the interfaces and roadmaps for browsers develop over time, it opens up possibilities for what you can do. This is something I’m experimenting with, with a lot of 3D stuff and WebGL.

It’ll be interesting to see how this looks in five or ten years because there’s a scope that’s recently been agreed upon by a lot of the big browsers for WebGPU. You can get quite detailed renders working in the browser, and you could describe it as something similar to early Unity stuff. Having that work in Safari is awesome, so there’s a lot happening in that space.

Yeah, I think I’ve undervalued the power of the browser. I was always working in these cryptic, home-rolled setups and doing complex computation and visualization within Python or GIS software. But once I learned a few tricks and little workarounds to make things work smoothly, I realized it’s a great tool. Not just because everyone is familiar with it.

The key thing is that more people can access this information we’re talking about, like Antarctic satellite data. For me, that’s really important because it allows you to communicate with a wider audience. So much of science can feel esoteric, convoluted, and out of reach—especially when it’s about a remote, almost romantic place like Antarctica or the Arctic. There are a lot of stories to tell. You see books and research papers, but an interactive data visualization tool sits somewhere in between—it’s a really interesting space.

I’d love to talk about the “Sastrugi” performance. What’s the concept behind that project?

To explain these names briefly, Nilas refers to a young type of sea ice that forms on the ocean’s surface. It’s really thin and flexible, a little bit dark, and as waves move through the ocean, you’ll see them move through Nilas—it’s young, thin ice. Sastrugi refers to waves formed in snow by wind coming from a prevailing direction. Sastrugi is an art project with another collaborator, Diana Chester. 

We’ve been working together for a while, and were awarded this art residency through the Theatre Royal and the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania. The work we produced was performed at their summer festival. It’s a sound and visual-focused performance artwork.

We had been making things that weren’t really fit for a live setting, and this residency pushed us to create a performance about Antarctica and sea ice, drawing on Diana’s expertise in sound and my background in data visualization and music, and recontextualizing that for a theater environment, which was a new environment for both of us.

Everyone’s sitting down, velvet chairs and carpet—it’s a very different vibe from an art gallery or a club, where we both have more experience. Sastrugi had three stages in the performance. The first stage was a spatial, immersive audio experience in the dark—a deep listening exercise. These were all field recordings I had taken using hydrophones. I would drill holes in the ice and lower these microphones down, leaving them for 8-9 hours, then come back and sniff out the interesting bits.

There were lots of groaning, cracking, and tinkling sounds, as well as seals chatting and calling to each other. All those sounds meshed together for that first part. The second part was a sonification, which involved turning satellite data into sound, paired with cinematography from another collaborator. It was more like a movie. The idea behind the sonification was to capture the degrading amount of sea ice in Antarctica as time passes.

Every year, the ice grows and melts in a natural cycle, but it’s generally getting less and less over time. That’s worrying because the ice acts as a big mirror, keeping the Earth cool by reflecting solar radiation. As we get less ice, the ocean absorbs that radiation instead, warming the Earth. The third section was a violin composition with another friend Bea, where we also had microphones frozen in ice cores that resonated and created a feedback loop. It was fun to make a more complete performance and artwork. I also got to wear one of those Britney mics and give lighting cues while playing music which was hilarious and fun. We have an article coming out in the MIT press journal Leonardo covering the piece in detail if anyone wants to read more about it.

Thanks for sharing. Do you think you’ll do any art projects while you’re in Norway?

Yes, definitely. I have a residency at the Bergen senter for elektronisk kunst, BEK. I did a workshop with them—the ‘Performance and Procedure’ workshop with Mark Fell and Rian Treanor. That led to a piece where we created this generative, human improvisational ensemble. It was a really interesting framework for collaboration. During my residency, I’ll have some studio time to develop new work, likely continuing along that same line of exploration. I’m also presenting at Prøverommet, a long-running performance series, in winter which should suit my palette. 

What’s been your impression of the culture and the scene for this kind of work where you are? What’s the reception been like compared to Australia?

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think there is a bigger appetite... It’s hard to generalize. Look, I’ll just say that without comparing the two places, there’s a huge appreciation for sound here in Norway, particularly with the friluftsliv (open air living) attitude toward nature. It’s a community where the work I’m interested in making has a solid audience and people who engage with it.

Also, the arts funding model here and the institutions that support artists seem really strong, especially for a country of this size. That leads to lots of opportunities for collaboration. I’ve met a few amazing artists here and hope to work together with them. However I know I probably have some recency bias and the Bergen city council recently announced the withdrawal of already awarded kunstnerstipend (artist grants) so it’s not all grass is greener. I’ve come across some great organisations like Bergen Kjøtt and Comrades that do important work across activism, art and mutual aid including a recent fundraiser for the escalating conflict in Lebanon in collaboration with Beirut Synth Center.

What’s your philosophy on the space your’re inhabiting? I mean, you’re doing this work in the data space, working with all these data sets and inputs and outputs, and then you’re using similar information in your own work as an artist. What’s the intersection here? Why go to the lengths of doing that? You can make art without those inputs.

So, what’s easier? Yeah, well, I guess at the start, my creative work and my scientific practice were really separate. Over time, they naturally got closer and closer together, and I eventually made a conscious decision to let them merge.

At the beginning of my ‘professional life’ I didn’t want anyone at work to know about the creative things I was doing and tried to keep them separate. I think that was partially a fear of not being taken seriously as a scientist because I was out DJing under a bridge or something. Eventually I just gave up on that and decided to just bring my full self to each of them. That art-science venn diagram just became a little circle and I hit a good balance between things.

A lot of scientists who come into this space with the attitude of making art can get obsessive about one-to-one representation. For instance, in sonification, they might feel it has to be so precise, bringing ‘scientific rigour’ into the art creation. While that has its merits, it can also block certain creative pathways. When you’re talking about inputs and outputs grounded in data, I agree that I don’t need them to make art about these things, but I enjoy them as inspiration.

However, I’m not rigidly bound to them. A good comparison would be sonification versus a violin composition. The sonification is very precise, turning satellite images into numbers, which then become notes or parameters in Ableton, for example. The violin composition, on the other hand, was more improvisational and creative, using data as a loose inspiration. So, I try to have both rigorous, detail-oriented work and more interpretive, loose creations and I don’t think these quantitative sources are more special than the qualitative ones.

Thanks for sharing. It’s interesting because the music doesn’t depend on the data, but it can influence it. For me, I find it compelling because it adds context to what you're doing. Also, if you're closely tied to the data, if you have a relationship with it—in your case, you actually do since you work with this stuff in your day job—it helps fill in some gaps. I think we’ve really underestimated the importance of context in art and music these days. Data is just one way of adding that, in some form. I mean, context comes in many ways. It could come from the person creating it, or from the process behind it. But knowing that makes a difference. Take Spotify, for example. They added the Genius feature, where you listen to a track with lyrics, and they include notes and descriptions about what went into making the music. Some of my favourite hip-hop tracks have become even more meaningful because of the added context.

Like, "Oh yeah, this X verse here is a reference to this Y world event." Just knowing that adds depth to it. I think data is a great way to bring that kind of context into this space. It’s really fascinating.

Regarding those tracks; would you have wanted that context when you first listened to them?

That’s an interesting point. Can it speak for itself in isolation? I think that draws me in at first, but coming back years later, the context fortifies it for me. It’s different for everyone, what makes you appreciate the things you like. It would be interesting if there was a way to showcase something you’re working on, provide no context, let people enjoy it, and then provide the context later. 

Because if I knew all the technicalities or trivia of how a track was made before I listened to it, would I enjoy it the same way? It’s almost like context without context—I still need to witness the art first, experience it, before I can appreciate the context. So, there’s a duality there; they depend on each other.

I think so, too. It’s interesting. When we had the Sastrugi theatre performance, we had two nights and ran a kind of quasi-experiment. The first night, we had a Q&A and explanation afterward, where the audience could ask questions. It was a long Q&A—about 30 minutes. They asked a lot of questions about how it was made, the inspiration behind the violin score, and the sonification. 

On the second night, I did a little explanation at the start, briefly laying out some of that context stuff you’re talking about—what the three parts were. I don’t think one approach was necessarily better than the other. Personally, I prefer providing no context first and then offering it afterward. But some people in the audience said they really appreciated knowing certain things beforehand because it made them listen more deeply and carefully. It’s hard to know which balance is just right because someimtes you want the art to speak for itself, but you also want people to get the most out of it.

That’s fascinating. Maybe you could ask people when they enter if they would like context—give them a choice.

Yeah, I’ll think about that for the next show. Though sometimes it’s nice to just do what I want.

What’s your plan then? How long are you staying in Norway? Do you have any plans afterward, or are you planning to stay here for a while?

I’ve got a multi-year contract here doing this research including some fieldwork in Svalbard, which is an island in the Arctic. I’ll keep plugging away on the sound and art stuff in parallel with this. Who knows what will come next. I would love to apply for the European Space Agency astronaut program, but they haven’t advertised in ages.

Otherwise, I might see if I can work for NASA in their Earth observation program or get involved with the MIT Media lab. Right now, I’m working with the European Space Agency—they fund my research here. I’ll just take it one step at a time.

It’s good to have that on the periphery at least—to know what you can steer toward. I’m the same; I don’t really have five-year or ten-year plans because it seems silly. The person I am in two years might be completely different. But it’s good to have that peripheral vision, especially career-wise. That’s awesome. Svalbard is going to be really interesting. Are you planning on visiting the Seed Vaults?

Yeah, I’ll get to visit a few of those places.

I’d love to go. They look so cool.

They do look cool, yeah. Mark and Rian went up there for a week and did lots of recording and audio work in Svalbard through BEK. I haven’t been yet, but the photos and sounds they captured were great, so I’m excited to go up there.

That’s on my list too. I was checking out Dyveke Sanne, the artist who designed the outer shell for the Seed Vault. I don’t know if you’ve seen pictures of it at night, but it’s essentially encased glass with metal and light inside.

Oh, yeah! It’s stunning.

It’s such a nice representation of art and science. They didn’t need to employ someone to create that, but it’s cool to see it. It’s definitely something special.

Yeah, definitely. A lot of the good things don’t need to happen, but I’m glad they do.

That’s very true. It could have been just a very boring vault with gray walls and nothing else, but they decided to go a little bit further.

But if you mention the Seed Vault, people know what you’re talking about, even though it’s this random, climate-controlled scientific institution in Svalbard. Most people know it because of that iconic façade.

That’s definitely something. I think that’s it; thank you so much for doing this.

I think we’ve covered a lot. It was good to chat.