Exposure, a Soils-Based Generative Installation.

Soils surrounding ancient settlements can hold cultural evidence of the activities of the past societies that inhabited these areas. To seek an understanding of how such past societies have reacted to environmental changes requires many data sources including soils-based or geoarchaeological evidence. In a visual and sound-art installation called Exposure, we explore the creative possibilities and problems in presenting such data.  In this installation, these data include information gained through image-analysis of soil materials sampled at the early Norse settlement site of Brattahlíð in south Greenland.  They are used to connote environmental events and consequent human responses through the period of Norse settlement, abandonment, and the recent resettlement by modern-day Greenlandic peoples.  The scientific analysis of landscapes and soils is translated, in a process of critical evaluation, to create the installation. In this real-time generative work, data, images, text readings and environmental sound recordings are used to offer context and potential validation about changes in this extreme environment.  Details of this process, and of the work itself, will be discussed in order to consider the use of such an installation as a means to conceptualize soils-based cultural records.