June 1, 2021 Journal article Open Access

Landscape/mindscape/langscape: The ephemerality of the digital and of the real in Marlene Creates's video-poems for ice and snow

Carmen Concilio

AbstractThe present essay aims at illustrating Marlene Creates's web project Brickle, nish, and knobbly (2015), as a key example of Eco-Digital Humanities. First of all, it is a digital work of art made of ice images. Besides, it is also a digital archive meant to salvage a linguistic treasury of local idioms that both name and describe all types of snow and ice formations in Newfoundland, Canada. Therefore, the present analysis proves the special quality and inevitable ephemeral status of this project, for it constitutes a multimodal and multimedia web-archive, subject to possible erasure, or obsolescence in the face of new computer programmes and platforms developments. The archive is also an open instrument for everybody's use: a digital audio-visual (poetic) dictionary, that ultimately functions as a challenge to climate change effects, that might dissolve both the ice formations and the language that accompanies them. Since the real world is no less ephemeral than the world of the web, this contribution also proves how Marlene Creates's artwork envisions and embraces an ecological salvaging of our present and future landscape, mindscape, and langscape.