Mediating Antarctica in digital culture : politics of representation and visualisation in art and science

The point of departure chosen for this chapter is an epistemological one: Antarctica is arguably the most mediated place in the world, and as Elena Glasberg contends, 'more than for any other place on Earth, visual mediation defines and has created the territory of Antarctica'. The geopolitics of knowledge of the Antarctic is, in other words, intimately related to the politics of its representation. From the realm of the imaginary, through direct scientific observation, and increasingly via remote sensing, the Antarctic region is exposed though very particular logics of representation, and through an array of lenses, sensing devices, and technologies of representation. This chapter is concerned with the ways though which the Antarctic is continually sampled through a diversity of technologies of calculation and measurement, and also imagine across distinctive sites of sight; a diversity of gazes - and gazing bodies - that cut across a range of practices of enquiry and modes of knowledge production.