Reuben Wu is a multidisciplinary artist who uses technology and the concept of time and space to help tell compelling stories about the world we inhabit. He is also a National Geographic Photographer, and a leading artist in the digital art space, whose work belongs in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MoMA.
The Sea of Ice is a beautiful capture of a landscape now gone. Its ephemeral nature was captured and immortalized on the Ethereum Blockchain as a 1/1 NFT (Non-Fungible Token). The Digital and Physical pieces both sit in the 55H collection.
Reuben himself described The Sea of Ice as “A testament to impermanence, an ephemeral landscape in constant flux, and the act of memorialising its image for generations to come, through the medium of photography. While my practice as a whole aims to reveal hidden meanings on a geologic time scale, this artwork shows a snapshot of a kinetic landscape which no longer exists in this form. On a long and arduous journey at 16,000ft in the Cordillera Blanca in Peru, I used my camera to photograph a glacier illuminated by my light-carrying drone. This allowed me to reveal details and textures never witnessed before, in a way which can be described as ‘terrestrial chiaroscuro’.”
The still image version of this piece was published in National Geographic Magazine, Sept 2020.
2880 x 2160 – Sound and visuals by the artist.
In further conversations with Reuben, we explored the time capsule this piece now represents. Succumbed by the effects of Global Warming, the landscape has largely melted and no longer even qualifies as a Glacier. This makes the piece even more unique in its dichotomy between mutability of the landscape combined with the immutability of the blockchain it is stored on.
If you see the piece in person, you may find it comes alive looking at it through the application “ArtVive” on your phone.