Slow Dissolve

<div style="padding: 60% 0 0 0; position: relative;"><iframe style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%;" title="Slow Dissolve (Trailer)" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/1184942991?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" frameborder="0"></iframe></div> <p> </p> <p><i>Slow Dissolve</i> presents a close study of two archives: a repository of prehistoric ice studied for building climate models, and a collection of cinema reels preserving data for a post-apocalyptic future. At a German laboratory for polar science, we first watch sample cores of ancient glacial ice be analyzed with diagnostic instruments. Trapped within are oxygen bubbles and dust particles, traces of lost atmospheres; their information can help improve predictive computational climate models. Most of the ice samples were drilled at sites across northern Greenland, and the cores now reside in a storage facility outside Copenhagen. In that frozen library, a lone archivist examines and prepares specimens to be shipped to outside laboratories, showing us fragile evidence of the planet before civilization. The film then shifts to the production facility of the Norwegian data storage company Piql, which prints customer data onto analog film reels for long-term storage in a disused coal mine on the Arctic island of Svalbard. The material processes of cinema have here been repurposed into a post-apocalyptic data container. <i>Slow Dissolve</i> connects two cycles of information: polar ice is extracted to help reveal our climate future; while human data, materialized onto film, is buried deep in the Arctic to shield it from the effects of our own damage. <a href="https://www.librarystack.org/contact" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Contact Library Stack</a> for screening copy.</p>