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Glacial till: the product of relentless grinding, pushing, pulverizing, mashing, sitting, sliding, waiting, flowing, advancing and retreating— repeating.
google map of Long Island and Cape Cod
Over the next several months we will document and creatively traverse the piles of glacial till that the Laurentide ice sheet left in its wake a couple thousand years ago. We’ll start in our own backyard, specifically between Brooklyn and the tip of Cape Cod. We have tentatively named the project Till.
If you look at a map of Long Island and look off the tip to the east, you’ll soon run into a small, curious place called Block Island. If you keep heading east/northeast from there, you encounter Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, and wind up the arm of Cape Cod. This arc of islands and landscapes are the tilled glacial aftermath of the Pleistocene. We’re interested in stitching together these seemingly disparate landscapes and cultures by seeing them through their Pleistocene-inflected past.
ferry unloading at Orient Point, NY, image FOP 2013
ferry ride to Shelter Island, image FOP 2013, from Till.
We already started the project by tracing the terminal till while driving from Brooklyn eastward on the Long Island Expressway, which uses the spine of the Long Island moraine as its support. We took a short ferry ride to Shelter Island, a relatively small pile of glacier-plowed till tucked between Long Island’s north and south East End tips. You can take a three-minute time-lapse journey with us to Shelter Island and watch the Orient Point ferry disembark on Vimeo.
Shelter Island highlighted in red, “Geology of Long Island” map by Dr. J. Bret Bennington
This summer and fall we’ll extend our documentation to Block Island, and the Cape Cod and the Islands. Cape Cod’s Route 6 also follows the crest of a moraine up until things grind to a halt at the sandy tip of Provincetown.
We plan for Till to be hybrid journey, based both in fiction and in reality. We’re interested in exploring how the force and event-ness of the ice sheet, long retreated, lingers as a force that shapes daily life and senses of place today. Contemporary cultural and economic realities, such as the taste of North Fork wine and its emergence as a major activity on Long Island, is a direct result of the Pleistocene. In some ways, Till is similar to our 2010 project Below the Line, which required us to project our imaginations 20,000 years into the past as we scouted Utah for the present day traces of the once massive, but presently extinct, Lake Bonneville.
Till also links up with a forthcoming smudge project that will include places where geo-bio dynamics of the Pleistocene are less imaginary and more material, even today. Next spring we’ll be based in Oslo as guest researchers for a project called Future North. This provocative project is supported by the Norwegian Research Council and is managed by Making the Geologic Now contributor Janike Kampevold Larsen, and based at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Future North considers the changing environments of the deep north and will include excursions to locations such as Vardø, Svalbard, Murmansk and Tromsø.
Pleistocene ice once connected sites such as Long Island to the far northern regions of the planet. As the material traces of those connections recede further and further, new forces are set into motion by the emerging conditions of the Anthropocene. Through our work on Till and Future North, we will develop field-based projects that attempt to aesthetically respond to the rapidly changing environments of the north. We hope to develop aesthetic relays that invite audiences to experience what is near (i.e. “here,” New York/Cape Cod) and what seems far (i.e. “there,” the European/Scandinavian Arctic North) as being directly related by diverse and highly consequential material connections (past, present, and future).
The Weichselian ice sheet over Scandinavia, image wikicommons
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