Cody Thomas

Week 6 Art Experiment

28 July 2022

Harnessing the Ephemeral: Ice Spiral

I enjoyed learning more about this form of installation, specifically the work of Brazilian artist
Nele Azevedo’s human ice sculpture installations. I find it interesting that an artist works with a
medium that can be unforgiven if the ice is dropped and other conditions. One must work
quickly to set the installation up before the pieces start to melt.

For my installation experiment, I wanted to work with ice. I thought about where to place it: in
my sink, on my patio, but I ended up working on this assignment at my work in the back parking
lot that no one uses. During lunch, I purchased a bag of ice from Sonic because the ice from this
restaurant is small cubes, and I thought that it would be great to make a design.
My ice installation is how I feel in this Florida heat – melting!

While working on this piece, I realized the smaller pieces melt faster. Yes, it was also 90 degrees
with a higher temperature on the pavement. I also “tried” to install the spiral in direct sunlight.
The second I placed a handful of ice down, it immediately began to melt. This experiment also
made me think about using larger amounts of ice as well as pouring straight from the bag
rather than running to scoop handfuls of ice to place them onto the pavement. I think next time
working with ice, I will change it to half in direct sunlight and the other in a shaded area with
grass. This should give two different temperatures to melt the ice at different rates. I would
also use the standard larger cubes of ice as well.

I recorded this video in a horizontal format, but not sure why it is now vertical. I hit record on
my iPhone, watched the ice melt for a minute or so, and then went into my office. I returned to
discover my phone went into a cool-down mode as my phone got too hot being in the sunlight.
This caused the GoPro to stop recording, catching absolutely nothing from a different aerial
angle. But I was lucky my phone caught most of my installation before powering off. I was
hoping to keep the video recording through the entire water melting process and drying up.

One video is the real-life speed and is ten minutes. I then made a copy and sped up the video to
9x’s the speed making the video one minute.