Frank Halbig’s Antarktika
April 9th, 2008 admin Posted in history, news | Comments Off on Frank Halbig’s Antarktika
About a week ago, I visited Frank Halbig at his office at the SWR Hörspiel (radio play) department in Baden-Baden Germany. Frank has created a moving sonic interpretation of data extracted by EPICA, the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica, covering 742 millennia of climatic history. The work is called »ANTARKTIKA«, a climatic time-travel concert for string quartet, live electronics and video with the Helios String Quartet. I talked to Frank about his work (unfortunately didn’t record any of our conversations, but perhaps I can convince him to do a skype interview in the future), and was struck by his poetic use of the string quartet, the dominant mode of music production in Europe at the time of the first Antarctic explorations, to express the history of climate. I found it to be a very poignant idea and resulting work.