Antarctica – while you were sleeping

Visitors gaze in awe at a full-size iceberg that appears in the night city, in the place of a grand building. Videos of a real iceberg are projected onto the structure, accompanied by eerie ice sounds of groaning and cracking.

The installation enables members of the public to experience an iceberg at scale, with the goal of inspiring respect for the natural world. Artist Joseph Michael and his team voyaged to Antartica to record the icebergs, and were themselves surprised by the dramatic soundscape they discovered.

The piece was first displayed in March 2017 on Auckland Museum in New Zealand. It went on to appear on the United Nations headquarters in New York in the lead-up to the UN’s climate action summit in 2019.

The making of Antarctica – while you were sleeping is the subject of a documentary, available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jFBg0Ppsx6k?si=qtESW0FuhfTOq0UT