Peggy Weil: Core Memory

"The pace of climate change is too slow to apprehend," says artist Peggy Weil, "and its substances—gases like methane and CO2—are invisible." A trailblazer of digital art, Weil has recently turned her attention to what she calls Extended Landscapes: portraits of the invisible layers "beneath our feet, above our heads, and back in time." Her work reveals the planet to be a recording device, inscribing climatic and geological events into polar ice sheets and sedimentary strata. Core Memory brings two of Peggy Weil's "underscapes" to the immersive 24-foot screen in MoMA's lobby. From the youngest snow to the oldest ice, 88 Cores descends two miles and 110,000 years through Greenland's ice sheet, where time is preserved in vertical bands of ice, air, and gas. In 18 Cores, Weil shifts from polar cold to geothermal heat, assembling images of rock cores extracted from California's Salton Sea between 1985 and 1986. This film reveals a subterranean landscape of shales, siltstones, and sandstones dating to the Pleistocene era. Through these vertical time capsules, Weil makes the physical evidence of environmental shifts perceptible and undeniable.