NAISA Sound Byte 16 - Ice Voices with Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant
Interactive artwork about the disappearing ice on the St. Lawrence River
Photographer Joan Sullivan and Composer Robin Servant, from Rimouski, Québec, describe their interactive art installation Ice Voices in this video. The artwork features abstract photographs of ice on the St. Lawrence River, created with Intentional Camera Movement (ICM), as well as underwater sound recordings made with hydrophones of the ice in the St. Lawrence.
The interactive artwork invites visitors to listen to what the disappearing ice is trying to say, and to use their sense of touch and vision to explore the sounds more deeply. Underwater recordings of ice “voices” can be both fascinating and destabilizing. They pull listeners into their evocative vortex, coaxing them to listen more intently to the non-human world.
The commentary in this video was recorded on September 26, 2025 during an artist talk on the opening day of the exhibit, which continues until January 5, 2026 at the NAISA North Media Arts Centre in South River, Ontario, Canada. Ice Voices is presented by New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) and the video is produced by NAISA as well.
Transcript of Ice Voices video:
Joan Sullivan: Ice Voices is an interactive, immersive installation where we invite the public to enter the artwork, to become part of the artwork, to slow down and instead of just looking at something on a wall, to literally go into the centre and to try to imagine that you’re there swimming in the St. Lawrence with these blocks of glace, and maybe if you’re lucky, you can hear what the glace is trying to tell us about climate change. I said it in French. What the ice is trying to tell us about climate change.
Robin Servant: Yes, and it’s multi-sensory because (there) are visual(s)… audio, and there is also a touch part, tactile part, because the photos are embossed in Braille. The sentence(s) are the same … in the sound installation (as the) sentence(s) from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report.
The ice sounds come from the centre of the room. So, when that sound happened, I wanted it to be so different. To be like radical altérité, like “Oh! I don’t know what is that…”
If you only.. listen to the (text), it says, basically in three language(s), that we’re doomed, and that... it’s going super bad and it’s super anxious. But if you take an action and engage with the photos and the Braille, something happens… I wanted that happening to be big and kind of mysterious and magical, so that when you take an action you get out of your anxiety and something that’s new (and) unknown happens, and you just have to bond with it or learn how to live with that new thing that’s created with your action.
Joan: Absolutely. Robin used the word altérité in French, which means otherness. It’s like trying to -
Robin: Is that a word in English? Altérité?
Joan: No. It means otherness. But it’s exactly what I also wanted to achieve, which is to imagine the world from a different perspective, or from a perspective of a nonhuman. And for me, of course, the St. Lawrence River is a being, is alive. And the ice - I keep saying glace - is part of the St. Lawrence. And we live so close to the St. Lawrence. It’s the inspiration for much of my ‘Oeuvre’ - I love that word in French.
We see the changes. I think everybody sees the changes. Everyone has smelled the smoke. Everyone has seen the flooding, or the droughts. We are visual. We’ve seen it. But does it translate into action?
And that’s what we’ve created. We’ve created a tiny little action. You lift your hand and you touch the photo, which is of course taboo in most galleries. That little action will open a door to this other world. And, it’s kind of shocking. It’s like, what? What is that? It’s other-worldly, isn’t it?
Robin: I’m always fascinated when, I get an experience that I don’t understand, either hearing a new language, seeing a thing I haven’t seen before. And I’m really interested in bringing, not translation but transposition, of different signals and experiences and to bring them (into) a form. And it happens that my domain is sound and time. So I try to find ways to make some things that I don’t understand, to give them forms, and to make them appear and to be sensible.
We have so many words to describe what we are seeing. We can have 20 different words to tell just (the) nuance(s) of red - we have 10, 20, 30 that the average person knows. (But) just a few words about sound. (For) the description of sound we can say loud, soft, high, low. But many people don’t have that many words … because we have no education (about) sound or it’s -
Joan: minimal
Robin: Yes. Very minimal.
Joan: Yes. So, the senses. I mean we’re visual, but I actually encourage people to close their eyes… I’m a visual artist. Close your eyes and listen,… touch and try to change your perspective.
It’s definitely an exhibit that you just can’t come in the door, quickly walk through, and say you’ve seen it. You have to live it. You have to slow down. And that would be good advice for all of us. We’re just on a… treadmill. And it’s just never stopping. Coming to NAISA is a way to… become grounded. I think we need that right now in this chaotic period.
Are we collectively blind to climate change? And I knew what my answer was, but how do you translate that into a photo? And so I kept playing with the idea of blindness, because I repeat myself… we see what’s happening, but… it’s not resonating somewhere deep inside.
It actually happened during the second year of COVID. I had an art exhibit in an artist-run Arts Centre in Rimouski in November-December of 2021. And on the day of taking down the exhibit, I arrived early, and I’m walking around the empty Gallery, and I’m just looking at my work, and I just had this existential moment of… I didn’t really like my work. You know, it’s never happened to me, and I had spent 40 years of my life as a documentary photographer. And I just told the director of the Arts Centre, I said, I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I don’t think I want to hang any more photos two-dimensionally on a wall and have people come in, and… keep their distance, and say, “Oh, that’s nice. What is it?” And (Robin and I) mentioned it earlier, I didn’t know that my next step was going to be to suspend from the ceiling, but that is actually what happened. I was looking for a different way to share my photos.
But my photos also changed during COVID. I spent a lot of time walking along the shores of the St. Lawrence, because of the… what do they call it?… Distance Sociale.
Robin: … Social Distancing.
Joan: And I had a lot of anxiety not just about COVID but also about the climate. I won’t go too much into the detail, but there was this moment where the sun was setting on the St. Lawrence. It was a day where there was no wind. It was actually on January 1st of 2020. So, COVID hadn’t truly started, but you’d (be) beginning to hear about China. No wind, no ice, beautiful sunset… sky was just one of those bright red orangey skies. Because there’s no wind, because there’s no ice, the water of the St. Lawrence reflected perfectly, like a mirror, the sky. And I just had this freak-out moment where literally I thought the Fleuve, the St. Lawrence River, was on fire. I mean it was like I was not expecting that and I couldn’t..… I was shaking… literally, I’m shaking, and my hands - I’ve never had that problem but I was trying to hold them still… I first thought it was the cold, because it was January 1st, but no, I was just so upset… Collectively, we are not moving quickly enough in a certain direction to keep the temperatures down. So I was shaking, and I just started trying to take some photos with shaky hands and they were all blurry… I started (to) delete, delete, delete, delete, and then… one or two were like, “hmm, that’s kind of interesting.”
So then I started moving the camera… up, down, right, left. Most of them were too blurry, obviously, and over the years I’ve perfected the movement. You don’t need a lot of movement. But in the early days, I was doing this (moving hands quickly) - and it was too much. And it’s a technique that I did not invent. It’s called intentional camera movement, or ICM. A lot of people use it. But I don’t know of anyone who’s using it to describe the climate, the rapidly changing climate. So … I use ICM all the time now. I rarely document things like I used to for most of my life - except for today, I was documenting the exhibit. But yes, I’m really into this idea that, everything is fleeting, everything is impermanent, and my photos are an expression of my eco-anxiety. That’s it. And I know that we’re different in that aspect, but we found common ground in how we view the situation of the ice, because even in this case, you know, there’s less and less ice to record.
Robin: Yes. I’ve talked about it all through the week, but when we got the idea to do this together, it was in the winter and I (said), “Oh, now… the weather is perfect… So, I’m going to do it right now…” I have (the) time to do it because… I can be quite busy… I’m a musician (and) I can be on the road. So, I went and did some recordings and I had some nice texture(s) and material(s) to work with, and I was pretty happy with it. And the year after our project was accepted in Vaste et Vague - at the Arts Centre in Carleton where we first showed it… - I was very glad that I recorded the winter before because that winter there was almost no day where there was enough ice around my place, otherwise I would have to (go) to Matane, (or do lots of driving)… to record the ice. So, at first I didn’t think that much about it, but it was… the perfect exhibition that… my work recording winter sounds is transforming - because it’s not the first project that I’ve done with winter sounds - Oh, and maybe some sound and some soundscape that I really love are endangered, because it won’t be cold (enough) anymore to have… certain sound… texture(s) of snow and… ice. So maybe I’m recording a disappearing soundscape…
It’s obvious when you think about birds and animals. (But) to have the soundscape of the… geophony - I think the water and the ice can go into the big category of geophony - is changing. I mean, it’s a big thing. And so the.. winter (after)… I recorded the ice… I wouldn’t have been able to. The winter after that, there was a bit of ice but not that much. So yeah, instead of having like a full month where you have the good condition(s), maybe it’s going to be one week or 10 days or something.
Joan: And that second winter that he’s talking about, there wasn’t that much. I was invited for (an) artist residency on(to) an Icebreaker of the Canadian Coast Guard… We went to the Saguenay Fjord… and it was the warmest winter in Canadian history and there was almost no ice in the fjord… I was doing my ICM technique and I was crying, because I had this idea, maybe in my lifetime we won’t need ice breakers on the St. Lawrence. I mean, yes, we’ll still need them up north, but I just felt something was slipping away right in front of us -
Robin: was melting away…
Joan: Yeah. I hope that anyone who will come to NAISA to see it, will realize that this is a great exercise… to begin to use our other senses to see… well at least for me, to see the climate changing… I think it’s useful for all aspects not just climate.
We need to work on our other senses, I think it will help us make sense of the chaos that could be down the road. I mean, we’re okay right now, but yes, I’m wondering what the next chapter of our civilization is going to look like.
We’re going to need all the help we can get. Hearing, taste, smell, all of it.
Joan Sullivan is a photographer, writer and artivist. Her climate change photographs oscillate between documentary and abstraction. Her current series of experimental photographs, JE SUIS FLEUVE, explores the fleeting nature of the disappearing ice on the Saint Lawrence River as a metaphor of impermanence in a rapidly changing world.
Robin Servant is a sound artist whose installation work and electroacoustic compositions are anchored in territorial soundscapes and the people who inhabit it. Convinced that listening to our sound environment creates empathy with it, he has listened to and documented many soundscapes in the Lower Saint Lawrence region for 20 years.
New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) is a sound-based media arts organization near to Algonquin Park. NAISA presents sound sculptures, transmission art, electroacoustic music, videomusic, new art, and the art of sound, through performances, exhibitions, broadcasts, and three annual festivals: Sound Travels, Deep Wireless, and SOUNDplay. Operating since 2001, NAISA is partially funded by Ontario Arts Council, The Canada Council for the Arts, and The Department of Canadian Heritage.