Recording the Blizzard

'Recording the Blizzard' explores the challenges and creative possibilities of working with sound in Antarctica’s most extreme conditions.

Bringing together artists with direct experience of polar fieldwork alongside practitioners whose work engages conceptually and performatively with environmental sound, this conversation and listening-based presentation examines how blizzards, wind, ice, and infrastructure shape recording methodologies and artistic outcomes.

The speakers reflect on technical strategies, ethical considerations, and the role of listening as a way of engaging with environments that resist easy documentation. Through field recordings, discussion, and shared perspectives, the session reveals how Antarctic sound practices sit between science, art, and endurance.

 

Philip Samartzis is a sound artist, curator, and researcher whose work explores the relationship between sound, place, and environmental change. His practice is grounded in field recording and long-term site-based research, often undertaken in remote or extreme locations including Antarctica, desert and alpine regions. Samartzis has presented performances, installations, and exhibitions internationally, working across experimental music, spatial sound, and acoustic ecology. He is Professor of Sound Art at RMIT University, where his research focuses on listening as a critical and creative methodology.

Polly Stanton is an artist and filmmaker. Her films and installations focus on contested sites and extractive zones, presenting landscape as a politically charged field of negotiation, entangled with history, technology and capital. Her mode of working is expansive and site based, with her practice intersecting across a range of disciplines from film production, sound design, fieldwork, performance and publication. Polly has exhibited widely in both Australia and overseas and has been the recipient of numerous grants and Artist-in-Residence programs. She is a Senior Lecturer in RMIT’s School of Media and Communication.

Michael Vorfeld is a Berlin-based artist and composer working across experimental music, sound art, drawing, and expanded performance practices. Since the 1980s, he has been a central figure in Berlin’s experimental music scene, known for his work with prepared instruments, self-built sound objects, and extended techniques. Vorfeld’s practice emphasises physical gesture, materiality, and the acoustic properties of space. His work has been presented widely in concerts, galleries, and festivals throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas, often blurring distinctions between sound, image, and performance.

Thumbnail image: Philip Samartzis recording a blizzard at Jack's Hut, 2016, Image by Dan Wilkins.

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Acknowledgement of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.

Learn more about our commitment to Indigenous cultures