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Emerging artist Katie Paterson's latest show is a sound installation that enables you to listen to a Icelandic glacier as it melts, via telephone.
The live link up is acheived using a Dolphinear underwater microphone immersed in the icy lagoon at the head of the glacier and mobile technology provided by Virgin Mobile.
Paterson first exhibited the work last year when she was a final year student at Slade School of Art in London. It was inspired by the fever-induced hallucinations she suffered when she fell ill during a previous trip to Iceland. She imagined that the litres of water she was drinking were making her part of the nearby glacier which supplied the water.
The work, named Vatnajökull (the sound of), captures the sound of Europe's largest glacier as it creaks, cracks, drips and eventually falls into the sea.
You can listen to the glacier live by dialling 07757 001 122. Calls are charged at the international rate.
Vatnajökull is part of her exhibition at Modern Art Oxford's Lower Gallery, which also includes earth-moon-earth. For this work, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata was translated into Morse code and bounced off the moon. The fragmented signal that returned was converted back from Morse into a new score, which is played on a Disklavier, an automated grand piano.
The exhibition, and the live phone link to the glacier, runs until 1 June 2008.
