Mark Dorf
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In Wake Pt. 1
2014
A glacier is an archive. Embedded within its layered ice are traces of life—plants, soil, microorganisms, even ancient atmospheres—preserved across spans from 500 to 500,000 years. These frozen records contain invaluable data on Earth’s shifting climate systems. Yet as glaciers recede at accelerating rates, they take with them not only water, but the histories they hold.
In Wake Pt. 1 constructs a parallel archive: a visual record of the Pariacaca glacial range in the Peruvian Andes. At three specific locations, I have placed waterproofed, concrete-encased USB drives containing photographs taken from the exact coordinates of their placement. Each drive holds only these images, along with a text file—translated into five languages—explaining the device’s function. The files will never be published, printed, or distributed online. They exist only in situ, available solely to those who travel to retrieve them.
In this way, the archive becomes inseparable from place. To witness the glaciers as they appeared at a specific moment in time, one must physically enter the landscape, bridging the distance between digital memory and embodied experience. The drives, like the glaciers themselves, are impermanent. Despite their protective casing, they will degrade—corrupting slowly, then entirely. There are no plans to maintain or repair them. Their decay mirrors the loss they document.
The images and map on this page depict the coordinates and elevations of each USB placement, along with photographs of their installation in the landscape. This information serves as a guide for those who may wish to locate the drives—to encounter a past moment, confront the present, or intervene by updating and preserving the archive themselves. In Wake Pt. 1 dwells in this tension: between preservation and loss, access and inaccessibility, human gesture and geological scale.
Selected Exhibitions
2015 Museo del Convento de Santo Domingo Qorikancha, Cuzco, Peru
2014 Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima, Peru
Selected Publications
2014 HAWAPI - Etiqueta Negra