Betsey Biggs

Video projection onto 1-4 walls, spatial sound; 4K color, Dolby Atmos sound, 74 minutes.

Visit the MELT: the memory of ice website

Six years in the making, MELT: Topographic Remix is an immersive installation based on my music-film, MELT: the memory of ice, an invitation to sit bedside in communion with our earth’s body melting and spilling through climate change. Created during a summer spent in Greenland with my mother and 5-year-old, the installation slowly explores a spectacular river of icebergs, increasingly interrupted by flashes of memories of the north. A musical drone rich with glimmers of sound — calving ice, reindeer bells, sled dogs — surrounds a choir reciting an unfathomable list of winter’s loss — flurries, orca, snow angels. The ice melts on.

As I struggle to give my child the same intimacy with the wild I’ve enjoyed, I find myself fascinated by a primary element of climate change: melting ice. Imagining a world where ice is a distant memory; the film posits itself as an archive of the beauty of ice and snow for future generations who have not experienced it. With spectacular aerial footage of glaciers giving birth to icebergs, visual portraits of Arctic locals, visitors and scientists, and ambient music made from glimmers of calving ice and other Arctic sounds, MELT: the memory of ice poetically evokes the experience of the north, acting as a powerful and emotional reminder of the physical immediacy of climate change.

MELT: Topographic Remix mirrors the sounds and images of the Arctic to truly create a space of contemplation and transformation for the audience to wander through and witness. The visual transformations, especially, allow me to understand the images in a different, more imaginary way: a kind of inner topography.

writer, director, composer, editor:
Betsey Biggs

producers:
Betsey Biggs
Susan Capitelli

executive producer:
Jill Mazursky

contributing producers:
James and Elinor Biggs
Susan Capitelli
Ann Reeves and Bill Swanson
John Wrobel

director of photography:
Troy Fairbanks

moving star vocal ensemble:
Sasha Bogdanowitsch
Emily Eagen
Tim Kiah
Jeremy Lydic
Holly Nadal
Onome
Peter Sciscioli

solo vocalist:
Hazel Biggs

recording engineer & vocal mix:
Jeff Cook
2nd Story Sound

music producer & mixing engineer:
Michael Hammond
Big Ship Audio

surround sound mix:
Sean Winters

postproduction services:
Peder Morgenthaler
Frame Linear
Mass FX

projection mapping design:
Brad Gallagher

very special thanks:
Suzanne de Vegh
Eric Coombs Esmail
Ondine Geary
Christian Hammons
Amy Harrison
Sharifa Lafon
Jeremiah Moore
Laurids Andersen Sonne

EXHIBITIONS
2025: ICMC (International Computer Music Conference), Emerson Media Art Gallery, Boston, MA, USA.

2024-25: "Arctic Voices," New Bedford Art Museum, New Bedford, MA, USA.

2024: B2 Center for Music, Art & Performance, ATLAS Institute, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA.