TILL
David Cass & Sam Healy

Formed from thousands of found scanned papers, TILL acts as an alternative graph, from 1895 to 2024, followed by an imagined sequence from 2025 to 2040. It’s an artistic rendering of environmental data reminiscent of an aerial coastline, where light coloured sheets represent ice and the dark carbon-papers represent sea. The piece imagines Arctic ice as a living entity, its fate inseparable from our own. The diminishing extent of summer ice is clear to see, drawn from early captains’ logs and whaling records to contemporary satellite readings. As years progress and ice cover diminishes, so too do the light papers. Watch the centre of the screen, where subtle date markers track the passing years.

Alongside the science and structure of the work sits another kind of archive: personal, analogue, human. In Scots (Scottish), the word till carries meanings of both accumulation and residue. The scanned papers, then, are the till of life – letters, postcards, tickets, certificates – gathered and repurposed. These are more than ephemera – they are an accidental archive, compiled as we extracted minerals, burned oil, and warmed the Earth. They speak not only to what we did, but to what we stand to lose, and in many cases, how we’ll lose it. Travel brochures, oil adverts, blueprints, endless receipts, and hundred-year-old photographs taken aboard ships whose purpose was to destroy icebergs with explosives – these artefacts document the systems and choices that have led us to this point. In retrospect, they read like warnings, subtle evidence of a world nearing transformation.

The film’s cover image (above) is a still form the year 2012: a record low when sea ice shrank to just 3.41 million km². An earlier version of TILL was commissioned by New Media Scotland, Aberdeen Performing Arts and Creative Scotland.