Calling the Glacier - Mobile Elegy, an installation by Kalle Laar (no, this is not the same project): Use your mobile phone and listen to the sound of the melting glacier in real-time. Call + 49 89 3791 4058 and you will be connected directly with the Vernagt Glacier.

Using the phone has become so prevalent in our society that we no longer consciously perceive the cosmos of sounds emanating from our global communications network. As with so many other sources, we have lost touch with qualities inherent in these acoustic artefacts and the sensations they can evoke. Pictures and images are spatially displaced representations of reality - before they can touch us emotionally, an intrinsic distance must be overcome. But sound knows no such barriers. It is immediate, It is unavoidable. It touches us directly.

A Mobile Elegy is a direct mobile phone connection to a glacier. A microphone in the heart of the glacier picks up it’s voice and transmits it to the caller. You listen the to sounds of water, occasional cracking and other utterances made living glaciers as they grow and recede in perpetual seasonal flux. The world has come to the awareness that global warming is real and that the ensuing climate change will affect us all. Our planet’s glaciers are a powerful and dramatic symbol for this process. They are like giant living creatures that are slowly dying - melting, leaking and waning into ultimate oblivion.

A Mobile Elegy invites you to connect.

Obviously the glacier will not respond by talking to you nor will it give you any other sign of individual communication. But once you pick up your mobile phone and dial the glacier you will be right there - in real time, any time, from anywhere in the world. This is all about the emotional qualities of sound. You will be affected by the simple sounds of the glacier melting away, by being there. Mobile Elegy will be extended to other glaciers in the Alps, the Pyrenees and other sites worldwide.’ [via Cultures of Climate Change]