Declassified Spy Outpost Lurks on the Dark Side of the Earth

As the cargo hull opened, the black Arctic poured into the Hercules C130. Breath-first, Charles Stankievech emerged from the belly of the carrier and into subzero stillness; it was like stepping out onto the surface of the moon.

“It is the place where the celestial meets the terrestrial,” says Stankievech of the landscape far north of the Arctic circle. “It’s as if the air has been sucked out of the Earth and outer space comes right down and touches you.”

In November 2011, Stankievech hitched a ride with the Canadian military to the Canadian Forces Station (CFS) Alert Signals Intelligence Station, which is only 450 nautical miles south of the North Pole. At the 82nd Parallel North, the military spy outpost at CFS Alert is the Earth’s northernmost settlement populated year-round.

Stankievech, a Canadian artist, made the epic two-day journey for his latest film project The Soniferous Æther. The project includes several haunting and beautiful black-and-white time-lapse shots (see video below). Late in the year, virtually no snow falls at the site and the air is dry. Under the constant pitch-black sky the already-fallen snow doesn’t glisten but appears as gray as lunar dust.

“There is a natural, obvious connection between the Arctic and outer space,” says Stankievech. “The –50ºC climate requires you to move from artificial environment to artificial environment. The darkness [in winter months] negates the blue atmosphere replacing it with stars and ‘space weather’ like the aurora borealis.”

Built in 1950, the Alert Signals Intelligence Station was used to eavesdrop on Russian communications throughout the Cold War. During that time, however, the public was told the base was merely one part of the U.S./Canadian Joint Arctic Weather Station (JAWS) network gathering meteorological measurements.

Activities at Alert were eventually leaked and operations were declassified. The base still monitors communications but is now solely a Canadian operation. Once a workplace for over 200 people, today Alert has only six military personnel responsible for operations. They are supported by civilian service providers. A tour of duty at Alert is six months long and, according to Stankievech, considered luxurious because of the special facilities provided to stave off alienation (see the the bowling alley in gallery above).

The frozen wastelands around Alert see no twilight in the winter. Stankievech reports only “complete and utter midnight darkness, all the time.” The Alert Signals Intelligence Station is so far round the top of the world, it is closer to Moscow than it is to Ottawa. Inuktitut, the Inuit language of the Nunavut territory, describes the region as “Inuit Nunangata Ungata” which translates as “The Land Beyond the Land of the People.”

The Soniferous Æther, a 35mm film installation, continues Syankievech’s six years of research into remote outpost architecture, military infrastructure and landscape. It draws out the myths we attach to such solitary places but also considers the practical human solutions to existing in such a harsh environment. To a soundtrack Stankievech scored himself, The Soniferous Æther contrasts time-lapse shots of man-made infrastructure with shots of alien landscapes.

“We posit alien landings [at the poles], and Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, or inversely in Antarctica, the Watchmen’s base. It’s where the Predator hunts Aliens,” he says. “Sci-fi is the perfect genre for filmmaking and it provides the language to look at what is in front of us with alien eyes. Tarkovsky’s Stalker has always been an important benchmark for considering the landscape in the post-industrial age, and I was definitely thinking of the final sequence in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – the pulse of the monolith communicating across deep space and the psychedelic flight that arrives at an empty outpost.”

‘The Soniferous Æther’ was shot on a Canon 5D mounted on a computer-controlled time-lapse rig. The full-frames were later converted to 35mm film using an ARRILASER, at the ARRI headquarters in Munich, Germany.

More than strange specters in strange landscapes; more than outlying sites of limited importance, Stankievech believes that peripheral outposts such as Alert tell us a lot about society.

“Paradoxically, by the extreme effort for such settlements to exist, they articulate what values are core to the centre of a society,” explains Stankievech. “Instead of outposts existing off-the-grid, I’m saying they invent the grid. Until you have the outpost, you just have the aggregate of flows or what we come to call a centre. Once you have the outpost, you create the matrix that becomes a structuring device. In a strange way, the frontier sets the structure. We typically think of the outpost as this thing out there that no one cares or thinks about. What I’m trying to say is that policy-makers are thinking about it very carefully and your subconscious ideological issues depend on it. That’s exactly the switch that interests me.”

Throughout his career, extraordinary landscapes have been a staple for Stankievech. He paid his way through college (where he studied philosophy) by working as an industrial radiographer and ultrasonic technician in the Alberta Tar Sands and in West Coast pulp and paper mills. Later, he worked in the camera departments for several Hollywood studios on sci-fi productions in Vancouver, BC.

“Most people don’t realize how much art direction in sci-fi comes from contemporary military architecture and epic primary industry, for example, polar outposts and the Tar Sands, respectively,” says Stankievech.

The art direction and videography for The Soniferous Æther was as solitary as the landscape it depicts. Working alone, Stankievech would set up the timelapse shots and then, as the system ran, he’d scout for the next location.

“The cold actually worked really well for the electronics and keeping the noise level low for the really long exposures,” he says. “A few times the gear system for the motion control froze up temporarily. It’s the batteries really which are the main problem in the cold.”

Stankievech’s Canon 5D wrapped with heat packs to keep the batteries and body at operational temperatures.

With some shots lasting five hours, Stankievech wrapped batteries in heat packs or in heated battery boxes. When batteries would not last, he used a generator with an AC adapter. On his hands he wore touchscreen finger-tip gloves to operate the electronics without having to expose any skin. Yellow lens goggles served to improve vision in the complete darkness and also to protect his eyes from the cold. He wore his own technical-fabric under layers beneath full Arctic military combat clothing. So outfitted, he could work a full day at a time.

“The point isn’t so much how long you are out, but if one keeps moving,” he says. “You are wearing so much gear your body heats your suit if you are active enough.”

At one point, Stankievech traveled seven kilometers from the station to capture some establishing shots at the edge of a cliff. Among the many things The Soniferous Æther tries to visualize and communicate the “different sense of time” Stankievech felt in that moment when he was utterly dislocated from every other experience he’d had previously.

“The sublime size of the chasm yet without any sense of scale, the total darkness and the psychological impression of how remote I was after flying for days on a military transport, all collided to create a sense of pure geological time. I felt I was either in a pre-Anthropocene Age or on another planet.”

TSA is currently on show at the National Arts Centre/Ottawa City Hall.

All images copyright and courtesy Charles Stankievech.