| Summary: | Antarctica and the notion of the interior are intrinsically intertwined. While the continent is strongly associated with its inaccessible icy interior, there are also builtinterior spaces in Antarctica that protect and sustain human life for the purposes ofexploration and scientific research. Antarctic Interiors is an interdisciplinary researchproject that combines perspectives from Interior Design and spatial analysis withthe insights of the emerging field of the Antarctic humanities. The thesis investigates ways in which Antarctica as a geographical and material place can inform a(re)thinking of the concept of the interior. Recent research on interiority within extreme environments has focussed on seemingly unbounded oceanic space and outer space. While designers have had an increased involvement in the built environment in Antarctica in the last two decadesdue to the rise in the number of new research bases, the continent has been remarkably absent in spatial/interior research. Existing research into the continent andits built environment has focussed on psychology and human behaviour (for optimizing human operationality), historic archival research (for heritage and conservation purposes) and building engineering (for optimizing building performance),all of which convey very little about the complex conditions of interiority presentedby the highly specific Antarctic environment. Antarctic Interiors introduces the southernmost continent into contemporary scholarly discourse around the concept of the interior. Through its focus on embodied interactions with the ice, the thesis extends understandings of human inhabitationof the Antarctic. At the same time, because Antarcticas highly specific atmosp-xxixhere, geography and materiality challenge the boundaries of human perceptionand engagement, the thesis explores the limits of knowledge in interior research.Conventionally the interior is understood as a static, bounded space enveloped by asedentary architectural structure. This traditional understanding of the interior iscentred around the human subject, itself comprehended as an autonomous unchanging identity and a stable sensing self. Antarctic Interiors draws on Suzie Attiwillscritical interrogation of the interior to open Antarctic research to other disciplinaryperspectives and spatio-temporal scales. In this thesis, interiority is understood asa practice that entangles a myriad of human, material and environmental processes,and as a research into which requires both conventional and creative methodologies,representation and expression. The thesis comprises six chapters in two sections: the first section of three chaptersestablishes a series of critical, theoretical and contextual ideas. The first chapter canvasses conventional approaches to the interior before turning to emergent theories that challenge the stability underlying notions of the interior thatare centred upon the privileged and dominant position of the human subject. Thesecond and third chapters argue that Antarctic interiority is trans-scalar, traversing the global and the personal, the atmospheric and the material, the physical and the imaginary. The three case studies in the second section make up thethesiss own interior: the historical subglacial hut of Advance Base as narratedin Richard E. Byrds 1938 memoir Alone; the imaginary and filmic interiors of USOutpost no. 31 station in John Carpenters 1982 film The Thing; and the authorsown experiential research into the French logistical traverse, which involved driving a tractor to Concordia station in the continental interior of Antarctica. Thesesix chapters are joined by the Tractor Notes a piece of critical spatial writing xxxibased on notes recorded during this fieldwork. Additionally, the thesis is interspersed with short videos of interior conditions as experienced during the Antarctic expedition. While this project is not a thesis by creative work, these additionalelements productively evoke the embodied experience of engaging with the forcesand the materiality of Antarctica that the scholarly chapters also explore. The spatial analysis of the three case studies, together with the creative componentsof the authors Antarctic fieldwork, support the argument that Antarctica is a forceful agent in the production of interiority. Within the Antarctic context, comfort, balance and rest conditions traditionally associated with the interior can be foundonly within an ongoing movement amidst and with Antarcticas materiality. Incessantly adapting to and interacting with the material conditions of the ice, the humansubject is always (in geographer John Wylies words) becoming icy a processthat is intimately tied to the making of interiors and practices of interiorisation.
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