Arctic Circle trip log
This is my trip log from the Arctic Circle Artist and Scientist Residency. It was a unique opportunity to explore deep time, climate and space in the tipping-point-prone environment of the High Arctic. The experience had many crucial dimensions, including, of course, the people (guides, fellow expeditioners and ship crew) and brought politics, governance and environmental stewardship to the forefront. I have excluded personal stories for confidentiality, although they deeply touched my heart. I shot all photos below unless I indicate otherwise.
19 Days, 19 chapters
Longyearbyen
What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic
Art in times of climate (and grief)
Illusions
Singing Auks
Deep time
Antigua
Midnight sun
Ice politics
Impermanence
Emergence
Going with the elements
Fudo
On ways of looking
On my practice
Listening
On residencies
Polar sublime
Liminality
Longyearbyen
I know why I am here and not in a city full of people, companies and neon lights. I don't always like myself the way I am when I am with other people. There is something unnatural about the way I have to control, evaluate and observe my reactions. There are certain things that are expected of me - I have to be a son, a friend, a lover, an enemy, a brother, a citizen, a soldier...This means nothing here. I am no God out here. I cannot make the wind blow or the snowfall. Sometimes I cannot even get my sledge dogs to obey me. But I am second to a God. I am a human being, alive, due to my efforts
ODD IVAR RUUD, 1978
Longyearbyen is, in many ways, a liminal and mythical place. The town is undergoing a significant transformation as it seeks to redefine its role in the region and the world. Economic conditions drove people to exploit the landscape for centuries through whaling, fishing, or fur hunting. As those industries dwindled, coal mining took centre stage. Today, Longyearbyen's economy is predominantly based on tourism and scientific research, with the town becoming increasingly exclusive due to the influx of wealthy visitors. Svalbard is the least sustainable any place can be: almost everything in Svalbard is imported and presently, only one mine remains active in the area, set to close in 2025, with plans to import diesel instead.
“This place is abandoned by God and ought to have been abandoned a long time ago by mankind as well”. But it isn’t. A key reason for its existence is largely geopolitics and the Russian presence. In the 1980s and 1990s, Norway made a concerted effort to establish a stronger regional presence. Another reason is its allure. Svalbard's history is rooted in hardship and courage, celebrating human tenacity and the determination to survive and adapt to challenging environments. From the museum in Longyearbyen: “The ability to adapt, and the art of resignation, are some of what is needed most by those who shall live in Svalbard.”
Life in extreme environments like Longyearbyen revolves around a philosophy of care and mutual trust. Residents do not lock their doors or snowmobiles, which are the primary mode of transportation in the town. Marius explained that the keys are left in the snowmobiles so anyone encountering a polar bear can quickly escape. This practice underscores the community's reliance on openness and shared trust for survival in such a challenging environment. In which ways can we have more of this vibe?
We then embarked on the trip.
What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic
The Arctic is changing 2-3 faster than anywhere in the world; in some ways, the Arctic already exists suspended in a future climatic state. In this way, like an uncanny early warning anti-pilot project, it’s pointing to some possible ways the world is changing due to climate change. If we want to understand how environments and places will change and how different species adapt, we should look at the Arctic now.
Secondly, the Arctic seemingly appears out of sight, a remote cold place whose reality doesn’t affect our lives in the rest of the world. But change in the Arctic reverberates worldwide, given its connectivity. The Arctic helps regulate the world’s temperature, so as more Arctic ice melts, the warmer our world becomes. When covered with sea ice, the Arctic Ocean reduces the absorption of solar radiation. As the sea ice melts, absorption rates increase, resulting in a positive feedback loop where ocean warming amplifies sea ice melt, contributing to even faster ocean warming. This feedback loop is largely responsible for what is known as Arctic amplification and explains why the Arctic is warming so much more than the rest of the planet.
Besides sea ice, the Arctic contains other climate components extremely sensitive to warming. One of those elements is permafrost, a frozen layer of the Earth’s surface. As temperatures rise, the topmost layer of soil that thaws each summer deepens. This, in turn, increases biological activity in the active layer, releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Arctic permafrost contains enough carbon to raise global mean temperatures by more than 3℃. Should permafrost thawing accelerate, there is the potential for a runaway positive feedback process, often called the permafrost carbon time bomb. A second Arctic component vulnerable to temperature rise is the Greenland ice sheet. As the largest ice mass in the northern hemisphere, it contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by 7.4 metres if melted completely.
Lastly, we are continuously understanding more about the broader interconnectivity of the Arctic. For example, the moon could be influencing methane release from the Arctic Ocean seafloor; massive dust clouds from the Sahara Desert reached record size and density due to Arctic warming; researchers have discovered sponges consuming ancient fossil matter in the high central Arctic and have also revived large, ancient viruses from the frozen Siberian permafrost, including a 48,500-year-old Pandoravirus (let alone the scientists who are creating elephant-mammoth hybrids to help restore degraded Arctic habitats and combat climate impacts).
Unmitigated action in the Arctic can lead to $70 trillion in the overall economic impact of climate change if the planet warms by 3°C by 2100. Assessing, managing, and mitigating risks as new areas become accessible is crucial in this ever-changing environment.
Art in times of climate and grief
The Arctic Circle fellowship had a unique and high-quality mix of practitioners and creative people. Some of the practices in the ship: dance, performance, conceptual art, sound art, visual art, photography, screenwriting, poetry, journalism, textile, weaving, cartography, curation, community organising, carbon MRV, marine biology, sculpture, architecture, visual history, archiving, information design, aviation, videogame design.
Photo by our expedition leader Sarah Gerats
A snow glyph we created together! Photo by fellow Leandros Ntolas.
Every other night we did presentations of our work. Exposure to many motivations, capabilities, dreams, and practices was incredibly rewarding. Altogether, we are like a multimodal perceptual and generative body that can express interiorities relating to the place, the Arctic, that we all perceive and experience.
Art and science are very similar; both aim at understanding the world through experimentation. What’s the role of the arts in our times as we navigate change and transformation? Art as: the documentation of changing places; the expression of a sacred place melting away; perceptual shifting and seeing the unseen; a channel for climate grief; a vehicle to inhabit future worlds; as visioning for sustainable future systems. What else?
Illusions
The world shows up for us. But it doesn’t show up for free…We achieve access to the world around us through skillful engagement; we acquire and deploy the skills needed to bring the world into focus.
—Alva Noë, Varieties of Presence
When you immerse yourself in something new, it can lead to the discovery of new perceptual worlds. Acquiring new skills and knowledge can broaden your perception and reveal new ways of paying attention to the world around you. For instance, my conversations with Leandros about atmospheric optics transformed my experience of observing light and being in nature, ultimately altering my perceptual reality. As a result, I became more aware of light phenomena like mirages, smoking crevasses and the simultaneous presence of the sun and moon.
Singing Auks
The 26th of April was my favourite day so far! Woke up on a beautiful and warm day. We walked up the hill for 4 hours and felt my body moving! We stopped for 10’ and sat in silence. I wish I could etch the feeling of that moment in my skin. I could hear little auk birds chirping in the distance, reverberating in the body. They seemed many more than they were, as the shape of the fjord was magnifying their songs. The voices were coming from different depths and different chirping sound waves moving elegantly in the sphere of my attention.
As I closed my eyes, the sun warmed my face. Gradually, I tuned into the soundscape around me, losing touch with my body as I became more attuned to it. The vibrations seemed alive, filled with life energy. I felt an intimate connection to the flock of birds, reminiscent of metta meditation, where one connects with the love that extends outward.
It was as if the space filled with bird sounds was a big warm embrace of aliveness welcoming me into its fold. This pure experience made me feel the need to care for and support these fellow bird companions. The moment felt almost sacred, leaving me to wonder why I don't engage with nature in such a profound way more often.
Making beauty salient in my awareness is half the work I must do; I then got to see the sacred. An experience transforms into something sacred when I release my self-awareness and bodily sensations, and I tune entirely into the energetic qualities of wholeness, perceiving the process of enlivenment. It’s about metabolising the interconnectedness and interdependence that exists between all living things.
Deep time
The rapid advancement of human civilisation has led to our ability to significantly impact the planet, altering it in ways that will affect future generations. For example, the maintenance of biodiversity, biogeochemical flows, and land-use changes all require protection over long durations to be effective. Additionally, carbon sequestration, storage and nuclear waste management demand stable institutional safeguards lasting centuries, which is longer than any of our current institutions. I have written about organisational principles and also investigated media for transmitting information over millennia (will be published soon). As part of this exploration, I discovered time capsules as a storage medium for deep time and left a time capsule in the Arctic, which will be opened in 35 years [link to blog].
Antigua
Midnight sun
Radiance sutra
“The light of consciousness illumines the world.
The world reflects this splendour.
Energy and matter, essence and manifestation,
Reveal each other to each other.
Individual soul and cosmic energy,
Pulsing heart and infinite awareness—
Are secret lovers, always merging in oneness.
When the secret slips out, there is laughter
And a flash of brilliance in the air.”
The midnight sun is a natural phenomenon in polar regions during the summer months when the sun remains visible at the local midnight. It’s a result of the Earth's axial tilt, which causes the North Pole to be tilted towards the sun during the summer months in the Northern Hemisphere and the South Pole to be tilted towards the sun during the summer months in the Southern Hemisphere. The sun's apparent path during the midnight sun season in the Arctic is neither a perfect circle nor a perfect spiral. But it’s perfect.
Polar politics
Svalbard is a truly unique place. Svalbard doesn’t belong under any one country's sovereignty and has a unique legal and governance framework. While under Norwegian sovereignty, it operates under the unique conditions of the Svalbard Treaty, which grants all 46 signatory nations equal rights to engage in commercial activities (I recommend this analysis). As a result, people worldwide can live in Svalbard without requiring work permits or visas. However, certain limitations apply, such as not being allowed to give birth or die there, no state welfare provisions, and individuals being responsible for securing their employment and housing. Climate and environmental conditions are also unique in Svalbard. It’s a wild and remote place, and as far as I know, there aren’t many places that are changing so fast due to climate change—literally melting away…
The above conditions have attracted a unique mix of freedom-seeking people, who mostly have chosen to be there (plus there are no indigenous peoples in the land). Unlike most sovereign territories in the world, the people of Svalbard are not united (or divided) by nationality, which is crucial. There are no "vertical" relations of exploitation between labour and capital or capital centralisation. It, thus, feels like a one-of-a-kind experiment in constructing polity beyond pre-established categories.
Due to its size and context, one can feel that individual actions lead to tangible changes. As explained by our guide Sergei, the sense of personal agency is evident, and the feedback loop is direct, fostering a sense of purpose. Sergei explained that this stems from a dedication to serving the community while maintaining the individualistic values that underpin this place. This sense of agency is often lost in larger cities with established governance structures. Our responsibility is to take action, organise, and engage in discussions about public goods, rights, and our shared lives together.
Svalbard faces lots of pressing questions today. First, there is increased Norwegianisation (Norway is exercising its power and making it more difficult to vote, work, rent a house, renew one’s driving license and access the same rights as Norwegian people in Svalbard). Geopolitical pressures, the Russian presence, and the energy transition combined with tensions brought by skyrocketing tourism create competing interests. Adding to the transitory nature of the place, there is a quick churn of inhabitants and a waning interest in political organising. I will surely be returning to the topic of autonomous city-states and territories that do not belong (roughly) to any one country and have a unique legal and governance status.
The above discussions made me think about the relationship between global and local governance. The concept of governance in modern international relations has shifted towards "governance without government". This approach is less centred on subjects and focuses more on addressing issues or problems, giving rise to climate politics as a global climate polity. This polity revolves around the Earth's carbon cycle as a real, distinct, malleable object and a subject to political action that includes all actors attempting to contribute to its governance.
Global hyper objects make their governance accessible to disembodied actors worldwide. This was my initial point of departure when I started investigating geoengineering efforts in the Arctic (see here and here for more details), asking about the affordances and implications of drastically altering Arctic environments to halt global warming. However, the area's reality of life and political activity differs significantly. The focus is not on climate interventionism; the main concern is rather energy security. Technology solutionism (and associated capital forces) often adopt detached, distant viewpoints disconnected from the realities of specific places and local change. We should be bridging the scales of socio-technical change all the way through.
Impermanence
Standing atop a rock, I found myself reflecting on the impermanence of existence. Initially, my thoughts were drawn to the loss of places. The arctic ocean floor shows that 55 million years ago, the area near the North Pole was practically a subtropical paradise. This thought makes the sense of my spec-of-dustiness more salient. My existence is impermanent, and these places are impermanent too. Nansen, the great polar explorer, was writing in his notebook: “The endless ages of the universe which is ever-changing, yet ever the same (….) the universe’s notes are worlds; one vibrates for a longer, another for a shorter period, and all, in turn, give way to new ones.”
We are both transient.
Liminality
The Arctic region is naturally a liminal space with complex relations between representation and materiality.
When sailing north, we might have been the most northern people on the planet at that moment at 79.45 degrees north (~60 nautical miles from the North Pole).
The Arctic also has an extreme circadian rhythm that shifts dramatically over a year. We had light all day (so-called midnight sun), with slight hues and variations and from May, the light is 100% bright.
It is the coldest environment I’ve experienced in my life. It must have been -25C but wind can easily lower the felt temperature by 5-10 degrees. My eyes would cry constantly due to the cold. Then my tears would freeze. Yen wrote a haiku inspired by my frozen tears “unrelenting winds, icy darts flay exposed skin, tears stream without end.”.
The high Arctic is a place at the edge of the world.
Emergence
Yesterday when we arrived, the sea was thick, matte and smooth like the skin of a whale; a foggy horizon was rolling over, and infinitely unique iceberg shapes were floating all around us; every single piece of ice is the visual expression of the emergent interactions of physical components. I genuinely love flocks of birds.
Going with the elements
We can’t predict a lot during the expedition. We finish every plan with “maybe”. The conditions — ice, the sea currents, the weather- are changing at a resolution and speed that we can’t control.
Maybe that’s what humans are best at and where we feel our most alive selves; being in environments where we have to adapt dynamically on the spot! Cities give us a false sense of invincibility, total control, and entitlement to dominate over objects and subjects. In the Arctic, we can control only a few dimensions; for the rest, we need to improvise and adapt right on the spot;
In the Arctic, we need to move with rhythms that might be outside of our plans, rhythms that are larger than us. It feels more like dance, not a march. That tyranny of predictability in modernity, i.e. the desire to render the world legible, measured and predicted, comes from an innate curiosity but taken too far, we lead ourselves to a world of domination and exploitation.
When one goes with the elements, they don’t use cartesian cartographic principles to navigate the world and their circumstances. For example, one of Nansen's first successful polar explorations was counterintuitive. Instead of making his way through conquering the natural landscape like previous expeditions, Nansen and his men waited on their ship as the ship was lifted by the ice and carried by the ocean currents; drifting makes its way through a lack of brute force actions, working with natural forces. Nansen let himself and his men drift along with the Arctic currents and winds, being taken towards their goal using the transpolar current and “a ship so slimly shaped that she could slip like an eel out of the embraces of the ice”. I want to use these steering principles more in my life.
I remembered the birds while we were at sea. They were floating with the current of air; they were effortlessly using all their elements to..flow and preserve their energy! The bird was using its environment to perform its function. How can I be more effortless like this? How could I get some of the qualities of the birds? Keywords: Vibrancy; complexity; attunement; outward expressive movement.
Fudo
I thought about how climatic phenomena profoundly affect our lives and cultures. I wrote a longer article on the Japanese concept of Fudo as an alternative theory of Antropos-Gaia interactions whereby phenomenology is shaped by both space and time (link to article).
On ways of looking
Give us adequate images. We, we lack adequate images; our civilization doesn't have adequate images. And I think our civilization is doomed, is gonna die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images.
Werner Herzog
We were constantly recording and collecting photographic fragments of space and time. We should remember we are not garbage collectors, as my fellow residents joked. What is realism saying here at this moment in time and about certain aspects of a place? Images that resonate should be filtered to embody the creator’s point of view at that time, like the water that passes through mountain rocks and bubbles up clear. Images need to marinate in a perspective which imbues the captured landscape with a sense of meaning. I decided to focus on details and textures.
On my practice
Every other night we had artist’s presentations. Seeing my fellow expeditioners minds and work unfold was one of my favourite moments! They are truly exceptional people, and I felt deeply inspired! I shared projects that showcase how I view design as a strategic practice that operates at multiple scales of change, e.g. designing interactions, projects, products, and programmes. This includes human-nature-tech interactions across ecosystems like rivers, deserts, rainforests and oceans. It also includes organising intelligence, whether artificial, collective, or open-source. The latest chapter of my work is bringing several of these aspects together.
I would love to spend the next decade interrogating value beyond markets and designing new economic architectures to value and steward the natural world to bring vitality and generativity. What are the convergences of digital and natural public goods, and what are new modes of governance? How do we design for both human and planetary health simultaneously? Opportunity and value should be shared with all who co-create it, and economies should aim to thrive forever rather than grow forever.
On ways of looking, again> After my presentation, Elise said I have worked on many different topics and contexts, but she could see a distinct way of looking through these. Gosh, this is what I’m striving for; I need to listen to and orient myself towards actions that bring out more of this.
Listening
Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm.
Half of the creative process is listening; half is filtering; the rest is experimenting. I got to fine-tune my listening (perceptual abilities) and synthesis skills (how perceptions resonate and reverberate with my interiority). I like the fluidity of using multiple instruments. However, fluidity brings forward affordances to manipulate media through a form which is subsequently crafted. Craft makes beauty salient. The artist's role is to create beautiful bridges so interiority can meet exteriority in more resonant ways, whether through craft or dialogos.
On residencies
The arctic circle residency was so exceptionally well done. A good residency is suspended in time, gives the practitioner distance and perspective, condenses space, accelerates meaningful social interactions, mixes different perspectives/ points of view/ practices and allows for intense deepening and immersion in an environment. Unlike other residencies, the beautiful thing about the Arctic Circle is that we are all experiencing something genuinely new and truly unique together. We know this is a life-changing moment and are experiencing it together.
People enter residencies from different points, and all are valid: some people read first to then go on an expedition; others need to go on an expedition first to read later, said Patrick. I thought I was in the first category, but deepening my engagement with the Arctic and its people made me realise I’m in the latter. This is just the beginning.
I was also reflecting on the process of co-production. Our guides are not just polar bear guards; they understand the place, seek to understand our project and are constantly looking for options and affordances that serve our projects. This is a truly unique experience and very much unlike any other expedition out there. We would take the dingy, most days, twice a day. We would make special requests: tying wool at the propeller for textiles, asking for the mud from the anchor to create paints, special silent-only dingy rides, digging holes in the ice for the hydrophones, taking us to a specific piece of floating sea ice so we can stand on top of it, finding infinite horizons, finding abandoned mines for my capsule, taking us to research base in Ny Alesund to see the atmospheric balloon etc.
Photo by fellow resident Tamara Susa
What kind of residency is the world missing? I have draft ideas on three interdisciplinary residencies, which I will share in later posts: a bioregional residency (operating in intersections of the Earth’s 185 bioregions and focusing on transboundary governance and large-scale ecosystem landscape restoration projects), a planetary health residency (bringing together practitioners working in human, animal and plant health to identify joint intervention vectors), the places to intervene in a system residency (bringing practitioners from across levers of change to tackle a specific topic)
Polar sublime
Keywords: terror, obscurity, power, privation, vastness, infinity, difficulty, bodily pain.
Photo by fellow resident Tamara Susa. The little shapes on the snow are us :)
The scientific sublime at Ny Alesund, the northernmost research base of the world with 50 permanent habitats. Below are images of scientific instrumentation found on land.
