The uncertainty of the Arctic in augmented reality. From Svalbard with Love by Pareid Architects

Project description by Pareid Architects

Longyearbyen, Svalbard is located deep within the Arctic circle and is the world’s most northern inhabited town. As a result of its uniquely remote and environmental conditions, the archipelago is home to a number of public and private institutions and ventures that range from research, archiving, monitoring, and mining.

However, it is currently experiencing rapid and unprecedented environmental changes due to warming temperatures, the effects of which have already caused a partial relocation of the town, a water breach inside the Global Seed Vault, and various other perturbations, the future and extent of which is still yet to be known.

From Svalbard with Love is a mixed-media interactive experience that was produced for the Seoul Biennale 2021 that presents alternate realities of the remote arctic archipelago. A confluence of scenes printed on a fabric that are arranged as a quadtych and mediated through AR (augmented reality).

A multi-scalar assemblage, the imagery consists of the main town, uninhabited regions, public and private institutions, houses, different kinds of infrastructure, various forms of non-human life and matter.

While representational and legible by humans, different regions of each image are encoded to be recognized by machines (in this case a phone’s camera) the boundaries of which are not legible to the naked eye.

Each encoded region operates as a ‘black box variable’ which triggers different augmented realities and narratives to play on the app, the various scenarios of which are created by combining data collected from interviews, researchs, and forecasts.

The uncertainty of the present Arctic and its future are intimately linked to the uncertainty and multiplicity of the user’s experience, paralleling the possible combinations of carbon emissions, environmental pollutants, restoration and mitigation efforts, consumerist trends, international policies and relations that are currently playing out in real time today.