The work is a large-scale poetic fantasy on the theme of the distant catastrophic future, awakening the fragments of its past. It explores the VR medium and the work of memory through understanding of a new genre, the young heir to documentary photography - documentary scanning. This work is also a document that has collected fragments of the present in its tension: the Russian North - a beautiful, frightening, strange, and complex space of the modern Arctic.
The VR viewer transferred to the endless nothingness. All around is a snow-covered space, to which a blizzard howls. The viewer is a spirit, instead of a body - plasma waves. The only objects in this world are ice letters floating in the air. If the letter is touched the ice will break and reveal its word, one of the portraitures, depictions, and states of the Arctic. D - Dwelling, M - Melting, S - Sensitive... Being touched the word will blow away as snow, sounding like poetry, dragging the viewer with itself. For a brief moment, the viewer will find themselves in a new environment presented by an immersive video matching the word somehow - a snow-covered Soviet city, iron ruins covered in tundra moss, a northern river with floating ice blocks, a herd of wild deer, a dried-up tundra forest, or a bright mountain stream. The word determines the destination.
The video dream will last for some time sufficient to look around, but not enough to get comfortable, exactly such as to have time to feel something, to peep someone's memory, but not to think it through. So we remember a bright moment in life. Too bad we can't look around in it too. When the vision disappears and the viewer returns to the snowy desert, he/she will see that the space is no longer empty - each time, with each new thawed vision word, new objects appear in it. Nganasan woman in bright national clothes is self-absorbed and gloomy, a miner in a baggy robe froze in front of a freshly butchered deer carcass, a tourist in felt boots with a camera, and a woman in a mink coat, is frozen in anticipation, by a broken car. Space becomes a place. A fragment of a Stalin-era house stretching for 50 meters, together with a bright concrete wall of a late soviet building and a huge graphic bunker, frames the square, on the outskirts of which there is a tent and a team with sleds, whereas, at the center, there is reared asphalt and the same amazing five-meter snow dump.
All these are 3D scans of real people and spaces, voluminous and detailed, but simultaneously fragmentary and incomplete. After each vision, a new fragment appears - a figure or a building, forming together a collage space. There are also new sounds. Every object has its voice: city noise, random dialogue, a repeated call at the airport, or a quiet story and song. The viewer can walk between those objects, examine them, and listen to them. Each involves them in its imitation of reality. The viewer is immersed in a snowy dream, revealing new and new details.
This is how the Arctic, gradually thawing out under the observer's gaze, remembers itself.
The work is currently a complete working prototype. We intend to make a full version within a year because arctic territories are currently very problematic: pollution, misuse of nature, conflicts with the native people, and global warming consequences. We would like to draw attention to this zone as soon as possible.
The work won in the GoEast Film Festival 2022 in the VR section as a work in progress. 2023 it was exhibited at the 'Fenêtres sur cour' in Collégiale St. Pierre, Orleans, France, and at 'Overcoming divides: Electronic literature and social change' in Convento São Francisco, Coimbra, Portugal.