THE WHITE SABOTEUR
Everything beyond the polar circles is unique: the sound, the air, the light... the feeling of being alone, in the middle of nowhere. When you stay still, the landscape becomes a moving one, slowly evolving around you. There is something sublime in seeing this world disappear, alongside our own finiteness. To understand its fragile beauty, you must have traveled through it.
Everywhere, the world of ice is retreating under our impact. In just a few years, icy landscapes are transforming into barren fields of rock. According to the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative (ICCI), within 25 years, one-third of the glaciers on the World Heritage list will have disappeared. In the Alps alone, it’s estimated that 90% of glaciers will be gone in the next 50 years.
Despite activists, scientists, and civil society raising alarms ever louder about the disappearance of these seemingly eternal ice giants, the timeline does not appear to bend toward a viable planetary balance.
Are we, as humans, witnessing the fossilization of the cryosphere? Could it be that we are creating our own asteroid?
This landscape, created from photogrammetric captures, is purely fictional, yet realistic. It evokes the melting cryosphere, symbolized by this digital universe that is being erased. The experience unfolds in two parts—one within VR, and the other under a dome.
In this artificial, photorealistic world, glaciers break apart, defying gravity, while lightning—unnatural for polar regions—now begins to appear due to climate disruption. Here, iceberg water fossilizes, forming the foundation for this immersive experience. As the visitor enters the VR, they step onto a poetic, otherworldly ice field. With each moment of presence and gaze, they witness and induce the degradation of the landscape from within, which is also observed externally by others, thanks to a virtual-to-digital material transfer.
This visualized transfer—from physical presence in the VR to digital presence outside under the dome—poses questions about the gains and losses of virtual reality. The experience is neither linear nor finite; it starts when the visitor enters VR and continues as they remove the headset, seeing the impact they left through fossilized icebergs drifting like asteroids in the dome’s digital display.
In this persistent world, each visitor encounters the landscape altered by the previous one, creating a cumulative degradation until the iceberg landscape fully transfers to the dome. Eventually, these fossilized fragments join a growing "asteroid field" of frozen remnants, a testament to the irreversible, shared impact of every presence in this ephemeral environment.
From this perspective, the experience mirrors our physical world, where the cryosphere melts before our eyes as we increasingly occupy media and digital spaces.
Would you put on the VR headset, knowing that your presence would
accelerate the disappearance of the universe you are about to enter?
accelerate the disappearance of the universe you are about to enter?
CREDITS
Barthélemy Antoine-Lœff
Hugo Arcier
Soundscape
Olivier Girouard
Producer
Pierre-Arthur Goulet
Scientific Collaborators
Heidi Sevestre
Léo Decaux
Eco-Production Consultant
Adèle Boyer
Technical Artist
Robin Maulet
Unreal Developers
Alice Zanuttini
Theo de Nanassy
RISETTE
Coproduction
N°130
Ekumen
Eluhims
Pictanovo
With distribution support from
Cité des Sciences (Paris)
Société des Arts Technologiques (Montreal)
In collaboration with
CIRMMT (Montreal)
Diversion (Paris)
Tallieu Art Office (Brussels)
With financial support from
CNC
City of Paris
Hauts-de-France region
Project developed as part of the
Biennale College XR at the Venice Biennale in 2023
Project presented at
New Images in 2024