The White Saboteur — VR Installation by Barthélemy Antoine-Lœff & Hugo Arcier

The White Saboteur is an immersive, persistent installation in which the viewer becomes, despite themselves, the agent of the disappearance of a fictional glacial world. Fitted with a VR headset, they enter a persistent polar landscape, but their gaze alone is enough to accelerate its erasure. Icebergs and glaciers dissolve as the viewer watches until they leave the universe, leaving behind, for the next visitor, a territory already degraded, doomed to extinction. As the installation runs, the climate keeps worsening from one visitor to the next, and no two spectators ever witness quite the same landscape. In diptych form, a screen renders in real time the fossilized version of this glacial matter erased in VR, now adrift in the void of space, making visible to all the individual impact of each user.

Beyond the metaphor of last-chance tourism, the work stands as a critique of a deeper, capitalist logic of consumption applied to the world itself, and of technology as both a tool of exploration and of destruction. It questions our choices, virtual or real, and our responsibility toward threatened landscapes, starting with those of the cryosphere.

The project was developed in close collaboration with glaciologists and polar researchers, grounding this fictional world in real climate data and keeping it firmly tied to the physical realities it evokes.

Would one still enter a world, knowing that the act of entering it is what destroys it?

CREDITS

Written and directed by
Barthélemy Antoine-Lœff
Hugo Arcier

With sound compositions by
Olivier Girouard

Based on scientific data provided by
Dr. Heidi Sevestre, Dr. Richard Hann, Dr. Léo Decaux and Cap au Nord

Produced by
Pierre-Arthur Goulet – Risette

in coproduction with
N°130, Actrio Studio and Zéro de Conduite

With the support of
the CNC – Immersive Experiences Creation Fund, the City of Paris, Région Hauts de France – Pictanovo, FilmFernsehFonds Bayern GmbH, and Film und Medienstiftung NRW

CONCEPT
Writing & dramaturgy: Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff & Hugo Arcier
Visual & CGI development: Hugo Arcier

INTERACTIVE DEVELOPMENT
Prototype R&D: Theo de Nanassy
Interactions and architecture: Alice Zanuttini, Aymeric Betton, Max Schindele
Visual development: Robin Maulet, Viktor Schenk, Jörgen Engdahl

SOUND
Sound design & music composition: Olivier Girouard
Audio integration & spatialization: Pierre-Marie Blind
Additional sound design & choir recording: Christian Kohler

PRODUCTION
Pierre-Arthur Goulet (Risette) - Michael Geidel (Actrio Studio)
Hugo Arcier (N°130) - Fabienne Giezendanner (Zéro de Conduite)

Developed thanks to
Biennale College Immersive

With the support of
Universciences

Technical partner
diversion