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.