Location: Kirkenes, Finnmark, Norway
Credit: Olga Kisseleva & Victoria Miles
Initiative: Belmont Forum CRAs (CCH 2023)
Project: ARCA. Biocultural Heritage in Arctic Cities
Story: This photograph was taken during the 2025 Barents Spektakel Festival in Kirkenes, Norway, as part of the art-science installation “Zoom In/Zoom Out”. Presented under the festival theme *Remote Control*, the work explored how Arctic environments are understood both through lived experience and through scientific observation.
The installation combined satellite imagery, thermal sensing, geospatial analysis, and artistic visualization to reveal hidden heat patterns shaping urban life in the North. Yet what made this moment especially powerful was not the technology itself, but the people gathered around it.
The photograph captures a range of responses to the encounter between art and science. Some viewers appear skeptical or analytical, while others seem curious, focused, or deeply absorbed. In the cool light of the projection, they become part of the work, transforming scientific data into a shared social experience.
The audience itself adds another layer of meaning. Festival visitors sit alongside people wearing traditional Sámi clothing, grounding abstract environmental data in a lived cultural context. Different experiences and ways of knowing come together around a common question: how do we understand and respond to a rapidly changing Arctic?
Rather than presenting environmental information as a fixed conclusion, “Zoom In/Zoom Out” invited visitors to interpret, question, and connect with it through their own experiences. The work created a space where researchers, artists, local communities, and festival audiences could engage with environmental change not as distant observers, but as active participants in a shared conversation.
As the Arctic undergoes profound transformation, this image captures a moment when skepticism becomes curiosity, observation becomes engagement, and scientific data becomes a catalyst for shared understanding.