On Creating Arctic Code Vault Art, Open Source, and Minerals

It’s not every day that you get an email from a friend connecting you to a project that…honestly, sounds like something out of a James Bond movie. A vault, buried deep in a mountain on the Arctic Svalbard archipelago, housing a repository of humanity’s most important open source code, designed to last 1,000(!) years, potentially with artifacts representing the project in several major libraries around the world. They’re looking for an artist. You are an artist. What??

I would love to say that I jumped and hollered when I got that email —in actuality, it came out of the blue, and I had no idea whatsoever what I was looking at. I mostly stared at my laptop for awhile, with the expression that one has when one is humbly negotiating with a cup of coffee to help them make sense of what is on their screen. And thankfully, the part of me that lives for experiences on the edges of technical creativity (and some would argue, sense) became quite awake, and eventually responded, yes, I was definitely interested. A few interviews later, and we were a go.

For those unfamiliar, the Arctic World Archive is a repository of human artifacts and information, stored deep in a decommissioned coal mine in the Norwegian Svalbard Archipelago, declared a demilitarized zone by 42 countries. It contains everything from manuscripts from the Vatican Library, to Rembrandt masterpieces, to scientific information and political histories. It is incredibly remote, incredibly cold, and also incredibly cool. In…