Global Seed Vault, 2024

These paired large-scale photographic prints document the doors of Svalbard's Global Seed Vault by tilting a flatbed scanner against their surface, creating high-resolution indexical readings that are illegible in their abstraction, yet factual. The work investigates scanner technology as alternative to camera-based documentation, inverting photographic logic where cameras take the world in, while scanners project light outwards and enter the world. The scanning methodology treats the vault doors as text, reading their surfaces through systematic left-to-right, up-down motion that transforms impenetrable architectural thresholds into deliberately indecipherable images. These doors function as the skin of the vault as they are the only accessible material evidence of a questionable, ideological, futurist proposition that presents storage and burial as key methodologies in pre-imagining the future. My approach reveals how the vault exists in our minds as much as it does the side of the mountain, operating as mental construct parallel to Svalbard's omnipresent polar bears. The doors define the separation of the world from the vault, and the separation of the incendiary present and a buried future, becoming literal thresholds to inaccessible futures. The works generate new knowledge by demonstrating how illegibility can function as critical artistic methodology. By producing factual yet indecipherable documentation at humanity's primary seed preservation facility, the work questions the primacy of legibility as the means to know a thing, revealing how technological solutions to environmental crisis remain fundamentally withdrawn from understanding.<p></p>