This summer I went to collect material for The Cold Coast Archive, a joint project with fellow artists Annesofie Norn and Steven Rowell about the Global Seed Vault, a seedbank located on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, near the North Pole. The facility preserves millions of different plant seeds for food crops. The seeds are duplicate samples of seeds held in gene banks worldwide to provide insurance against the loss of seeds in the other gene banks in the case of large scale regional or global crises and catastrophes. The Svalbard Archive is using its Arctic location, and its rich symbolic significance, as a starting point for an exploration of human beings’ efforts to preserve civilisation and defy the inevitability of its demise.

The Global Seed Vault is a 120 metre long cave in the Arctic mountains of Svalbard, surrounded by abandoned coal mine shafts. As I explored the Vault, I became acutely aware of its surrounding environment. Above the Seed Vault, on the top of the mountain lies SvalSat, a large satellite earth station. In a mountain nearby, the only remaining coal mine in operation provides power to the Seed Vault. On the mountain top above it, a research station monitors aurora borealis, the enigmatic carpets of coloured lights that often appear in the sky over the Arctic.

So here we have dramatically contrasting manifestations of space and time at an immense scale: on the mountain tops, instruments that reach deep into space and measure the present and predict relatively close future; deep underneath in the ground, two cavities – one harvesting the energy of a fossilised rainforest created millions of years ago and the other protecting life into eternity.

What do these places sound like? What are the sounds – some audible to humans, some only detected by instruments – that mark these environments? And how do they contrast with the wind, the running water and the noise of trucks and diggers during the days of summer, and the Arctic silence of the long winter nights?

“Boreal” is a work based on recordings from both the hidden and audible sounds from SvalSat and The Auroral Station. The Cold Coast Archive will culminate in an online exhibition launching in February 2012.

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