Field Notes_EOS with Bioart Society, Helsinki.

What does it mean to observe art in fieldwork?

In September 2018, I was the only journalist selected for Field Notes: Ecology of Senses — an international art-and-science field residency run by the Bioart Society at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station, above the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland. For a week, more than thirty artists, scientists and thinkers roamed the sub-Arctic tundra to test a single question: how do the senses shape the way we come to know a place?

I worked inside “The Second Order” — a group of curators, scholars, artists, and me, the journalist — embedded across the other teams to observe, question, and document how art gets made in the field. Writing became my method: we treated ethnographic poetry and prose as instruments for sensing, not just recording. I buried my hands in the soil and tasted it, followed the logic of reindeer, and listened to water moving under two-billion-year-old rock.

Out of that week came two published pieces of my own — “Notes from The Ocean” and “The Lost and Found Department” — written for the Bioart Society. It remains the strangest, most ephemeral expedition I’ve ever worked in. I had a lake for a masthead, guys.

Read our full experience here.