Ellen Bjerborn: FIELD STUDIES

Ellen Bjerborn: FIELD STUDIES: Film screening | talk | get-together
17 February 2026, at 17:30
Location: Black Room 

A humming landscape of snow and fells is surveilled, its flowing processes quantified and visualized into datasets. The datasets are passed on to a global information network, a pulsating cloud of numbers surrounding the Earth. Its goal being:

“To create the most ambitious, globally distributed, and systematically collected dataset to date”

The keeper cares for the machines that survey the landscape. Every week he treks a lonely path up a fell to the tall metallic structures. He refills their fuel and shields them from reindeer and snow. Not too long ago it was him and not the machines that looked out over the fells and observed the flows of the land.

In the sci-fi docu-fiction FIELD STUDIES, media artist Ellen Bjerborn charts an ongoing shift in how field work in biology is conducted. Through Bio Art Society's ARS Bioarctica residency, she spent two weeks in a biological observation station in subarctic Kilpisjärvi, observing the daily movements of the staff and how they monitor the surrounding landscape on a yearly basis, measuring and observing that same data sets since the 1960’s. 

The film moves between fermenting in primordial juices and the monotone vibrations and uncanny warmth of server halls. It explores how a visual language concerned with information rather than aesthetics emerges from the scientific field, abstracting nature's signifiers into symbols. 

Ellen Bjerborn is a media artist based in, and from Malmö, Sweden. Her practice explores the human relationship to technology, spirituality, and nature using lens-based and digital media. She holds a BFA in Industrial design from Parsons School of Design, NYC.

Visit Ellen Bjerborn's artist page - ellen.media