Tim Bishop is Bringing Abisko to the People

Part I – Originally published in June 2021

As the ancient proverb goes, “You have an idea for a project and you just go for it.” (Cut to two years and one plan-stymying pandemic later.) “And then you find yourself melting snow for several hours a day. With no one around.” 

Such was the experience of Tim Bishop, the Britain-born, Sweden-based audio artist whose ambitious plans for an immersive art installation brought him to Abisko for the first time last month. With the support and guidance of CIRC, Tim plans to return to Abisko four more times over the course of the next year, capturing the shifting temperatures and Arctic environment, and recording three-dimensional audio for next year’s gallery installation—all while growing more accustomed to such remote living, he hopes. After each of his weeklong treks to Abisko, and once more after the installation debuts, I’ll be speaking with Tim for this blog. Consider this article the first in a six-part series.

Tim didn’t come to one-to-one performance art via the traditional route, if any such route exists. A guitarist and music lover with unfulfilled band aspirations, Tim once tried out a music degree, but it bored him, and he dropped it. As 25 approached, and Tim began to notice that all of his friends had degrees, he started looking for programs that piqued his interest. He looked for good universities in livable cities, and then read descriptions of various courses, while trying to keep their official titles out of things; focusing solely on the content each was advertising. Tim laughs, explaining that this is not the recommended way to find a degree, though it worked for him. “The one that actually stuck with me was Bristol University, [when] I read the description for Drama. If I took out the word ‘drama,’ then it [sounded] really interesting.”

Tim never wanted to become an actor, but Bristol’s research-based approach to its Drama program appealed immediately; the various academic lenses through which drama was refracted lending themselves to anybody with creative vision. When he got there, an eager-to-learn theater rookie, Tim’s mentality, as he tells it, was something like, “‘Yeah, I’ll do this degree for a bit—I really want to do something I enjoy. And then I’ll go back to music.’” 

Quickly, though, Tim discovered a love of performance. But “I didn’t really like the whole ‘mass audience,’ and the rules of how people transact with an audience,” Tim explains. So upon graduation, he threw himself into the lesser-known world of one-to-one performances and immersive experiences. “And then the sound technology was kind of me trying to do stuff on my own,” Tim adds, noting that he’d become proficient in certain audio technologies while working on productions at Bristol. “I was really interested to be as self-sufficient as possible as an artist.” 

Tim received his degree in Drama in 2011. The next year, he and his girlfriend moved from the U.K. to Lund, in southern Sweden, having talked for a while about moving abroad. Leaving the insular art scene of Bristol that Tim had come to know so well, he had to start from scratch. He forged new connections; sought out artistic spaces, audiences, and galleries with which he could connect. In the move, Tim became more introspective and less dependent as a creator, and meanwhile more open to a diversity of collaborations.

Tim’s quasi-collaboration with CIRC, however, came much later. In 2019, feeling pulled toward extreme environments, and with an underwater performance piece finally under his belt, Tim decided to combine his perennial interest in the Earth’s extremes with his penchant for immersive technology experiences. “I was curious about the north of Sweden; I hadn’t been up there. [...] And I thought about the ratio between the north and the south,” he explains, commenting on the relatively high population density of his adopted southern Sweden as compared to its Arctic counterpart up north.

His project entails five evenly spaced trips to Abisko over the course of a year, throughout each of which Tim plans to use an ambisonic microphone to capture so-called “3D audio,” and to record personal observations as well as hyperlocal temperatures alongside each of these recordings. In the gallery exhibition tentatively planned for sometime next year, Tim’s tent, which by that point will be well-worn, will serve as the site of an individual-sized immersive experience. Alone in the tent, patrons will wear headbands that pick up on their brain activity, and map it to the simulated weather conditions in the moment. Their relative calmness or anxiety will ideally trigger a change in the simulated weather, Tim explains.

Much like the eternal question of chicken vs. egg, Tim expects that the simulated tent weather will influence participants’ emotions, and their emotions will in turn influence the weather in which they’ve been artificially immersed. “I guess it’s not really about being scientifically rigorous,” Tim says. “And it’s not about being completely abstract. I think it’s trying to stay focused on the environment.” The project, while inevitably bound to encompass climate change if only by virtue of existing in an age of a rapidly changing climate (in the Arctic, particularly), is not meant as a direct comment on climate change. However, “If people can influence [weather] in the installation, then maybe afterward they’ll feel more able to change bigger issues—maybe like the climate,” Tim hypothesizes.

Still, I don’t get the sense that the primary goal of this project is to incite change, unless its direction shifts drastically over the course of the year—a possibility that Tim hesitates to dismiss. As it stands, though, Tim’s project aims to give its participants as close an experience to his real one as is possible within the (technologically enhanced) confines of a southern Swedish art gallery space.

But winter camping is arduous and solitary, and it’s still all quite new to Tim. He recounts some of the many personal firsts brought on by his inaugural May visit to Abisko, which include knee-deep snow drifts, snowshoeing, and long, sleepless overnight train travel. Upon arrival in Abisko, Tim was met by CIRC’s own Keith Larson, and Max, who accompanied him three hours uphill to a site that the two of them agreed would be ideal for providing both privacy, and an appropriately windy spot for recording audio. Fitted out with winter camping gear as a result of many hours-long sessions spent with the kind employees with Lund’s “Naturkompaniet” outdoor store, Tim still wasn’t a pro at tent assembly, so Max set it up before heading off, leaving Tim alone for the following five days. 

As snow continued to drift over the course of Tim’s week in the tent, he ventured afield less and less, recording ever closer to his temporary home. For about four hours each day, he estimates, Tim had to focus on melting down snow to be used in his rudimentary camp stove cooking. And on a spare phone he took along for snapping photos, he listened to the two albums he happened to have downloaded, both favorites of his from the band “Mansun.” 

Utterly alone in the vast Arctic, I’m curious about just how Tim chose to stream to his music, so I ask him. “I had these with me, but they’re not very good quality for music,” Tim tells me, pointing out a skimpy pair of white Apple earbuds that I hadn’t noticed dangling from his left ear throughout our interview. “Or I also had my main headphones. But instead I just put it on; I just played [the albums] back on my phone. I never do that, because I’m working with sound a lot. It sounds so crappy. But there [you’re] making a cup of coffee with all of the ground coffee in it. And it’s really a bad cup of coffee. But there, it was amazing. Same for just playing my albums through my phone in the tent, and just being able to hear that. Whilst enjoying this really bad cup of coffee.”

Until immersive artistic experiences feature complimentary mugs of gritty coffee served to a soundtrack of tinny alt-rock on repeat, I’m not convinced that full immersion is possible. But that won’t stop Tim from trying.

Part II – Originally published in August 2021

By the time he left his secluded, snowy campsite in May, audio artist Tim Bishop felt a pleasant familiarity with the spot. He hadn’t strayed far from his little territory all week, all alone, splitting his days between learning how to survive in the icy wild (much of which meant melting down snow to make water), and recording ambient 3D sounds for his forthcoming installation. Though the precise details are still being worked out, the basic concept of the project, which is called ‘Sheltered,’ is that patrons in an enclosed gallery space in southern Sweden will eventually have the chance climb into Tim’s actual tent, and briefly live vicariously through him and his five weeklong visits to the Arctic over the course of a year. 

But in July, when Tim returned to a much warmer Abisko, the campsite he fondly remembered from two months prior was nowhere to be found. The major stream that cut around it was still visible—albeit this time filled with crystalline water fit for unfiltered drinking, rather than with ice and snow—as was the more established 1950s campsite nearby, with its telltale flagpole, wooden hut, benches, and two outdoor toilets. But it took tracking his coordinates on a GPS watch for Tim to believe that the sleek snow field he’d once called home had become a swampy thicket replete with flies and mosquitoes.

So Tim settled for the more established campsite a few hundred meters away, which he’d foregone in May because a few snowmobilers were staying there on his first night—before leaving Tim all alone for the remainder of the week. In July, the area was noticeably more populated. “Tourists?” I ask. “Sort of… but ones who were hardcore hikers,” Tim replies. They would come and go, mostly couples, in and out in 24 or 48 hours, gone in the daytime, leaving Tim a particular sort of isolated. He somewhat enjoyed the company, but felt strange about it, too, no longer free to 3D-audio-record like no one was watching. 

One day, Tim tells me, he was walking around the campsite, curious about its reverb. “It’s something I do sometimes,” he admits with a smile, telling me about his proclivity for testing a space’s echo with claps. “And I started talking to myself while doing it, like, ‘Oh, it’s quite dead over here, but let’s see what happens if I go over there…’” Tim was having fun. Nobody had been at the campsite since morning. “And I walked over to this open bit where the benches are, and there’s been no one there for several hours, and then I was doing this last big clap … and I turn around, and there’s a lady standing just three or four meters away from me.” Rather than explaining himself, he said a tentative hello and left it at that.

Still, the steady flow of people—and the warmer, if sometimes prohibitively buggy, weather—had its upsides. Tim’s primary focus was no longer basic survival. This time, he says, “It was more like, ‘I’m here doing a job, or a project,’ whereas before it felt like, ‘I’m here doing that, but my main thing is just to keep myself alive.’ … In some sense that made it easier; just to wake up and kind of know, ‘Okay, I’m gonna go do the project now.’”

In July, Tim wandered slightly further afield in the name of recording ambient, or 3D, audio that he felt represented his experience of the place and its weather. This time, that included dipping a hydrophone, or underwater microphones, under the nearby stream’s surface to capture a fish-ear perspective on the noises that lulled Tim to sleep each night, sounding more tidal than riverine. It didn’t include intentionally recording the sounds of human voices, helicopters, or earthly necessities like making and eating food. 

“The ambience recordings are more about what I'm really enjoying about being there—like listening to the water while I'm falling asleep, or listening to the wind in the trees. That’s more stuff that’ll go into the installation, and then the stuff that’s more practical”—like cooking, and people coming to the campsite for short periods—“will be more in the [accompanying] podcast.”

I’m still curious about his downtime, though Tim assures me he never had much. Between keeping track of all of his sound equipment, planning the next day’s recordings, recording his own musings for the podcast, and those persistent practicalities like making food, Tim kept quite busy.

“But did you listen to music again this time?” I persist, still tickled at the thought of Tim listening to his only two downloaded albums on repeat for a week in May. He laughs. “I thought you were gonna ask this! This time, I listened to a lot of Led Zeppelin.” He was only just getting into the band for the first time as he packed for Abisko from his home in Lund, and this time, armed with a new phone and more gigabytes of storage available, Tim had the luxury of more than two albums downloaded once he got there. 

Still, Tim tells me that he didn’t listen to much music this time. “Except for Friday night… I was outside my tent, having some food, and the weather was quite nice—before I was getting lots of insects attacking me—and I was enjoying a Thai red curry in a little bag, and having some coffee, and an energy bar with chocolate, and I was listening to Led Zeppelin on my phone, and looking at the amazing landscape—the mountains and stuff—and I was like, ‘This is a pretty good Friday evening.’”

Overall, July’s was a pleasant trip—consistently so. Tim’s nights were so cold and sleepless in May that his comfort felt in constant flux—“whereas this was steadier enjoyment.” I wonder aloud which trip was Tim’s favorite. “Which was my favorite baby?!” Tim jokes. But he quickly provides an answer. All in all, May’s snow, as opposed to July’s muddy grass, made for more comfortable camping—if much colder, too—“plus it all felt so new.”

“That said, I really enjoyed this as well. But for me personally, I'd choose the snow. And maybe the solitude as well.” The snow will doubtless be back for his next three trips, though—or at the very least, for his final two. Possibly with a vengeance.

Part III – Originally published in October 2021

It’s September in Arctic Sweden, and Abisko is decidedly past summer’s zenith, having long since absorbed, and then forfeited, all of the heat and light that the warmest months toffered. The temperatures are cooler now, and whereas in July Tim was more than content to drink unfiltered water straight from the nearest glacial stream, he now prefers to let it warm up a few degrees in his Nalgene before taking a sip. The unrelenting bites and low whine of the mosquitoes are finally, thankfully, gone, but the landscape doesn’t look much different than it did two months ago. Greenery abounds (though some of it is quietly turning red); snow is scarce; the tourists and hikers are thinning out in number. Tim’s solitude is punctured by the occasional friendly passer-through from time to time, but not as frequently as in July. It’s a special kind of loneliness, he tells me.

Tim Bishop has passed the halfway mark now, with three trips down and two still to come in his quest to record the sounds and silences of Abisko five times over the course of a single year, collecting weather and audio in equal measure for “Sheltered,” an art installation in southern Sweden tentatively scheduled for 2022.

Tim humbly protests that he’s no expert on Arctic backcountry living just three cumulative weeks into the project, but he’s steadily becoming familiar with the rhythm and staff of the northbound night train from his home in Lund. At the end of the day, Tim and I muse, even the furthest-out commutes really are just that: commutes. 

We’ve talked three times now, once after each of his journeys. We’re developing a shared lexicon—the light banter about some audio recording terminology that I mistranscribed once and Tim hasn’t forgotten; the human interest story–style questions he’s come to expect from me; the answers to those questions that he has ready and waiting for our Zoom interviews. This time, inspired by a long conversation Tim had with Kai from CIRC, who walked him out to his campsite on this third visit, we talked mostly about the overall aims of the art project, and the personal impact Tim will necessarily have on the virtual reality–esque installation as its sole creator. 

“If it were another artist doing this project,” Tim tells me, “It would be quite different to this—even if they were doing the same thing technically, with the same parameters, the actual content would be quite different.” I ask whether he’s referring to his position as a white, male, non-Swedish camper/artist in Sweden, and he tells me he isn’t, really. It’s more that “some bits aren’t enjoyable,” he explains. The subjectivity of the art-making comes down more to the whims and experience of the solitary artist than to his sociopolitical standing in the Swedish wilderness, Tim suggests. 

“Of course if I’m feeling crappy and I don’t feel like doing a recording, then there won’t be a recording of that thing, and [exhibit visitors] won’t necessarily know that I was feeling crappy that day,” explains Tim. Referring again to his conversation with Kai, Tim says, “We would both rather be inside, in the warm, at certain points. And that’s the stuff that doesn’t really get discussed a lot of the time, when you think about Abisko. It’s very visual, how you get to know the environment, until you’re actually there. The sound of it is something that’s not quite as focused on, necessarily. You can see photos of hiking there and you don’t necessarily see the difficulties and the challenges of that. And you don’t have an idea of how it sounds differently in this place here, compared to that place there. It seems more like one homogenous—beautiful, but homogenous—environment there. But actually, there’s lots of differences within it,” Tim tells me. 

With this personal impact baked into the project, then, I ask Tim whether he’s planning to lean into his own presence, or attempt to remove himself from his art entirely. 

“Is the ultimate goal for the installation for you to be an invisible force?” I ask. 

“I don’t think so. The installation part isn’t so much about removing myself from it, or removing [the sounds of] helicopters or the other people there. It’s more about giving space for the person going into it to put themselves into that environment. I don’t really want to hide the fact that I’m making it; I don’t think that’s useful… It’s not claiming to be Abisko. It’s kind of like, ‘This is some stuff that I got from Abisko.’ It’s like going to the beach and bringing back some rocks, or some fossils. Like, ‘Here are some things I found on the beach. These are the things that I found interesting on the beach. These are things that I want to show you, and maybe some of them I don’t want to show you, because they’re my really precious fossils, or something.’”

Tim laughs, now, and continues: “I want to keep it so that it’s more about the ‘artifacts’ than about me. So I’m part of that, but it’s also like, ‘How do you relate to these things I’m showing you? Of course I’ve selected them, but how do you imagine this beach was, from what I’ve selected?’”

But that’s not been my experience of “Sheltered” so far. I’m documenting the artist himself. I’m interested, primarily, in Tim’s own process of coming to know Abisko over the course of a year: How September felt like the trip that Tim finally hit his stride with the audio recordings, but also the trip that felt most tedious, with the hastiest packing beforehand, coming right on the heels of two weeks of summer vacation, and his July visit just prior. 

I don’t hear the audio that he records, and likely will not unless I make it to next year’s installation in Sweden. So for now, I am content to imagine Tim’s September visit in 13 songs he sent me as a Spotify playlist. Some I knew already (“Don’t You Want Me”; “Don’t You [Forget About Me]”), most I didn’t. In crafting the playlist, Tim was careful to fold a new genre into his Abisko listening repertoire, well aware that I’d be asking about it. “Yeah, you have to show growth for the audience!” I joke, and he chuckles: “Exactly! I went for 80s synth-pop this time.” 

I listen to the playlist more than once, saving the songs I like the most to my own Spotify account, trying to put myself in Tim’s ears in Abisko while physically in New York City grading English quizzes; walking through Central Park on my way home from work; making dinner indoors with a full stove (and oven, and microwave) at my disposal.

Just after a few hikers leave the Abisko campsite on a Saturday afternoon, Tim sits on the grass in the crisp autumn sunshine, eating lunch, listening to his playlist on his phone. “It felt really good, sitting there,” he recalls. “At times I kept thinking, ‘Yeah, I’m kind of happy now, and I could probably stop with the work part of this for now––and then I would think, ‘Okay, maybe I should go get just one more recording.’”

Part IV – Originally published in January 2022

From an iPhone buried deep within the muffling down of a Fjällräven jacket pocket on an early evening’s pitch-black clearing in Abisko, “Hocus Pocus,” the six-and-a-half-minute-long 1971 anthem by Dutch rock band Focus, played on stubborn repeat. Somewhere in between a classic Queen ballad, supersonic scatting, and the amplified echoes of a soulful Swiss yodel, “Hocus Pocus” felt, to Tim Bishop, like salvation. 

“I just needed to keep warm,” Tim explains, “so I needed a track I could move to.” Yodeling along to “Hocus Pocus” with his final reserves of energy, Tim brazenly attempted to outdance the sub-zero temperatures, and even managed to forget, occasionally, what he was doing for that final hour of solitude: straining to track Max and Ellen’s approaching headlamps as the two completed their hours-long ski journey to collect him. 

Early December saw Tim’s fourth, shortest, and toughest trip yet. We’ve been catching up with the British-born audio artist after each of his visits to Abisko, where he’s been collecting sound recordings for his forthcoming art installation, “Sheltered,” which will show around southern Sweden in late 2022. An optimist by nature, Tim painted each of his first three trips in largely positive lights, all inconveniences considered. 

Tim’s penultimate trip, unfortunately, felt different. 

In the weeks leading up to Abisko, Tim had a cough he couldn’t quite shake. It wasn’t COVID. “It was just a cough—it was just annoying,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘Well, this cough is lingering, so the cold air is going to help.’” Tim chuckles with all the wisdom of hindsight. “It did not help. It got worse.” There was also the persistent fatigue, which Tim, blinded by his excitement to get back outdoors and record the sounds of the blistering cold, managed to ignore. 

It was only after weeks of further decline upon his return from Abisko that Tim would be diagnosed with a rare pneumonia; would shed it in the new year, finally, with the help of antibiotics.  

Already exhausted, his throat so scratchy that he could barely speak, Tim set out for a four-night stay at his now-familiar tent camp that he had originally intended to last five nights—a delayed train up from his home in the southern city of Lund forced Tim’s first night in Abisko into a warm, comfortable stay at the local STF Abisko Turistation—and which actually lasted three.

His first morning outside: Saturday. 

Tim awoke to a tent whose every synthetic surface and loose item was crusted over with ice crystals, much in the style of plastic food containers piled high with fluffy frost in the back of the malfunctioning freezer. Everything from his headlamp to his clothing would stay frozen indefinitely, Tim quickly realized, unless he defrosted it under his jacket using his own body heat.

Tim exited his tent equipped only with five layers of clothing, opting not to waste precious energy by setting up his recording equipment right away as he’d have done on former, warmer trips. This time he would scope out the good recording spots in advance, Tim strategized, and so he walked. “It was really nice, the sound of the wind in the trees, and it was quite consistent while I was having my breakfast,” Tim remembers of that first morning, wistfully. “But then I went back outside about an hour after I’d been hearing this wind, and it had just stopped. And then, for the rest of the trip, there was no wind whatsoever.”

Quite alone in the mountains once again, without any trace of the fellow adventurers whose company he had sometimes enjoyed during his summer and autumn trips, and now without even the wind to keep him company, Tim took solace in the feeble “dawn chorus” performed by one or two birds each morning. They sang near eight o’clock, as two thin bands of pink and turquoise light began to saturate the lower rungs of otherwise dark, open sky. The sun never revealed itself as such. Arctic winter. 

The nearby mountain stream that had sounded so like the sea in July was still running, somehow, but only at a trickle, and only as a means to transport slow, grating slabs of ice. Tim recorded the strange sounds of ice skidding over itself where once he’d known a solidly liquid river, and yet, as on his first Abisko trip in May, he was resigned to the daily tedium of melting down snow for his drinking water, and cooking. 

Monday morning: Tim’s last in the tent. 

His attempts to appreciate the beauty of the veritable winter wonderland spread before him (soundtracked by a well-loved, seasonally appropriate Christmas playlist, no less!) were beginning to buckle under the weight of his desire for a warm bed and, particularly, a fresh sandwich. Tim mimics weighing two offers as if it were early December in Abisko again—a Ferrari versus a sandwich. He picks the latter.

“So I sent a message to Max and Keith [back at CIRC], because we were communicating a lot more regularly because of the [extreme] winter conditions,” Tim says. “I was messaging them three to four times a day, instead of the once a day or so it had been on the previous trips. I sent a message saying, ‘Is there any chance you could get me earlier?’ and I was trying to be quite careful in how I worded it, so they wouldn’t worry about me.” To send the message—and to possibly receive one in return—Tim had to loiter around a bench about ten meters from his tent, where he could sometimes pick up a bar of cell service. Max replied that it might be hard for them to pick Tim up that day—little did Tim know, at the time, that Max was tired from trekking to the hospital the night before—but he promised to figure something out. 

“So this was going on around eight thirty or nine in the morning, and I keep going back to the bench to get the signal. So I’m basically just hanging around by this bench, putting the Christmas songs on, just looking at the view, and enjoying the fact that there’s some light in the sky, just for a little bit… and then I hear this helicopter.” By Monday morning, Tim had been starved of loud, vehicular noise for days. “So I heard this helicopter and I thought, ‘Oh, someone must be out skiing again, on one of those peaks,’” Tim says, vaguely gesturing behind him. “And then suddenly it starts coming over more toward the mountains that I’m on. I’m like ‘Oh, that’s weird. Maybe it’s taking a strange route?” But then the helicopter swerved abruptly, marking out a swift “S” in the sky. “I was like, ‘Is this coming to me— no, that’d be crazy. Why would a helicopter be coming to me? That’s really weird.’

“And this is all within one minute of me first hearing it. It just comes in really fast, and lands like 20 meters away from me.”

Tim played it cool. A woman jumped out of the just-landed aircraft. (Rebecca, Tim learned later. Her organization remains unclear.) “She walks over to me, and is like, ‘How are you feeling? How are you doing?’” Utterly unsure what to do, Tim said that he was alright, if a little tired and cold. She had been sent by Max and Keith, he soon learned, to check on him in the flesh. The helicopter did not have room for both Tim and his belongings, which included necessary insulin as well as expensive microphones, so he stayed put. 

“She’s like, ‘Alright, as long as you’re okay,’ and then she gets back in her helicopter and flies off,” Tim says. “I didn’t want to be awkward while they were landing, but when they flew off, I did take a quick picture to prove that this happened. Because it was probably one of the coolest things that’s ever happened to me, and it was just me there to see it, dammit!”

By afternoon, Tim was packed up and eager to go. Even his stove and cookable food—powdered, “just-add-water” soups and stews that were, by that point, almost sickening to Tim—had been long since packed away. “I was having a few energy bars but I was starting to run out of water because I hadn’t been melting snow,” Tim says, now banking on Max’s imminent arrival. Ellen was en route too. A recent hire at the Abisko Turistation, she had happily agreed to join Max for a long evening ski out to Tim. He saw the light of their twin headlamps grow in ultra slow–motion; the promising light of a passenger train rumbling resolutely down its track. 

Tim danced by the benches; yodeled; waited and watched. 

The night hike back to the Turistation with Ellen and Max proved the hardest physical effort of Tim’s life. Even in snowshoes, he kept sinking deeper into unstable snow. Ellen and Max were gracious and encouraging, offering Tim much-needed food, water, and that most Swedish of sustenances—a warm concoction made of slånbär berries. Once they arrived back at the Abisko Turistation nearly four hours later, everything went smoothly. The Turistation’s kind receptionist, diabetic like Tim, found a sandwich in the closed café and insisted that Tim eat it. Indeed, he calls the night “textbook brilliant.” Tim collapsed into bed with immense relief, surrounded by frozen articles of clothing plastered around his hotel room from ceiling to floor, everything hung out to thaw—and ideally dry, too—in the hopes of making the next day’s re-packing easier.

Blissful, Tim fell asleep, only to awaken with alarm in the middle of the night, body and bed drenched in sweat. “I’d been having a dream about being in the tent and having to keep warm,” Tim realized. “I was trying to keep myself so warm in my dream that I’d made myself sweat that much… [The trip] wasn’t that bad—but obviously, it wasn’t quite out of my system yet.”

Tim will return to Abisko for the fifth and final time in late February. People keep telling him that it will be just as cold.

Part V – Originally published in March 2022

Tim Bishop’s tent is showing signs of wear, as is to be expected. In the last days of February, Tim completed his fifth and final trip to the Arctic, recording audio⁠—and the electromagnetic crackle of the Northern Lights⁠—for his forthcoming art installation in southern Sweden. The tube-like orange tent was purchased approximately one year ago, has undergone exactly one zipper repair in between trips to Abisko, and will serve as centerpiece in the installation, with gallery visitors invited to crawl inside, one at a time, and consider Tim’s heard experience. The hope is that the project, “Sheltered,” will encourage patrons to consider more closely their own relationships with the environment.

“Have you ever found yourself lying in there, trying to imagine how the installation visitors will experience the tent in seven or eight months?” I ask. “Yeah, I’ve thought about it. But you know when you're really cold, and it’s quite hard to imagine that you’re somewhere not cold?” Tim answers my question with a question. I nod my understanding, and we discuss potential solutions to that possible problem: I wonder whether visitors will be able to vicariously experience all that Tim hopes they will in an indoor gallery, lacking the bones-deep cold that has been so fundamental to much of Tim’s time in Abisko. Tim tells me that during his December trip, having just dug a pit in the snow beneath his tent in which he could rest his feet, he briefly toyed with the idea of doing the whole installation in a “deep freeze”; a large freezer complete with actual snow.

But the freezer idea, aside from its counterproductive climate impact, soon seemed undesirable from an artistic standpoint as well. “I think it’s maybe better for people to just come in and be comfortable; just to lie in the tent and imagine. I think that may be more useful than trying to recreate the specifics,” Tim tells me. “It’s a wider thing I’ve been doing in my work anyway⁠—rather than trying to create a lot of things for a ‘seamless’ immersive environment; trying to have a few things that people can springboard off, and use their imaginations to fill in the rest.” 

And extreme cold is liable to distract from other, less immediately pressing thoughts and emotions⁠—something that Tim knows all too well. He’s had to stay especially well-focused when recording audio in Abisko, he explains, compared with other, less extreme environments where he’s worked before. Even just looking around and enjoying the view from time to time required real discipline in February, given Tim’s weariness. The fatigue that attends a three-night visit, as this one became when oncoming dangerous winds saw Tim picked up from his campsite a day earlier than planned, seems an appropriately sedate response to the slow-motion rhythm and physical demands of daily life. 

In order to stave off dehydration, Tim again had to spend hours at a time melting snow down to water⁠—a task that felt no less tedious in February than it had on his first trip north in May. Carefully packing equipment away after an afternoon-long recording session took him an hour and a half to accomplish. And building a meter-tall wall of snow to protect his tent from the unrelenting snow drifts took about an hour⁠—beginning around midnight⁠—on Tim’s last “first night” in Abisko.

As he rode the train north from Lund for the final time, Tim was gripped by anxiety, recalling the serious unpleasantries that had plagued his penultimate trip; bracing himself for some level of discomfort once again. This time, though, things felt more within his control. Tim prioritized needs like melting snow before he rushed into any recording work, and was no longer sick, as he had been in December. And notably, when he had to leave a day early to avoid the strongest winds, mountain guide Max was able to reach Tim without much trouble.

The sounds that Tim recorded offered some illusion of control, too. The howling wind that had evaded him entirely in December was out in full force in February; the kind of wind that reminds one to be careful what they wish for. I ask if wind had been the one remaining item on his “checklist” for this trip. Yes, Tim tells me. “But there’s an irony in that, because I wanted to go there and record what I find there, but you start thinking like, ‘It would be really nice to get this, or record this…,’” he laughs. 

Tim adds that he had heard about people translating the radio waves emitted by the aurora borealis into sound, using an electromagnetic antenna, and also wanted to try that this time. (He did, to grainy, buzzing success!)

Even as the project’s final recordings were made, the installation has yet to take its full shape in Tim’s mind’s eye and ear. He’s still editing the first trip’s podcast-style recordings, which he would make whenever he felt like monologuing to an as-yet empty audience, and is still deciding how best to incorporate his own voice into the installation (if at all). He still plans to use an EEG headset in the experience, but has yet to pick the factor that visitors’ own brain activity will control. As Tim puts his recordings together over the next few months, and determines the best order in which to present them, he plans to let the sounds lead the way. 

Tim seems in no rush to snatch back his tent post-installation, and get back to camping. I ask him how this project has changed his view of the environment, and Tim replies that he’s not sure it has. “I think [doing the project] has confirmed things that I thought I liked, and things I probably didn’t like,” he tells me. 

“Like, camping?” I interject. 

“Yeah, basically camping.”

“It’s made me realize that I should be doing more things out in nature, because I really enjoy that,” Tim says. “Particularly working with sound⁠—I love that. I was so happy when I was sitting in the snow with my headphones on, recording the wind. And it confirmed that I can do these things by myself, for a while. I don’t know that I’d want to do that again, but it’s quite nice to be able to go do it, and of course to meet [CIRC’s] Keith and Max, and have their help in terms of getting out there in the first place. But it confirmed that I could be out there [alone], and keep myself going… And then also it confirmed that I really don’t want to be sleeping in a tent, if I don’t have to.”

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All five parts were originally published as separate pieces on arcticcirc.net.

“Sheltered” was an art and science collaboration project between artist Tim Bishop and Keith Larson at the Climate Impacts Research Centre and was supported by Kulturbryggan.

Photos below courtesy of Tim Bishop.