Arctic Journey – Boreal Flow
You are invited to walk through this world, to listen, to observe, to slow down. There are no goals, only presence. A moment of stillness beneath a cold, endless light. It began as a series of HDR photographs, but what I truly wanted to share was not the image itself — it was the silence between them.
Boreal Flow was born from a desire to merge technical precision with the poetics of digital space. It began as a series of HDR photographs capturing the northern landscape — a world where light constantly shifts between day and night. Yet as the work evolved, I realized that what drew me most was not the image itself, but the silence between the frames — the space that remains between traces of light. From this idea emerged an interactive gallery, where visual and sonic layers merge into one continuous experience.
The environment was modeled in Unity using ProBuilder, with an intentionally minimal architecture designed not to impose a narrative, but to let light and sound become the main protagonists. The surfaces were textured with materials derived from HDR photographs processed in Lightroom and Photoshop, exported as .hdr files. These were used both as albedo and emission maps, creating a self-illuminating effect where the image itself becomes a source of light.
A subtle particle-based fog system fills the space, responding to the light and the viewer’s movement. The floor uses a glass material that captures reflections from HDR images, producing the illusion of ambient light scattering across surfaces. For realistic illumination, I used reflection probes and a combination of baked lighting within the URP pipeline.
The sound layer combines field recordings and royalty-free samples, arranged through a custom audio-mixing architecture in Unity. Each room routes its own audio signals, with volume controlled by scripts responding to the user’s position. Initially, cross-room “bleeding” created unwanted overlaps, but this issue was resolved by implementing triggers that dynamically adjust the levels of each audio mix depending on the listener’s location.
Boreal Flow stands as an experiment at the intersection of visual art and technical design — a digital environment that resists behaving like a machine. Instead, it breathes, reacts, and quietly mirrors the presence of the observer. It is not only an exploration of light and sound, but also an invitation to experience the subtle pulse of digital matter as something alive.