If the National Maritime Museum's new Sammy Ofer Wing is known as the "toast rack" then deep in the basement is the freezer.
High Arctic, the first installation in a new exhibition space, is not what you would expect from what we could now reasonably call Maritime Museum Classic.
Along the corridors, back in the old space, an exhibition of about the quest for the North West Passage displays rust cans, mangled eyewear, compasses and worn leather journals covered in spindly writing.
High Arctic - designed by United Visual Artists - conjures the same sense of desolation and cold without a label or artefact in sight. In fact, the room is in virtual darkness, its curious cubist stalagmites picked out by the visitor with a UV torch.
This is art of a very modern kind and so a fitting one for a slick new wing that values experience and authenticity equally (a statement typified by the new Voyagers gallery that has a wall of old-school highlights behind a sweeping 25m wave projection conjured by soothing sound and rushing words).
High Artic deserves an explanation if only because it is so unusual. But an explanation will not adequately serve to conjure the experience because the immersion will be what you bring to it.
The visitor navigates clusters of oblongs, each carrying the name of a glacier, while evocative prose and poems conjure the raw beauty of the icy landscape.
On the floor there are what can only be described as a wild scattering of ever-shifting pixels. Some coalesce to represent snow scapes, others become glaciers dragged ever in one direction, some are maps and others are blizzards.
They seem inevitable and permanent but the UV torch allows the visitor to interact: pushing and breaking up the glaciers, changing the wind, moving the map. A landscape that seems impervious and impersonal warms to the touch. It is both a gently soothing experience and ruggedly unnerving.
Next in this space will come Prof David Starkey's River Thames spectacular in time for the Olympics. One imagines his vision will be robust and grounded, in contrast to this nebulous blizzard of light-touch sensations.
– From July 2011
