Remote Sensing the Arctic: An Exploration of Non-Human Perspectives of the Territory

Abstract:
In the Arctic Ocean, remote sensing technologies are deployed in growing numbers, tasked with siphoning data from their surroundings and transmitting digital fragments of the landscape across the globe. As we increasingly come to rely on machine senses to understand and make decisions about the planet, my research grapples with the implications of navigating ecologies through senses other than our own, and speculates on the expanded, non-human ecological perspectives these instruments offer. Beyond their role as scientific instruments, I consider their potential as design tools—as image making and world building tools.

In the context of rapidly warming temperatures and rising geopolitical tensions, I examine the mechanisms through which prevailing imagery of the region is constructed, focusing on the ways in which capitalist and colonial enterprises are able to infiltrate and distort imaginaries of the far north. From this vantage point, I then speculate on the possibilities of using electronic sensing infrastructures to generate alternative visual and material languages that look to non-Western and non-human ecological perspectives.