
Land, Sea, Sky: Digital Infrastructure and Transition in Northern Landscapes and Communities is a recently-launched SSHRC project involving an international team of artists and academics interested in the growth, impacts, and futures of digital infrastructure in remote coastal and Arctic communities. In particular, the team behind the project are interested in how the growing availability of high-capacity fibre, as well as the emergence of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite internet, has altered thinking and expectations around reliability, capacity, and mobility. Over the course of its 4-year duration, Land, Sea, Sky will bring together artists and academics, in conjunction with local partners, at three different northern coastal field sites (Skidegate, Inuvik and St.John’s); These are communities linked by commonalities of experience around infrastructural growth but at different stages and with interesting unique histories concerning the development of local internet infrastructures. The project will ultimately conclude in 2029 with a series of international exhibitions. At a time when the historically uneven distribution of fibre has begun to tilt toward rural areas for the first time, and when increasingly, fibre-based systems are being constructed well beyond the confines of the world’s major urban centres, this project looks to explore the impacts of state-of-the-art internet infrastructure on the lives of those who use it and how a transition from a state of limited and unreliable connectivity to one of bandwidth-unlimited and resilient connectivity is experienced in remote and northern communities.
We would like to acknowledge the support of: SSHRC, ECU, McGill U, Queens U, and Haida Gwaii Museum
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