Amount Awarded: $20,000
In December 2017, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report proclaiming a "New Arctic", signaling a massive, irreversible phase change in the material composition of the Arctic Ocean and its peripheries. Once a forbidding "frozen ocean" blockaded with sea ice, the polar sea is now construed through the lens of runaway melt, thaw, liquefaction, and off-gassing-transformations not only quantitatively but architectonically expressed. The very idea of a constitutively new ocean entails radically restructured political and economic geographies to be observed, represented, exploited, and policed at multiple scales. The possibility of a liquid Arctic is reconfigured into financial and actuarial figure of a "trillion-dollar ocean" that need only build the necessary infrastructures of extraction, circulation, and securitization to come into being. Arbitrating the New Arctic's figuration and governance as a field of risk and opportunity are the techno-scientific and political apparatus of "environmental intelligence". A vast constellation of satellites, drones, buoys, cables, supercomputers, servers, and sensors constructs the New Arctic as a "digital ocean" whose geo-economic and geostrategic value inheres in its rendering as a calculative, computational domain. Through faculty exchanges, workshops and research collaboration, the New Arctic project builds upon the research strengths and connections of the University of California, Berkeley and the Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU)-- particularly given entanglements with SF Bay Area tech, and Norwegian oil, gas, and energy-- to explore how the New Arctic's digital ocean is taking shape