Land, Sea, Sky: Digital Infrastructure and Transition in Northern Landscapes and Communities is a four-year, multi-sited project using multimodal ethnographic and arts-based practices to interrogate the impacts and imaginaries of emergent fibre and satellite-based data infrastructures in remote, non-urban communities of the North Pacific, North Atlantic, and Arctic regions.

Historically, many remote, non-urban communities of the circumpolar north have contended with unreliable, high-cost, and low-capacity data infrastructures. Constrained by terrain, climate, and population density, the costs and logistics of deploying fibre-optic systems in areas without road access or electrical grids, or of maintaining fixed wireless systems in harsh and volatile environments of extreme cold, has meant that many of the smallest and most isolated communities of the circumpolar north have for decades contended with sub-standard internet connectivity.

But an altogether different digital ecology is now emerging. On land, local access to ‘future proof’ fibre-optic systems has expanded thanks in large part to increased public spending and the diligence of community-led last mile and middle mile broadband initiatives. At sea, accelerating glacial melt has opened up new, more northerly subsea cable routes once deemed impassable. And looming overhead, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite systems have rapidly emerged as a solution where terrestrial infrastructures are absent or poor.

Against this backdrop, Land, Sea, Sky engages remote, non-urban communities of the North Pacific, North Atlantic, and Arctic regions impacted by imminent and ongoing shifts in local digital infrastructural conditions to explore the spatial, material, and aesthetic dimensions of these emergent data infrastructures through multimodal ethnographic and arts-based practices. Through creative and collaborative encounters with local partners and artist communities, this project seeks an account of the impacts and imaginaries of these emergent data infrastructures in the remote, non-urban north in relation to the people who use them, the places in which they are physically located, and the communities who work to maintain them.

Land, Sea, Sky is supported by an Insight Grant of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).