image: StudioPolar: "wine with your climate change" design by Kory Fluckiger
As part of Arctic Action III festival, Artica Svalbard and Arctic Action have invited cultural anthropologist Arthur Mason to hold a breakfast lecture and dialogue.
Arthur Mason holds academic appointments as Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in the Department of Social Anthropology and as Adjunct Associate Professor at Rice University in the Department of Anthropology.
Dr. Mason’s research addresses the exchange of Arctic petro-industry information in elite premium networking spaces and the broader context of energy knowledge provisioning for visualising the future. His previous work examines Alaska Native history, including moments of identification and political recognition via forms of heritage work, citizenship, and academic expertise. His forthcoming research focuses on aesthetic in hydrocarbon imagery and interconnections between the Arctic’s changing environmental and cultural systems and other regions of the world.
The Arctic is a region that is being dramatically altered through climate change, even as extractive industries and the nations that rely on them frame the Arctic as an alternatively valuable or risky frontier. StudioPolar is a reporting initiative to reconsider the meanings of expert-based knowledge within the changing Arctic context. StudioPolar is supported by the US National Science Foundation and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology as an academic enterprise with broader outreach capacity available through on-line accessible formats.
Arthur Mason will in this lecture and dialogue discuss two concurrent StudioPolar projects: Arctic Abstractive Industry and Arctic Energy Image.
Arctic Abstractive Industry is a writing project that provides an ethnographic unmasking of some of the normative projects that today’s rush for the Arctic entails. It highlights the increasing speed of change in the Arctic; the complex relationship between Arctic inhabitants and their land/seascape; and the possibility of a postdiscursive turn in which managing Arctic risk relies on the shaping of aesthetic experience. Mason’s use of the word abstractive both evokes and departs from extractive. It gestures toward the stakes of rendering embodied knowledge explicit and redistributing calculative capacities from humans to technical systems, thereby instantiating the conditions for control over a valuable and vulnerable Arctic.
Arctic Energy Image is an engagement with a collection of images emerging in North America and Western Europe that embody myriad tensions associated with the modern integrated hydrocarbon energy system and its contradictions – peak oil supply and demand, scientific versus political responses to climate change – that seemingly promote more Arctic development, securitisation of infrastructure, and the financial management of production. These images circulate in both public and exclusive venues and include photographs, charts, diagrams, and advertisements, among others. They provide a discourse with which to comprehend a dual situation wherein we are both distanced from the means of production but also dependent upon and embedded infrastructures we know very little about.
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/945-arctic-abstractive-industry