Co-narrating a Future North

Arctic Frontiers 2015 – Future North Session

Through the persona of Narratta as a ‘thing that speaks ‘I investigate what might be shaped on site in the arctic but also online in the cast of design fiction. This situates the work within comunication design and digital narrative. Drawing abductively on ANT as a field, and our wider project work on landscape futures, in this chapter I seek to develop not only a criticism of concern, following Latour, but ways in which this might be extended and assembled through co-design as a ‘criticism of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2010.) This is a discourse of care mediated on the web, drawing on blog tools and multiple authoring. It is also a mode of articulaton that expressly attempts to produe an arctic ‘counter narrative’ of a ‘hybrid’ entity that irrupts, contrasts, queries and may transcend the predominent discourse of oil, gas and mineral extraction, geo-political manouevering and now near teleological paths of climate science. The role of such a patently fashioned narrative is to deploy alternate ‘tools’ to the deconstruction and discursive composition of representations and mediations of the artic today but importantly the ‘future north’.