Hello, I’m OCTOPA.
Pleased to meet you.

I’m a strange creature from the Northern Sea Route. Welcome to my Den, a place where you can find about all my adventures, a space to rehearse futures and a library of resources on my many curiosities.

WHO AM I, ACTUALLY?

I’m a shape-shifting, fictive, online being. I spend most of my time trying to make sense of climate change and our complex, dynamic world. The icy waters and slippery surfaces of the Arctic are my home.

I belong and I diverge, I contribute and I evade. I’m a sentient non-human anomaly. I move between sea and land. I’m my physical, biological self, by birth. But I’ve been altered, by irruption and interruption, against my will, contaminated by plastics and bio-effluent. But that means I’m able to run on land as well.

I am of the past but I move in the present and shift and change in the future. Being a shape-shifter and a time-traveller is what makes me special.

Ready for some unexpected moves and some time bending?

Together we’ll experience non-literal and creative ways to think and act back in the present. Just as I am able to invert my form, you too will need to choose what you can do to rethink and transform your expectations and how to act to change the current world and its workings.

THE NORTHERN SEA ROUTE
IS MY DOMAIN

Oh, did I forget to tell we’ll be connected to the Northern Sea Route (NSR) along the Norwegian and Russian coast? What a massive zone it is and hard to reach and fathom. Its experiencing rapid change from a once frozen passage to one now increasingly freer of ice.

This route is still remote as it was for 17th-century western explorers sailing wooden craft in search of a trade route through the ‘North-East Passage’. Today, the NSR is an immense and intricate tangle of interests and potentials: environmental and geo-political, cultural and communicational, political economies with technological innovation.

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE NORTHERN SEA ROUTE?

You’ve probably heard about the NSR in the news; container ships filled with consumer goods and liquid natural gas trying to reduce journey time between factories of Asia and markets of Europe. And there are nuclear-powered icebreakers, even floating nuclear power stations. You’ll meet scientific vessels studying climate change, the indigenous lifeworlds of Samí societies and extractivist policies and practices of fossil fuel interests and mining industries.

Our journey will be all about expectations and aspirations, experiences and sense making. Yet, the multispecies worlding we will venture into will take place in a non-literal zone shifting in time and space. We’ll explore it reflexively: through irony and play, by way of design fictive scenarios and via my flexible persona.

MY ADVENTURES

OCTOPATLAS

A narrative experience to explore, along with OCTOPA, the futures of the Northern Sea Route and their implications for your everydayness.

OCTOPA’S JOURNEY

A reflexive game to shape the fates of the Northern Sea Route as well as your creative practice, with the kind help of OCTOPA.

Publications ›

REHEARSE FUTURES WITH ME

Discover how working speculatively helps rethinking our shared futures connect with urgent demands, rapidly changing contexts and conditions and needs in the present!

Rehearsing ›

MY RESOURCES

Dive into scientific articles and creative works I’ve curated to understand facts and knowledge behind my speculative universe.

Resources ›

MY TRAVELS

You might like to join me on my travels in Arctic waters and the Northern Sea Route in the Amphibious Trilogies project website led by Prof. Amanda Steggell of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) into extended choreography, funded by the National Artistic Research Programme (NARP) of Norway).

I’m a collaborative creature also given life through the FUEL4DESIGN project into design future literacies and vocabularies propelled by Prof. Andrew Morrison, a member from the Institute of Design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO).

We’ve further collaborated in these projects and their intersections with Bastien Kerspern and colleagues in the studios Casus Ludi and Design Friction, with their speculative and ludic and design fiction exploration.