How much is a caribou worth? And is that worth more than the unknown quantity of oil in the Arctic Refuge? Is the cost of extracting that unknown quantity of oil, lower than the cost of cleaning up the possibility of an oil spill? As a landscape in the state of becoming, its value is contested through its potential futures. Supercomputers become the new oracles as they attempt to calculate these variables to inform policy and long term strategy. As these supercomputers model the complexity of nature, they become increasingly indistinguishable from the landscape they are modeling. The project speculates on a landscape re-imagined and re-engineered as the most advanced supercomputer on this planet. Through an Operating Manual for Sedna, nature becomes biological hardware, landscape survey equipment now measure computational outputs, and nature documentaries are reimagined as petaflops of risk calculations.
