Images from the 2009 research trip through Foxe Basin

Please see the project specific website of API for complete details.

The Arctic Perspective Initiative (API) is a non-profit, international group of individuals and organizations whose goal is to promote the creation of open authoring, communications and dissemination infrastructures for the circumpolar region. We aim to empower the North and Arctic people through open source technologies and applied education and training. By creating access to these technologies while promoting an open, shared network of communications and data, without a costly overhead, we can allow for further sustainable and continued development of culture, traditional knowledge, science, technology and education opportunities for peoples in the North and Arctic regions.

Our initial project is to construct mobile, habitable living and working units which can be used to live on the land away from settlements for periods of up to two weeks, all the while remaining connected through communications technologies such as live video streaming and data connections. The units will be powered solely with renewable energy sources, and will leave virtually no adverse ecological footprint. Through these units a number of activities can be pursued; scientific monitoring, filmmaking and editing, sustainability hunting, environmental assessment, and technology research. The first prototype is scheduled to be delivered, and tested during the summer of 2010.

The project aims to bring closer to a wide audience the urgency of the problems emerging in the Arctic with particular clarity: the changing cultural landscape of the region, the potential for new intercultural dialogue, conflicting economic and territorial interests, ecological problems, climate change, and the effects of ecological changes on the life of the Inuit and other circumpolar peoples.