SOS funds five new projects in the 2025 Project Booster Call!

Valaankasvattaja (Eng. Whale farmer) is a Science&Art research project conducted in collaboration with SOS, the Finnish Environment Institute, and the Science&Art collective Fern Orchestra. In the project MIMOSA, we improved the Archipelago Sea biogeochemical model by incorporating temperature adaptation for phytoplankton. Within the project, we also introduced the concept of Whale Farmer (Valaankasvattaja), which refers to a person who, despite their environmental concerns, is an active protector of the marine environment. We organized an event in October 2025 where we trained the first 20 Whale Farmers to tackle the environmental problems in the Archipelago Sea.

The next project phase will enable the expansion of modelling to nutrient adaptation and compensatory mechanisms as well as bring the project results to the people of Turku in June 2026, significantly broadening our scope. Art will not only make the results of scientific research accessible to a wider audience but also activate the audience to work towards a better future for biodiversity in the Archipelago Sea.

The improvement of modelling will introduce the inclusion of adaptation to nutrient levels and temperature to improve forecasting of the futures under contrasting nutrient and temperature regimes. We will also model the compensatory mechanisms related to the decrease in nutrients. This will allow us to visualize the futures and encourage the Whale Farmers to take action in steering the futures.

In art history, the marine landscape is envisioned as a symbol of, e.g., vastness, spirituality, the sublime, and the journey of human life. It is something for the human gaze and imagination — an anthropocentric promise of excitement and struggle, too. The calm and the chaos. We, the humans, tend to categorise the elements of a landscape as compositional surfaces: A field, a forest, a river, a coast, the sea, and so forth. Through natural sciences, it is, then again, evident that this classification is not that simple, or, at least, it is wrong to think of them as separate entities. For example, 98 % of the streamwater flows from/through the land, filtered and affected by soil substances carried with it, while only 2 % comes from precipitation. In the Baltic Sea, 30–40 % of the water comes from these streams.

Thinking about art, symbolism, and human perception, this ‘leakiness of the landscapes’ raises intriguing implications. It becomes relatively fast impossible to keep these entities intellectually separate, but still the human perception resists, wanting clean categories and objects of aesthetic sensibility. We want to rely on what we, most of all, see.

We want to research this propensity through a transdisciplinary approach and to create a place-based, site-specific demonstration of extended perception: data-based sculpture(s) that manifest a multimodal way of knowing and contribute to the arts, sciences, and social research on human-marine relationalities in transition.

The project SOS3D seeks to enable the continued development of a recently created initial 3D model for displaying interconnections between actors and legislative acts at various levels of governance, in respect of the protection of the maritime environment of the Baltic Sea.

The project has two main purposes: 1) Further develop the recently launched model 1.0. 2) Identify future development needs and potential pathways. The project enhances a holistic marine governance and regulation, with future potential to reveal gaps and overlaps in regulatory approaches and governance tasks. It promotes a better understanding of the governance and legal framework, increases governance-literacy as complex data is being presented in an easily digestible form.

The project will create: An enhanced data set on actors and governance / legislative instruments in the Baltic Sea region, including a set of identified and verifiable interconnections; Enhanced open source code and web-based UI; Enhanced 3D model; A research funding application.