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Short abstract

Insights from the interdisciplinary project on DAS & dark fibre networks: drawing on artistic and activist-led research, feminist STS and science fiction to create community methods that enabled a bottoms-up approach to literacy and agency-enabling conversations on governance.

Long abstract

Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) is a technique that transforms fibre-optic communication cables into continuous sensors: pulses of laser light sent through the fibre detect changes in backscattered signals caused by vibration or strain, enabling the cable to register disturbances along its length. The paper draws on the interdisciplinary research project Soundscale which explores the potential of urban dark fibre (under-utilised) networks as sensing infrastructure for smart city applications. Similar systems in other contexts are being actively developed for military and security purposes such as border monitoring and infrastructure protection. A sustainable and trustworthy governance of such technologies, with active consultation from the public, therefore, becomes of utmost importance.

I would like to share the strand of the project that drew on artistic and activist-led research, critical theory, feminist STS and science fiction to create community participation methods that enabled a bottoms-up approach to literacy and agency-enabling conversations in relation to DAS governance. In the funding landscape where emerging technologies development usually comes late to citizens consultation, this becomes increasingly important. I will use my position within this project to share the methodology used in this project over the last 6 months, including exercises on science-fiction imagining, artistic research and community work. Employing these methods throughout the project aimed to avoid the traditional route of “art-as-output” for scientific process, but also produced new answers to some disciplinary traps and questions of validity, participation and media literacy.