The Readiness Is All: Ecological Approaches to Post-Detection

In 2022, transdisciplinary approaches breathe new life and nuance into research around post-detection protocols in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The researchers of the Indigenous Studies Working Group emphasise that communication protocols are not fixed and static, but dynamic, emergent, relational, contextual and alive (Shorter & TallBear 2021). The group identified critical areas for attention in SETI: cultural anthropology, Indigenous perspectives, and rigour in continually cultivating creative capacities to reimagine post-detection in step with societal developments. In support of fresh approaches to post-detection, creative research practice can be a uniquely playful method for speculative ethnographies of outer space, researching unknowable social dimensions of a discovery event. Playful transdisciplinary and transcultural entanglements may support imaginative and engaged mutual learning. Art projects—both my own, and those of other artists—explore contact scenarios as participatory experiences, for example, through Mixed Reality performances, Live Action Role Play (LARPs), and installations. These experimental encounters welcome a genuinely diverse mix of participants into semi-structured story-telling, improvisation and artistic processes, and generate research material from live interactions. Instead of speculating about possible scenarios, researchers can study living responses and interactions of audiences in real-time. The ability to play and replay artistic experiences creates unusual and significant data for further analysis, and considers dimensions notoriously hard to model in speculative research, such as spontaneous group behaviour, relational politics, aesthetics and affect. Process-based approaches to post-detection may deepen the questions we can ask together, and help us better prepare for the potential societal effects of a confirmed detection.