Hi, I’m Sarah Barns.

A live, openly-maintained map tracking the roll-out of infrastructure for AI sovereignty in Australia, including data centres, rare-earth mines, refineries, and the energy and water they draw. Includes considerations of ownership, approval pathways, and forms of public contestation and alternate sovereignties being asserted around emergent infrastructure. A data release (mapping toolkit) developed as part of the Civic Interplay project, with recursive interventions by the frontier AI lab and hyperscaler Claude Code.

Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and its surrounding areas, such as Human-Building Interaction (HBI), and Media Architecture have long been shaped by narratives of progress, innovation, and problem-solving, often following the “heroic arc” of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. While productive, these narratives tend to marginalize practices of maintenance, repair, and care, as well as the more-than-human relations through which sociotechnical systems persist. This full-day workshop invites participants to explore alternative narrative forms for HCI.

This presentation introduces the agentic-deliberative praxis of civic interplay as a contribution to the emerging field of digital statecraft.

A living atlas of contested AI sovereignties: a recursive, self-informed lens for watching the governance challenges generated by data centre growth in places of community interest and concern.

All I can do is watch and wonder and make a video player.

At a presentation at the American Association of Geography (AAG) conference in San Francisco I spoke on my pivot from platform urbanism to civic AI enablement.

How I'm thinking about AI sovereignty.

What kinds of intelligences and sense-making capabilities do we need to cultivate in ourselves, as we learn to adapt to these newer kinds of agencies?.

Examining the emergence of civic AI as a framework for civic learning and community health