Unsecurities Lab 1 (March 2025)

This Lab centred on two immersive artworks by Joey Holder: Charybdis, which visualises disrupted communication and deep-sea security ecologies and Abiogenesis, which imagines emergent life forms and synthetic planetary intelligence. Participants worked through both speculative analysis and structured scenario-building.

Questions explored:

• What happens when a security event is visually or emotionally unstable?
• How do existing response protocols cope with unfamiliar forms of signal or agency?
• What forms of coexistence or protection become thinkable when we foreground post-human actors?

Key insight:

Security cannot be separated from the forms of perception that shape it. Disorientation, non-recognition, and speculative presence all challenge the operational boundaries of current security models.

Interview with the artist

“We all have these structures within which we construct meaning. If the artwork makes participants question or destabilize their usual frames of reference, then it's working.”

Blog post about the event

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Unsecurities Lab 2 (July 2025)

This Lab focused on LUMI, a film by Jussi Parikka and Abelardo Gil-Fournier, which imagines a climate-AI tasked with restoring the cryosphere using archival images of snow and ice. The AI repaints the landscape according to limited visual training, raising questions about data quality, automation, and aesthetic influence.

Questions explored:

• How do environmental repair systems handle incomplete or biased data?
• What new risks arise when climate governance is automated or delegated to synthetic agents?
• Can minor or non-dominant sensing practices serve as a foundation for more plural security models?
• What happens if environments themselves are made responsible for their own security?

Key insight:

The promise of automated restoration can obscure deeper systemic risks, particularly when aesthetic coherence replaces ecological understanding. Recognising the entanglement of sensing, power, and repair is crucial for navigating emerging techno-environmental infrastructures.

A news item detailing the event which took place on the 10th July, can be found here

An interview with Abelardo Gil-Fournier can be found here

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Unsecurities Lab 3 (Upcoming)

The next iteration of the Lab will explore environment as critical national infrastructure, addressing the intersections of ecology, energy, data, and territory.