On 6th May 2026, Unsecurities Lab returned to Lancaster University’s Data Immersion Suite for a workshop built around a rich, multi-media immersive artwork called SUNK COSTS, allowing a team of experts to explore foresight across issues of maritime labour, ocean ecology and logistical risk.

This cycle of Unsecurities Lab in partnership with the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business took an artistic rendering of the 2022 fire and sinking of the car carrier MV Felicity Ace in the Atlantic as its starting point. The incident brings together many of the pressures shaping the future of ocean industries: seafarer safety, global supply chains, corporate accountability, ecological damage, financial exposure and the fragile infrastructures of maritime trade.

The workshop involved a team of prestigious scholars and thought leaders from social sustainability, ocean justice, marine governance, corporate accountability, marine biology, environmental policy, seafarer safety, business networks, advocacy, art, media theory and visual culture. Participants moved through immersive audiovisual worlds produced by the Sunk Costs artist collective. Each world combined shipwreck and seafloor 3D scenes, archival material, diagrams and narration. Between worlds, participants made collaborative decisions through a structured game, testing what kinds of futures and outcomes become possible when the crew, the ocean and the market are considered together.

The workshop resulted in a report capturing insights into how ecological harm, labour conditions, financial systems, corporate accountability and logistical infrastructures interact in future ocean ecosystems — and how these can be addressed and described by interdisciplinary teams.

Credits

Lancaster University — Unsecurities Lab in partnership with the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business

Commissioned media and workshop production

Sunk Costs × metaLAB Basel

Research Team

Jamie Allen, metaLAB Basel

Matthew Lutz, Lehigh University

Chris Woebken, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture

Célestin Meunier, Design & Computation MA at UDK/TU Berlin

Dr Nathan Allen Jones, Lancaster University

Special thanks

Treasury Spatial Data, Inc. for professional spatial asset provision and collaboration.