Unsecurities Lab

Reframing Security through Art and Culture Innovation

The Unsecurities Lab is an interdisciplinary platform that brings together artists, security specialists, policymakers, and researchers to rethink cyber-physical security, resilience, and adaptation. It begins with the recognition that security is not only about protection and control, but also about how we perceive and respond to complex, entangled systems. Cultural innovation plays a critical role in shaping these perceptions, providing new ways to approach security as an evolving, systemic challenge rather than a fixed technical problem.

Each lab cycle follows a structured process: Artworks are deployed as provocations—complex spaces of inquiry that demand attention, interpretation, and collaborative analysis. Close engagement with art surfaces new ways of seeing and conceptualizing security. Structured dialogue allows specialists from different disciplines to test assumptions and generate new frameworks. Documentation and publishing ensure that these insights circulate beyond the lab, embedding cultural innovation into security thinking.

The Unsecurities Lab does not seek to impose new security paradigms but to expand the ways key people think, speak, and act on security issues. By integrating cultural inquiry into systemic security thinking, it builds new methods, new forms of knowledge, and new capacities for navigating uncertainty.

Our Approach

The lab builds on Distributed Critique, a research method that involves bringing specialists from distinct disciplines into structured dialogue around problem-driven artworks. Rather than relying on existing expertise alone, Distributed Critique allows new conceptual tools to emerge organically through collaborative cross-disciplinary thinking.

Each Unsecurities Lab cycle follows a structured process:

The Artwork as Problem → A contemporary artwork is selected as a focal point for structured critique—posing speculative futures, systemic entanglements, or conceptual provocations relevant to security.
Gathering Experts → We convene an interdisciplinary cohort of artists, security specialists, policymakers, curators, and researchers.
Dialogue & Investigation → Specialists engage in facilitated discussions, unpacking the artwork’s conceptual, material, and security implications.
Reframing Security → Insights from these discussions are translated into new methodologies, cultural frameworks, and systemic security approaches.
Media & Dissemination → The process generates co-authored papers, recorded dialogues, and public outputs that expand the reach of this new knowledge.

Why Art? Why Security?

Art and security are rarely considered together. Yet, both deal with uncertainty, vulnerability, and systemic entanglements. Contemporary artists working with speculative futures, distributed systems, and environmental shifts offer unique entry points into emergent security challenges—especially those that are not yet fully recognized within institutional frameworks.

Through Unsecurities Lab, we ask:

How can cultural methods of speculation, abstraction, and critique help security practitioners anticipate emerging threats?
What new models of resilience and adaptation can be drawn from contemporary artistic inquiry?
How can interdisciplinary critique generate systemic insights beyond conventional security paradigms?

Current Cycle: Joey Holder’s Abiogenesis & Charybdis

The first cycle of Unsecurities Lab will focus on two artworks by Joey Holder:

Abiogenesis → Exploring emergence, synthetic life, and autonomous security risks.
Charybdis → Examining coastal security, environmental unpredictability, and systemic resilience.

Through these works, we will investigate how cultural critique can shape interdisciplinary security models, bringing together curators, AI researchers, environmental scientists, and policymakers in structured dialogue.