Developed by Dr Nathan Jones in partnership with Security Lancaster, the Unsecurities Lab creates immersive environments where participants from diverse fields, from marine biology and environmental science to cybersecurity and cultural theory, are invited to treat artworks as if they were live security incidents. The approach deploys immersive artworks in ways that provoke experts to surface hidden assumptions, translate concepts across fields, and imagine new models of collaboration.

As Dr Jones says in his introduction to the sessions, “Art dislodges what we take for granted, then helps us rebuild understanding together — a method for thinking with the increasing complexity and hybridity of the contemporary situation.”

The first Lab, held in 2024, explored security and environmental sensing through Charybdis by artist Joey Holder, treating it as a deep-sea “incident” that revealed how artistic scenarios can expose the cultural logics embedded in technology. The workshop found that when treated as an “incident,” the artwork opened unexpected avenues for dialogue between disciplines. Marine scientists, security analysts, and media theorists were able to interpret the same sequence of images through radically different frameworks — from ecological systems and threat response to semiotics and affect.

The second Lab, hosted in Lancaster’s 180° Data Projection Suite in July 2025, centred on LUMI (2022) by Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka, a speculative film imagining an AI trained on glacial photographic archives. In this session, researchers from the School of Arts including Prof Carolyn Pedwell, Dr Rolien Hoyng, Prof Charlie Gere, and Dr Kwasu Tembo collaborated with environmental scientists, cybersecurity specialists, digital humanists, legal scholar and defence experts. Together, this diverse group analysed LUMI as a live case of “environmental AI,” identifying emerging risks and developing imaginative “security actors” that embodied how Morecambe Bay might communicate with its human and non-human stakeholders towards a more resilent ‘security ecosystem’.

“The Unsecurities Lab reconceives art as an environment for collective thinking,” said Dr Jones. “By working with artworks we can prototype how knowledge flows between fields that rarely meet and help each discipline see where its own methods end and others begin.”

The project highlights the School of Arts’ leadership in arts-based research methods that address how data, decision-making, and environments intertwine — especially in an age of automation, ecological crisis, and AI transformation.

The Unsecurities Lab forms part of Lancaster’s wider strategy for arts-led innovation, linking creative practice with national and international debates on technology, environment, and security.

Read the full Cycle 1 report and Cycle 2 report, and interviews with artists Joey Holder and Abelardo Gil-Fournier.