Art as Anticipation in Tech at AND Festival 2026: Unsecuring Infrastructures

Posted on by Nathan Jones

Unsecured Infrastructures

This autumn, Unsecurities Lab will join Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival 2026 in Barnsley for Unsecuring Infrastructures: a security research programme exploring AI, identity and infrastructure in the UK’s first Tech Town.

Developed at Security Lancaster by Dr Nathan Jones, Unsecurities Lab is an interdisciplinary research method for security innovation. It brings small groups of specialist researcher-practitioners into close encounter with immersive artworks, using the distinctive forms of attention they make possible to investigate complex, emerging cyber-physical challenges.

The Lab is concerned with how we make judgements when evidence is partial, systems are opaque and the consequences of technological change are difficult to anticipate. Immersive artworks become shared environments for testing assumptions, identifying tensions and developing more resilient ways of thinking under uncertainty. Previous editions have looked at the role playing dimension of AI swarms, deep sea AI and bio-genetics, and the networks of power and responsibility in global shipping.

Barnsley’s designation as a government-backed Tech Town makes it a particularly urgent setting for a place based iteration of this kind of work. The town is becoming a test site for AI-enabled public services and new dependencies between public institutions and multinational technology firms. Questions remain about data sovereignty, ecological cost, public accountability and whose version of the town is being imagined.

Unsecuring Infrastructures will feature an international cohort of invited guests Dr Daniel Rourke, Dr Martin Zeilinger, Professor Nigel Clark, Dr Oonagh Murphy and Rose Butler, alongside postdoctoral and PhD respondents Áine McKenny, Andy Weir, Archana Prasad, Tamar Millen, Jake Parry, Jazmine Linklater, Kaajal Modi, Kwasu Tembo and Wassim Zuhair Alsindi. Their work spans critical posthumanism, computational arts, planetary social thought, responsible AI, visual culture, cultural memory, deep-time imaginaries, participatory AI, social sustainability, experimental composition, art writing, food and environmental politics, literature and philosophy, and the political economy of emerging technologies.

Across the festival weekend, the cohort will encounter selected immersive art works including Acoustic Memories by MONOM, Krumville by Dian Joy, Northern Passage: A Quest to Hopian by Jazmin Morris, (W)HOLE by Clusterduck and Chaos Theory by Metahaven.

These works offer oblique but powerful instruments for sensing the Tech Town in place: connecting digital systems to Barnsley’s industrial memory, planetary processes, social desires and real and virtual environments. The cohort will ask what latent realities are embedded in these encounters, and what they might tell us about the risks and possibilities of the futures now being built.

The dialogue will result in a co-authored post-festival publication: part festival reflection, part research report, and a contribution to Unsecurities Lab’s wider work on anticipation, security sense-making and technological uncertainty.

Unsecuring Infrastructures is developed by Lancaster University through Unsecurities Lab at Security Lancaster, in partnership with Liverpool John Moores University’s Institute of Art and Technology and Experimental Technologies Lab. It forms part of AND Festival 2026.

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