The Unsecurities Lab Takes Foresight to London

Posted on by Nathan Jones

Unsecurities Lab Goldsmith's

On 2nd April 2026, Security Lancaster's Unsecurities Lab recently hosted its first workshop outside Lancaster, bringing together a deliberately diverse group of academics and government practitioners at Goldsmiths, University of London, to explore how immersive art can function as a tool for security foresight in an increasingly unpredictable world.

Led by Dr Nathan Jones, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and theme lead at Security Lancaster, and featuring artist Joey Holder, the workshop drew participants from across HM Government and academia.

The workshop

The session centred on artwork by Joey Holder combining AI-generated imagery, deep-sea documentary footage, and biological and technological material into a deliberately ambiguous immersive experience. Participants were invited to develop a collective account of an unknown incident depicted in the film, drawing on their different professional backgrounds, before co-imagining embodied survival logics of four real deep-sea organisms, each chosen for its remarkable resilience to system change.

Participants connected this directly to live challenges across cyber, AI, biological, and environmental security — domains where the capacity to integrate knowledge from different sources, at different speeds, across different temporal horizons, is exactly what is needed and exactly what current disciplinary silos make difficult.

The Unsecurities Lab is a method for foresight development in which artistic projects are called in to seek and seed instincts and perspectives from diverse disciplines with potential for future cyber-physical concerns. The conversations generated in the workshop are being developed into a research report for participants, tracing the instincts and perspectives that emerged across the tables and the points where they converged, diverged, and productively collided. This report forms part of a broader research programme exploring what the lab calls artistic intelligence — the capacity of art to surface forms of knowledge and judgment that more conventional foresight methods do not reach, and to hold them in productive relation to one another.

Dr Nathan Jones said: "The integration that happened in that room, between disciplines, between timescales, between ways of knowing, demonstrates a virile ground for foresight. The art creates the conditions for it. That is what we are trying to understand and scale."

Professor Basil Germond, co-director of Security Lancaster, said: "The Unsecurities Lab is developing a genuinely distinctive approach to foresight, and this workshop was an important step in taking it into dialogue with government practitioners.”

Coming up

The next Unsecurities Lab session, SUNK COSTS: The Saga of the Felicity Ace, takes place on Wednesday 6 May in Lancaster — an immersive, branching exploration of the burning and sinking of a car carrier in the Atlantic and the overlapping systems it touched. A further workshop on AI image recognition and processing, developed with DMSTFCTN, follows later in the programme.

If you are interested in attending, commissioning an episode of the Unsecurities Lab for your problem space, or in finding out more about this method, please get in touch.

Related Blogs

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed by our bloggers and those providing comments are personal, and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of Lancaster University. Responsibility for the accuracy of any of the information contained within blog posts belongs to the blogger.

Back to blog listing