The Unsecurities Lab

Immersive Art as a Research Environment for Security Innovation

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What is Unsecurities Lab?

Unsecurities Lab is a unique interdisciplinary research method that uses immersive artworks to engage interdisciplinary teams in complex and emerging cyber-physical challenges.

Developed by Lancaster University in partnership with Abandon Normal Devices and embedded within Security Lancaster, the Lab convenes small, specialist groups of researcher-practitioners to think together in conditions that stimulate innovative and entangled thinking.

Contemporary artworks often deal with system complexity, world building, non-human agency, and unexpected consequences. These are themes that resonate closely with current challenges in security research.

By working with immersive media, Unsecurities Lab makes it possible for participants to explore threats associated emerging cyber-physical realities that are not easily represented in technical models or disciplinary frameworks. These include the unintended consequences of climate technologies, and other forms of agential, and perhaps autonomous, systems. Through close engagement with artworks and each other, participants surface tensions and reconsider assumptions of their disciplinary areas, and reflect on different configurations of agency, responsibility and reparative culture between them.

Each Lab takes place in Lancaster’s 180° Data Immersion Suite, where a selected artwork acts as a shared stimulus for collaborative analysis. The artworks are speculative and immersive, designed to prompt focused discussion on a given cyber-physical challenge. Participants’ structured dialogues are captured using AI transcription tools and analysed for further research and policy development.

These conversations contribute to an evolving Planetary Threat-and-Repair Archive—a record of emerging concepts, cross-sector tensions, and provisional models for adaptation.

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?
Abiogenesis and Charybdis

Current Cycle: Joey Holder’s Abiogenesis and 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.