Unsecurities Lab

Unsecurities Lab is an interdisciplinary research project exploring how contemporary art can function as a research environment for rethinking security under conditions of uncertainty, complexity and systemic change. Developed through Security Lancaster, the Lab brings together artists, academics, technologists, policy practitioners, security specialists and scientists to work with immersive artworks, speculative scenarios and structured discussion formats.

Across a series of workshops, the project has tested whether artworks can operate as “live incidents”: shared situations through which participants rehearse forms of perception, judgement and collaboration that are difficult to generate through conventional policy, risk or innovation settings. The Lab has used moving-image works, immersive projection environments, role-based exercises, incident-response prompts and speculative personae to examine emerging insecurities across ecology, AI, synthetic media, maritime systems, environmental monitoring, infrastructure, nonhuman intelligence and global supply chains.

The project asks how security thinking changes when it begins from ambiguity, affect, cultural interpretation and more-than-human systems. It positions art as an active epistemic environment: a space in which different forms of expertise can be unsettled, compared and recombined. Its workshops have shown how artistic methods can surface tacit knowledge, reveal disciplinary blind spots, slow premature consensus, and generate new operational concepts for responding to complex threats.

The Lab builds on Nathan Jones’s wider research into Distributed Critique, artistic research, digital culture and culture innovation. It develops a practical methodology for using cultural experience as a mode of interdisciplinary foresight, helping researchers and practitioners think together about problems that exceed single-discipline analysis. Outputs include workshop reports, policy-facing insights, methodological frameworks and a developing publication strand on art-driven security research.

Unsecurities Lab is a project that uses contemporary art to help people think differently about security and future risk. It brings together artists, scientists, policy makers, technologists and security specialists to explore problems that are difficult to understand from one point of view alone.

In the workshops, participants encounter immersive artworks, films and speculative scenarios. They are asked to treat these artworks almost like real events: something has happened, something is uncertain, and the group has to work out what it means. This creates a space where different kinds of expertise can meet, including scientific knowledge, policy experience, technical insight, cultural interpretation and instinctive emotional response.

The project looks at emerging forms of insecurity connected to artificial intelligence, ecology, climate change, synthetic media, infrastructure, maritime systems and nonhuman life. Its purpose is to test how art can help people notice weak signals, share specialist knowledge, question assumptions and imagine better responses to complex situations.

Unsecurities Lab shows that art can also be a practical environment for collaborating across disciplines on research and future planning.

Unsecurities Lab has shown that contemporary art can help people think more richly about complex and uncertain risks. Immersive artworks create situations where experts have to respond to ambiguity, unfamiliar evidence and emotional intensity, which are common features of real-world crises.

A central finding is that different kinds of expertise notice different things. Scientists, security specialists, artists, policy makers and technologists often read the same situation in very different ways. These differences are useful because they reveal blind spots, hidden assumptions and alternative ways of understanding risk.

The workshops also show that instinctive and emotional responses can be valuable forms of intelligence. Feelings of confusion, discomfort, fascination or concern often point toward something important that has not yet been fully articulated.

Another finding is that rushing toward consensus can weaken analysis. In complex situations, groups need time to hold several interpretations open before deciding what an event means or what should be done.

The project has also shown that security is no longer only about human threats, borders, cyber systems or institutions. Ecological systems, AI, synthetic media, data archives, infrastructures, supply chains and nonhuman life all shape how insecurity emerges.

Finally, the Lab demonstrates that art can be used as a practical research environment. It can help people rehearse judgement, test assumptions, develop shared language and imagine responses to future risks that are difficult to model through standard methods.