What is Unsecurities Lab?
Unsecurities Lab is a new platform for exploring how immersive
artworks can help us rethink security in an era of global complexity. Developed
at Security Lancaster, the Lab brings together researchers, artists, technologists,
and policymakers to engage with speculative artworks as if they were real-world
events—treating art as a research environment where urgent questions about ecology, intelligence, and resilience can be rehearsed.

What happened in the March 2025 workshop?
In the first Lab, held in Lancaster University’s 180° immersive
data suite, over 20 participants from neuroscience, marine biology, defence,
cybersecurity, political theory, and the arts encountered
two immersive films by artist Joey Holder.
→ In Session One, the film Charybdis was presented as a security incident.
Participants applied adapted incident response protocols, revealing how traditional
methods break down when faced with unfamiliar, emotionally intense data.
→ In Session Two, groups developed “stabilisation protocols” for fictional
marine intelligences introduced in the film Abiogenesis—prompting participants
to think like nonhuman entities and design radically different models of security.
Why does this matter now?
Our security institutions are structurally unprepared for the
challenges already emerging: deepfakes that destabilize visual evidence,
AI systems that exceed human comprehension, climate disruptions that operate
on ecological timescales, synthetic biology that blurs the boundaries between
natural and artificial.
Unsecurities Lab reveals three critical failures in current
security practice:
1. Emotional disruption breaks expert analysis - When incidents
are genuinely unprecedented and emotionally destabilizing, traditional
frameworks fail
2. Disciplinary silos cannot process complex threats - Cyber-physicalbiological
challenges require sustained interdisciplinary collaboration
3. Human-centered models inadequate for nonhuman actors -
AI, ecological systems, and synthetic life require new forms of negotiation
and coexistence
What could change?
The findings point toward potential institutional reforms:
Crisis Training Revolution: Incident response should prepare analysts for scenarios
involving unreliable visual evidence, emotional disorientation, and threats that
don’t fit existing categories.
Interdisciplinary Environments: Security institutions can use standing teams
that bring together technical experts, social scientists, ecologists, and creative
practitioners as core operational capacity.
Post-Human Governance: Consider frameworks for engaging with autonomous
systems, ecological actors, and synthetic intelligences that don’t conform to human
assumptions about agency and negotiation.
Institutional Adaptation: Organizations could utilise creative and immersive
mechanisms to explore functioning effectively under conditions of fundamental
uncertainty—when the nature of the threat itself is unclear, but intuition and
'hunches' are amplified.
What’s next?
→ A second Lab will run in July 2025, centred on the speculative
film LUMI by Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka.
→ A co-authored discussion paper is in development, drawing from
transcripts and participant responses.
→ Future Labs will deepen the method, strengthen cross-sector
partnerships, and develop new frameworks for embedding art into security
research, strategy, and policy.