The Natural Lab addresses non-human temporalities: geological, microbial, to actively challenge human-centered perspectives. Artistic practice here involves slow, durational experiments aimed at observing rhythms and processes beyond human perception and knowledge, emphasizing listening and witnessing over intervention and mastery.
The Artificial Lab engages with human-scale technologies like digital systems, sensors, networks, and algorithms. It explores how these systems mediate perception, extract data, and structure experience, actively questions distinctions between signal and noise, nature and culture. Central to this lab are questions of phenomenology, extractivism, and interface politics.
The Synthetic Lab turns toward post-human temporalities and materialities: synthetic biology, AI, plastics, radioactive waste, and other entities that will likely outlast human lifespans. Instead of treating these materials and systems as threats, this lab explores how artistic practice can engage with them critically, even intimately: developing strategies of toxic embracement, speculative ethics, and ecological attunement.
All three labs are committed to sustainability, viewing it as an open and complex field that goes beyond simple preservation or efficiency. Artistic practices within the labs are seen as processes of cross-pollination and contamination, merging different temporalities and infrastructures. By incorporating additive processes to others of recycling and composting into the labs, these natural cycles become visible and integrated into daily routines and artistic processes. This approach encourages students to develop grounded, embodied understandings of sustainability as wider circular ecologies, creating value systems aligned with their own experiences and desires.
These laboratories are not structured as disciplinary silos, nor do they seek to emulate the neutral authority of the traditional scientific laboratory. Instead, they function as spaces where different forms of knowledge production (aesthetic, technological, ecological, theoretical) are brought into proximity, often under conditions of friction, ambiguity, or indeterminacy. The term lab is used cautiously: less as a space of control and more as a contingent site for experimentation understood as a relational, ethical, and material-semiotic practice.
Rather than operating through control or isolation, experiments here are understood as safe spaces, where the integrity of our knowledge is put at risk through methodologies of care: situated, interspecies, interstitial, and infrastructural. Students are invited to perform experiments that cannot, or should not be performed, in real space. These laboratories allow students to be playful, finding in the labs a space to experience concrete situations that would otherwise not be possible to establish outside.
Art and science are not here to solve, but to reframe those questions. Students are invited to take risks and imagine new modes of co-existence. In this context, the lab becomes a third space, where students and their collaborators—whether human or non-human—engage as co-creators, never as instruments. The labs provide an interstitial space, where students can explore without the pressure of immediate results or predefined expectations, allowing for more radical forms of engagement, experimentation, and risk-taking.
(Slideshow of pictures from the labs & hands-on workshops are under construction)