MetaLAB (at) Harvard

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MetaLAB (at) Harvard

We are an idea foundry, knowledge-design lab, and production studio experimenting in the networked arts and humanities.

We are located at Harvard University and the Freie Universität Berlin. metaLAB (at) Harvard was founded in 2011 and is an institutional unit within the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, where it is involved in the Center’s research efforts in such domains as artificial intelligence, social justice, internet governance, cybersecurity, and the law. It is physically located within Harva

rd’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). Because design practice is fundamental to its ethos, metaLAB maintains close ties to GSD faculty, students, and academic programs, as well as to Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. metaLAB (at) FU Berlin was founded in 2022 and is housed at the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft. As a joint international research initiative with metaLAB (at) Harvard, it operates as a transdisciplinary platform for the exploration of new knowledge practices in the scientific, cultural and social domains with a focus on critical data science and experimental museology. metaLAB (at) FU’s approach and aim is to develop practice-based research projects in collaboration with both Berlin-based and European cultural institutions and research partners.

08/18/2026

🤖🐌☁️🌱 What if we slowed AI down? metaLAB Researcher Magda Romanska was recently invited to participate in a workshop on Slow AI and Disability, hosted by Leonardo ISAST’s CripTech Incubator.

Assembling disabled artists, musicians, writers, educators, and technologists, the workshop explored how disability perspectives can challenge AI’s culture of speed, extraction, and efficiency and create space for different rhythms and ways of making. From local open-source models to experimental computational methods, Slow AI asks us to pause, listen, and imagine technology otherwise.

We’re proud to see Magda contributing to this important conversation about accessibility and the future of creative technology!

🔗 Explore the full exhibition of Slow AI at the link in our bio.

08/13/2026

📚💡✨ The Public AI Summit for Educators returns September 16–17 as a free, virtual event bringing together educators, researchers, and AI experts for two days of practical conversations about teaching with AI.

We’re proud to see the AI Pedagogy Project—first started at metaLAB in 2023—co-hosting this Summit alongside the Data Nutrition Project. The Summit is supported by Axim Collaborative, a joint endeavor of Harvard and MIT focused on expanding access to education.

Featuring keynote conversations with:
✨ Karen Brennan (Harvard)
✨ Justin Reich (MIT)
✨ Arvind Narayanan (Princeton)

Expect practical workshops, live Q&A, classroom-ready resources, and thoughtful discussions about AI literacy, assessment, institutional policy, and preparing students for the future of work.

Virtual and free for all to attend!

🔗 Register at https://publicaisummit.org or head to the link in our bio.

07/30/2026

🤐 Do you have a guilty AI secret? In the Harvard Gazette, Sarah Newman, Director of Art & Education at metaLAB, discusses her ongoing project where she collects anonymous AI confessions. The project isn’t about shaming people. It’s about trying to understand how we navigate emerging technologies before clear social norms have taken shape.

“People don’t know what the rules are,” Newman proposes. Rather than waiting for norms to emerge on their own, her project invites us to reflect on our own AI practices and participate in shaping cultures of responsible, transparent AI use.

🔗 Read the full story in the Harvard Gazette at the link in our bio.

06/17/2026

🎠⚜️🏹 Next week! Join us on June 23 for a virtual community meeting with and Fredrik Hellberg of Space Popular.

Archives, Virtuality, and the Built Environment

In this talk Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg of Space Popular will trace the role of archival research across a series of their major projects, exploring the archive not merely as a repository, but as a generative tool for understanding history and imagining the future. From Freestyle, which drew on RIBA’s collections to examine 500 years of architectural style and its relationship to mass media, to The Portal Galleries — shown at the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London and the MAK in Vienna — which built a database of over 1,000 fictional portals to understand how the collective imagination has conceived of virtual travel, to Search History at MAXXI in Rome, which translated Aldo Rossi’s theories of urban experience into the virtual realm. Most recently, Space Popular completed the Collection Gallery at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam — an interactive, hybrid installation offering a digital journey through the Nieuwe Instituut’s archive of architecture and design in the Netherlands.

Space Popular is an architecture studio founded in Bangkok in 2013 that explores the relationships between media and the built environment through research, design, and artworks, directed by Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg. Both are Professors at the Institute of Architecture at the Angewandte in Vienna.

Join the meeting at the link in our bio. 🔗

06/03/2026

🗄️🐈‍⬛🗄️ Today at 4:30pm! It’s not too late to register for our last major work-share of the year with and ! From black boxes and “cryptocompetence” to the hidden architectures of data brokerage, this evening explores how opaque systems shape contemporary life. All are welcome! RSVP at the link in our story or bio.

**

Cryptocompetence (Ilan Manouach)
We have been taught to fear the black box, to demand that every system open itself to inspection, as though understanding were the price of legitimacy and transparency the cure for everything we cannot see. But the most consequential systems of our age, from protein folding to the markets to the cells that keep us alive, already produce results no one fully comprehends, and they have done so all along. This talk is an invitation to stay inside that condition rather than escape it: to treat the black box not as a fault to be fixed but as a space to think from, and to ask what accountability, traceability, and contestability might look like once we stop waiting for an explanation that may never come.

Segments (Kim Albrecht)
One way to understand reality is to divide it, slicing broad categories into ever finer pieces. Science has pursued this method for centuries, and so has commerce, where humans are turned into market segments. The shadowy industry of data brokers has refined this technique for decades, largely out of public view. This exploratory talk investigates the hidden structures of data brokerage through visualization, observing the observers and making the obscurity visible.

**

🗣️ 4:30-5:30 pm - Work-share discussion, 1st floor
🍻 5:30-6:30 pm - Reception & mingle, 4th floor
📍 42 Kirkland Street, Cambridge

06/01/2026

💾 🐦‍⬛ Join us this Wednesday, June 3 for a special work-share & mingle with metaLAB Visiting Fellow and metaLAB Principal ! They’ll share new work on the hidden infrastructures that shape contemporary life, from data brokers and market segmentation to AI, black boxes, and the limits of transparency. All are welcome! RSVP at the link in our story or bio.

Cryptocompetence (Ilan Manouach)
We have been taught to fear the black box, to demand that every system open itself to inspection, as though understanding were the price of legitimacy and transparency the cure for everything we cannot see. But the most consequential systems of our age, from protein folding to the markets to the cells that keep us alive, already produce results no one fully comprehends, and they have done so all along. This talk is an invitation to stay inside that condition rather than escape it: to treat the black box not as a fault to be fixed but as a space to think from, and to ask what accountability, traceability, and contestability might look like once we stop waiting for an explanation that may never come.

**

Segments (Kim Albrecht)
One way to understand reality is to divide it, slicing broad categories into ever finer pieces. Science has pursued this method for centuries, and so has commerce, where humans are turned into market segments. The shadowy industry of data brokers has refined this technique for decades, largely out of public view. This exploratory talk investigates the hidden structures of data brokerage through visualization, observing the observers and making the obscurity visible.

**

💬 4:30-5:30 pm - Work-share discussion, 1st floor
🥂 5:30-6:30 pm - Reception & mingle, 4th floor
📍 42 Kirkland Street, Cambridge

05/28/2026

🧊💦 The WATERSCAPES Symposium—part five of the series ¿SUSTAINABLE? curated by .landscape—starts TODAY at 11:30am ET (5:30pm Central European Time)! Swipe to see the full program and list of speakers, and join the webinar with the QR code on the last slide or at https://bit.ly/sustainable-symposium

05/27/2026

🐈‍⬛ 🗃️ Join us next Wednesday, June 3 for a special work-share & mingle with metaLAB Principal and metaLAB visiting fellow !

Cryptocompetence (Ilan Manouach)
We have been taught to fear the black box, to demand that every system open itself to inspection, as though understanding were the price of legitimacy and transparency the cure for everything we cannot see. But the most consequential systems of our age, from protein folding to the markets to the cells that keep us alive, already produce results no one fully comprehends, and they have done so all along. This talk is an invitation to stay inside that condition rather than escape it: to treat the black box not as a fault to be fixed but as a space to think from, and to ask what accountability, traceability, and contestability might look like once we stop waiting for an explanation that may never come.

**

Segments (Kim Albrecht)
One way to understand reality is to divide it, slicing broad categories into ever finer pieces. Science has pursued this method for centuries, and so has commerce, where humans are turned into market segments. The shadowy industry of data brokers has refined this technique for decades, largely out of public view. This exploratory talk investigates the hidden structures of data brokerage through visualization, observing the observers and making the obscurity visible.

**

4:30-5:30 pm - Work-share discussion, 1st floor
5:30-6:30 pm - Reception & mingle, 4th floor
42 Kirkland Street, Cambridge

All are welcome (in-person only)
🔗 RSVP at the link in our bio

05/22/2026

🌊🪼🏙️ WATERSCAPES is the fifth and FINAL symposium in our ¿SUSTAINABLE? series curated by .landscape. This Symposium, composed of critical interventions on the topics of—Sustaining Specificity, Designing for Extreme Water Regimes, Reimagining the Hydrology of Cities, The Unexpected Potential of Marine Organisms, Ocean Equity, Challenges to Coastal Communities in a Rapidly Changing Arctic—promotes perspectives that deconstruct commonplaces and critically scrutinize claims of sustainability.

The symposium series brings together leading thinkers and practitioners from institutions from around the world.

PROGRAM (MAY 28)

FIRST SESSION 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM EDT
Maria Goula, Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Professor in Landscape Architecture, Cornell University
TALK Sustaining Specificity
Lorena Bello Gómez, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture, ; Faculty Affiliate, Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities
TALK Aqua Incognita: Designing for Extreme Water Regimes
Max Maurer, Chair of Urban Water Systems, Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, ETH Zurich
TALK The Concrete Sponge: Reimagining the Hydrology of Cities

SECOND SESSION 1:00 PM - 2:20 PM EDT
Christian Hamm, Head of Bio-Inspired Lightweight Design & Functional Morphology Sustainable Marine Bioeconomy, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research
TALK The Unexpected Potential of Marine Organisms: How to Apply Their Design Principles to Create Efficient, Aesthetic (And Sustainable?) Lightweight Structures
Yosh*taka Ota, Professor of Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island
TALK What is Ocean Equity?
Jim McClelland, Senior Scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory, University of Chicago
TALK Challenges to Coastal Communities in a Rapidly Changing Arctic

💻 Join the webinar here: https://bit.ly/sustainable-symposium
🔗 Learn more about the ¿SUSTAINABLE? series at the link in our bio.

05/13/2026

🪲🧠 🎨🫟 Join us tomorrow, May 14, for “On Artifactual Imagination” with artist and researcher .tilford!  In this talk, Keith Tilford considers imagination in the context of generative AI as a lens through which to examine the evolutionary embedding of cognition in hybrid thinking systems more broadly. Drawing on evidence from art history, archaeological and cognitive-scientific research, and the anthropology of technology, he argues that the cognitive architecture of imagination is not merely expressed through artifacts and technical lineages, but is itself an artifact of technical practices and their cultural transmission — one coextensive with a reorganization of the imaginative function within a new technical apparatus. A central claim is that, since early modern Europe, this distributed technical character has been progressively encrypted through a concept of imagination and its productive capacities that serves to insulate creativity and forms of liberal subjectivity from scrutiny and historical accountability. The contemporary antagonism toward generative AI, positioned as a radical threat to human creativity, is treated here as an ideological symptom that presupposes exactly this framing of subjectivity. Keith will also briefly present a current synthetic comics project using a trained LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation large language) model over Stable Diffusion XL that operationalizes and tests these claims.

Bio Keith Tilford is an artist and independent researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. He is co-creator with Robin MacKay and Reza Negarestani of the graphic novel Chronosis (Urbanomic, 2022). Recent essays include “Performing Creativity: Text to Image Synthesis and the Mimicry of Artistic Subjectivity” (2023), “Grand Theft Autoencoder” (2025), and “Deskilling and the Dataset: On the Antagonisms of Automating Diegetic Representations in Comics” (forthcoming).

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Thursday, May 14 (4-6 pm ET)
4-5 pm - presentation and discussion, 1st floor 5-6 pm - reception & mingle, 4th floor
42 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA
All are welcome!

RSVP at the link in our bio. 🔗

Address

42 Kirkland Street
Cambridge, MA
02138

Website

https://mlml.io/

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