SUNK COSTS × UNSECURITIES LAB

Unsecurities Lab is a research format which uses immersive art to explore the role of affect in the innovation capacity of interdisciplinary experts. It takes up topics where environmental, technological, biological and informational processes are entangled – and require holistic, imaginative thought. For the May 2026 session, the Sunk Costs team (Jamie Allen, Matthew Lutz, Chris Woebken) and 3D artist Célestin Meunier collaborate with Unsecurities Lab in Lancaster’s Data Immersion Suite to build a participatory journey based on the 2022 fire and sinking of the car carrier MV Felicity Ace in the Atlantic.

Participants move through three short audiovisual ‘worlds’—Labour, Ecology, and Finance—each an immersive essay combining seafloor and shipwreck 3D scenes, archival imagery, diagrams, and narration. Between worlds, participants make collaborative decisions in a game that determines the nature of the world and desirable outcomes. Mixed groups from law, policy, science, business and art develop integrated views on what futures become thinkable when the crew, ocean ecology, and global financial market are considered holistically. The workshop will be documented and transcripts analysed for exposition on innovative and imaginative synergies between the participants and art practice.

Research Team:
Jamie Allen (metaLAB Basel)
Matthew Lutz (Lehigh University)
Chris Woebken (Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture)
Célestin Meunier (Design & Computation MA at UDK/TU Berlin)
Dr Nathan Allen Jones (Lancaster University)

Partners:
Security Lancaster Institute — Unsecurities Lab (Lancaster University)
Lancaster School of Arts
Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business (Lancaster University)
Sunk Cost (Jamie Allen, Matthew Lutz, Chris Woebken)
metaLAB Basel

Special thanks to Treasury Spatial Data, Inc. for professional spatial asset provision and collaboration (treasury.space/)