MetaLAB (at) Harvard

🗄️🐈‍⬛🗄️ 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.

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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.

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

💾 🐦‍⬛  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

🧊💦 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

🐈‍⬛ 🗃️ 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

🌊🪼🏙️  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.

🪲🧠 🎨🫟 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. 🔗

🪶🏢  The BUILT ENVIRONMENT Symposium—part four of the series ¿SUSTAINABLE? curated by .landscape—starts TODAY at 11:30am ET (5:30pm Central European Time)!

Swipe to see the full program + list of speakers, and join the webinar with the QR code on the last slide or at https://bit.ly/sustainable-symposium. See you soon!

🧠✨ Tomorrow, April 25, metaLAB’s Director of Art & Education will be joining and ’s AI & Education Symposium as a keynote speaker and workshop lead!

📚 Keynote Panel: AI & the Future of Teaching & Learning (10 AM - 11:15 AM)

What role should AI play in the future of higher education? Join Sarah Newman (Director of Art & Education, metaLAB (at) Harvard), Dr. Seiji Isotani (Associate Professor, Faculty Director of AI & Learning Analytics, Penn GSE), Lydia Logan (VP of Social Impact, IBM Education), Gabriela Gambi (Education Specialist, Inter-American Development Bank), and Dr. Janice Gobert (Professor of Learning Sciences & Education Psychology, Rutgers GSE) for a keynote conversation on AI’s role in teaching and learning. Drawing on perspectives from academia and industry, the panel will examine both the opportunities and challenges AI presents for educators and institutions worldwide.

💡Breakout Session: Moving Beyond “Don’t Use AI”: AI Policies That Actually Work (11:30 AM - 12:30 PM)

In this hands-on workshop, Sarah Newman guides participants through the practical work of developing AI policies that are clear, adaptable, and grounded in pedagogical values. Attendees will leave with frameworks and strategies they can apply in their own classrooms and institutions.

📆 April 25, 2026
📍 Penn Graduate School of Education + online

Learn more at the link in our bio. 🔗

🌲🍃🏙️ The BUILT ENVIRONMENT Symposium is the fourth in a series of five symposia entitled ¿SUSTAINABLE? curated by .landscape and hosted by . This Symposium is composed of critical interventions on the topics of: Building for Biodiversity. How to transition the world to clean, renewable energy. From design heuristics to moral choice through design. Biogenic Tectonics. Unsustainable. Unbounded Sustainability.

The symposium series promotes perspectives that deconstruct commonplaces and critically scrutinize claims of sustainability, bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners from institutions from around the world.

PROGRAM
FIRST SESSION 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM EDT [BOSTON TIME]
Li Xiangning, Vice President & Professor in History, Theory and Criticism, Tongji University
TALK Building for Biodiversity
Mark Jacobson, Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program & Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University
TALK No miracle needed: How to transition the world to 100% clean, renewable energy for everything 
Ellen Van Bueren, Vice Dean, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, & Head of the Management in the Built Environment Department, TU Delft 
TALK Sustainability: From design heuristics to moral choice through design

 
SECOND SESSION  1:00 PM - 2:20 PM EDT [BOSTON TIME]                 
Marc Tsurumaki, Director of the Master of Architecture Program & Professor of Professional Practice, Columbia University
TALK Biogenic Tectonics
Federico Pompignoli, PMP Architecture & Former Project Leader with OMA/Rem Koolhaas
TALK Unsustainable
Deane Alan Simpson, Head of the Program in Urbanism and Societal Change & Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and Planning, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture
TALK Unbounded Sustainability

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