MetaLAB (at) Harvard

💾 🐦‍⬛  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.

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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 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. 🔗