Labs
Labs
Mechanisms, methods, and protocol hypotheses developed from artistic practice and tested in bounded contexts.
Lab Architecture
NVI’s Labs are not thematic publishing categories. They are working units that extract, develop, and test mechanisms, methods, procedures, and protocol hypotheses from artistic practice. Each Lab begins from an open question and a founding body of work, then undertakes a distinct task of transformation: mechanism and protocol development, procedural analysis, conversational methods, archival methods, or future-systems experimentation.
How can structures within artistic practice become testable methods, mechanisms, or protocol hypotheses?
Each Lab uses distinct evidence and application boundaries to determine which structures depend on the original artwork and which can responsibly enter new contexts.
Plural Value and Decision-Making
Multi-Value Decision-Making Lab
How can decisions remain legitimate when the values at stake cannot be reduced to a common measure?
- Institutional Role
- Mechanism and protocol development
- Founding Corpus
- Post Capitalistic Auction
- Current Status
- Active protocol development
Value Elicitation and Articulation
Value Elicitation Lab
What conditions allow latent value relations to become articulable without predetermining what they mean?
- Institutional Role
- Conversational method and situated archive development
- Founding Corpus
- Voice to Voice and its interview archive
- Current Status
- Active method development
Adversarial Judgment and Legitimacy
Adversarial Judgment Lab
How is judgment produced, and what makes a procedure of judgment publicly legitimate?
- Institutional Role
- Procedural and legitimacy method development
- Founding Corpus
- JUDGE ME
- Current Status
- Active procedural method development
Multi-Agent Value Systems
Multi-Agent Value Systems Lab
How do distinct value systems interact, conflict, and become negotiated across human, ecological, biological, and artificial agents?
- Institutional Role
- Emergent outcomes from conflicting value functions
- Founding Corpus
- The Butterfly Entangled Effect
- Current Status
- Experimental system development
From Artistic Practices to Labs
Artworks pose questions; Labs develop structures within them into testable methods, mechanisms, or protocol hypotheses.
Through external practices, comparative cases, archives, collaborative inquiry, and bounded partner experiments, NVI’s Labs test whether those structures can hold beyond their originating works.
Explore published research and writing