Cultural Technologies Lab: Notes Toward a Growing Network
The Cultural Technologies Lab is an evolving, collaborative infrastructure. We are actively seeking artists, cultural practitioners, organizers, and researchers interested in shaping this network—whether through gatherings, writing, prototyping, or simply staying in conversation.
Our latest conversation, led by Luisa Ji and Benjamin Lappalainen, within the Cultural Technologies Lab continued to shape how this network might evolve—as a space for cultural research, public imagination, and collective strategies that move across place.
Rather than becoming a centralized institution, the Lab is interested in operating as a trust-based scaffolding for artists and cultural practitioners to share credibility, build connected networks, and co-develop approaches to pressing cultural and ecological questions.
This gathering surfaced several areas of shared interest that could shape the Lab’s next phase:
Areas of Focus
Translocal Infrastructure
How do we build support systems that move laterally between communities—across cities, islands, and continents—without relying on institutional pipelines? How can gatherings, residencies, and artist-led exchanges function as connective tissue?Trust and Credibility
What does it mean to steward a Local Lab? Can shared language and framing offer Local Labs visibility and legitimacy for their work, while staying rooted in mutual alignment and care?Reimagining Artist Resourcing
Beyond grants and foundations, what alternative funding models—formal or informal—can sustain artistic practices without compromising values? What happens when resourcing is relational, not transactional?Art as Social Infrastructure
How might practices at the intersection of AI, climate, and collective solutioning offer not just critique, but tools for orientation? Can the Lab function as a space for prototyping these tools?
What’s Next
Participants are exploring:
Co-developing with founding Local Labs: upcoming gatherings, proposals, and public projects
Supporting KL Local Lab in Malaysia: AI KE US
Ongoing conversations on governance and resource stewardship
Introducing new collaborators across Southeast Asia and beyond
Inviting contributors to establish and grow an open repository of practices, reflections, and templates for others to use and adapt to their local and cultural contexts
Open Invitation
The Cultural Technologies Lab is an evolving, collaborative infrastructure. We are actively seeking artists, organizers, and researchers interested in shaping this network—whether through gatherings, writing, prototyping, or simply staying in conversation.
If you see alignment, join us for our next gathering.