The Core of Uncertainty Labs

In a time of unprecedented access to information, knowledge and wealth production, why are we so lacking in alternatives?

Even when we know, why does our knowledge fail to produce corrections?

How do we account for an ‘age of no remedy’, where alternatives are consistently suppressed and dysfunction is highly advantageous (for some)?

What are the benefits of regulatory systems that are dysfunctional enough?

What are the tools that keep systems dysfunctional—even when we know—and to whose benefit?

Uncertainty Labs focuses on three main conditions:

  1. For many of the issues we face, we already know.
  2. For the subjective powers that keep knowledge ineffective, we do not know (and perhaps cannot “know”).
  3. The artist is one of the few social positions allowed to not know without risking legitimacy.

By sharing the ability to ‘not know’ with other knowledge-producers, Uncertainty Labs offers a collaborative space to:

  1. Ask if our existing knowledge and rhetoric is accurate or complete enough;
  2. Produce proposals for understanding the subjective powers of misconstruction, misalignment and maintained ignorance that benefit from inaccurate and incomplete knowledge and rhetoric (i.e., non-knowledge);
  3. Understand the qualities of knowledge and non-knowledge and how to tell them apart.

If more knowledge isn’t the answer, what is?

At the core of Uncertainty Labs is a belief in the need to realign knowledge towards the production of effective remedy and regulation. Can our rhetorical tools be recalibrated to “know” the subjective movement of intentional inability and ignorance? Can we generate methods of understanding obstacles to remedy and regulation that are not neutral but constructed, maintained and instrumentalized in endlessly shifting ways? Can we produce knowledge that is as dynamic, flexible and relative as the current ability to evade it?

To engage these questions, Uncertainty Labs focuses on three points:

  1. a proposal and theory of “social objects” and “non-knowledge”;
  2. the power of misalignment—specifically the misalignment of social objects via non-knowledge;
  3. a proposal for understanding the misalignments which contribute to the inabilities of our sovereign systems to regulate power and influence beyond sovereignty.