Dark Laboratory
climate | Race | Technology
Playing in the Dark
“We are dreaming all wrong.”
- Toni Morrison
Dark Laboratory is a creative technology collective, production company, and design studio that researches climate and race through theory and action. Each initiative we release forms another layer of an expanding galaxy of projects on Black and Indigenous futures. The lab’s philosophy is inspired by the ethos of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1993). We imagine the Western hemisphere as a haunted house founded on stolen land and built through the labor of stolen lives.
Dedicated to making possibility possible, we are a collective of technologists, scholars, artists, and theorists who are also storytellers centering the study of race and ecologies. Turning to human and non-human animals, plant life, and microorganisms as models of storytellers, we use immersive technologies, (VR, AR, sound design, films, video games) to produce solutions towards tackling climate crisis and racial injustice.
Constellations of AFro-Indigenous Thought
Founded by professor Tao Leigh Goffe in the summer of 2020, the laboratory works at the intersection of the Indigenous Americas and the transatlantic African diaspora. In 2021, she taught a studio course for Cornell Architecture School on Black and Indigenous Metropolitan ecologies. Dark Laboratory fosters a multimodal, interdisciplinary space for technology and the humanities. We bridge the gap between formal institutions and decentralized communities and networks.
Lab theoreticians and technicians explore intergenerational trauma and how storytelling can be a mode of redress and potential intergenerational healing. Dark Lab celebrates community knowledge so that those in higher education and the academy can listen and learn from local cultivators, practitioners, and artists by listening first.
The Metropolitan and Rural Landscapes of Abolition
Now located in New York City’s Upper East Side, the Dark Laboratory was founded in Upstate New York inspired by the overlapping freedom routes of the Underground Railroad, the carceral landscape of Upstate, and Native survivance. We center what must have been coalitions made in the dark as acts of Afro-Indigenous speculative geography. Sacred and sometimes unmarked burial grounds of enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples overlap. The land is a storyteller, so we listen to what the soil narrates. With attention to tourist signage for National Parks, we also consider what signposts and monuments do to misdirect from a history of disinheritance and dispossession in the Americas.
why does dark Lab exist?
If the intellectual community you need to thrive does not exist, you must create it. We hope to inspire others to found collectives and organizations too for innovation in technology and ethical storytelling about racial formations.
what does dark Lab do?
Members of Dark Lab are engaged in the ongoing study of race, climate, and technology. Some of our work includes peer-reviewed journal publications, contemporary art installations, commissioned multi-sensorial activations, curatorial writing, podcasts, sound sculptures, public programming, workshops, master classes, writing circles, and performances. We have participated in residencies and creative consulting in higher education, with private corporations, community based non-profits, and with museums.
What Has Dark Lab Done so Far?
Read our peer-reviewed journal articles. Pushing the bounds and conventions of academic publishing in the humanities, we have co-authored writing with 31 contributors at once. If you are having trouble accessing these PDFs, please reach out. So far our articles have been downloaded 650 downloads times.
What is in on the horizon for dark lab?
Over the past year, we have been grateful for the support and physical space of NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art and technology. We look forward to continuing this partnership and to establishing our headquarters independently with dedicated physical space for the first time at 695 Park Avenue, Hunter College, CUNY in the West Tower. Students will be able to enroll in Dark Lab as a course for credit under the instruction of Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe in 2024. She is on sabbatical this year completing a book (Penguin Random House, Fall 2024) based on Dark Lab research. It was named by Publisher’s Weekly as the Deal of the Week and was highlighted in the UK’s The Bookseller.
Design by Oliver Munday - Doubleday Books
“The rule is love.”
— Sylvia Wynter
Dark Laboratory is a research organization that does not belong to any university. It exists and is made possible by the support of donors, partnerships, consultation, sponsorships, and collaborations. We are committed to working with other organizations who are also dedicated to the combined work of racial and ecological justice. Please fill out our contact form if you are interested in working together. Since its founding in 2020, Dark Laboratory has been grateful to participate in collaboration and participation with the following organizations.
