The Dark Laboratory is a research organization, tech collective, and design studio founded by Tao Leigh Goffe in 2020. Located in NYC, the lab’s philosophy is inspired by the ethos of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark. We imagine the Western hemisphere as a haunted house founded on stolen land and built through the labor of stolen lives. As a collective of technologists, scholars, artists, and theorists who are also storytellers, we center the study of race and ecologies. We look to human and non-human animals, plant life, microorganisms as storytellers too. Using immersive technologies, (VR, AR, sound design, films, video games) we are producing cross-racial histories of solidarity and coalition to the surface. We bring artists, scientists, technologists, and audiences together to create uncharted constellations, giving us the opportunity to explore, to reinvent the shared planetary climate future.

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With a focus on race, climate, and creative technology practitioners, theoreticians, and technicians create art installations, films, architectural models, podcasts, and research reports that document the layered histories of the dispossession of Native sovereignty and the enslavement of African peoples. In 2023, the lab staged a multi-sensorial activation by invitation of Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation called Dark Blueprints on New York City histories.

 Through media including film, sound, text, VR, and AR, Dark Lab looks to center the ethics of what it means to tell a good story through research. By tackling climate crisis and racial injustice together, the lab fosters a multimodal, interdisciplinary space between technology and the humanities. The Dark Lab and its members have been commissioned to present work for Apple, Hulu, and the Guggenheim. Dark Lab has worked in collaboration with the New York Society Library, the Indigenous Futures Institute, and the New Museum’s incubator NEW INC to name a few of our institutional partners.