A frontend inversion is taking place. Websites become backends for AI; chat interfaces and terminals the new frontend. A ‘generative’ era is emerging and being pushed – content increasingly manifests as datasets, mediated by APIs across the network. Practitioners and communities are starting to surface through the loop of ingestion, embedding, retrieval, and generation as a primary mode of discovery – contextualised by systems that compress them into patterns a model can resolve. Conditions of generation are now conditions of legibility.

The lab’s substrate is a Minor Index⁠1 – a situated dataset built to confront the conditions of control: activated, composable, accessible, additive within a local hold. It functions as a layered medium: the dataset itself, the protocols that move it, the surfaces that render it, the analogue materials alongside. The posture is that of the bricoleur and the squatter – parasitising inherited infrastructure and loading it with friction, ornament, and local detail; counter-infrastructures that habituate by what they leave open.

The lab develops strategies for autonomy, confrontation, and resilience under conditions of consolidation, capture, and surveillance in an increasingly repressive context.