The CHAOS Lab is an interdisciplinary music and arts technology research lab based in Loughborough University London's Institutes for Digital Technologies and Creative Futures. The lab is led by Dr Courtney N Reed; we're a group of artists, musicians, researchers, educators, designers, and activists ... and this is our chaos!

Chaos is part of life. The unexpected and unexplainable are what makes artistic practice and creativity so enjoyable. There's no getting around the random, indescribable, subjective, and unpatterned parts of human interaction.

When we create with digital technology and implement data-driven systems into creative contexts, there’s a delicate balance and collaboration when designing interactions that are simultaneously usable and also leave space for ambiguity and individual meaning-making. Try to encode everything, and we end up reinforcing biases and narrow ways of thinking about creative practice. Leave too many things random, and artists may not be able to make much meaning with tools in their practice.

The CHAOS Lab works in this space: Our research aims to explore artistic practice - mainly in music and sound - and understand how conceptualisations about creativity are encoded into digital systems and where we can leave room for unpredictability and discovery. We apply feminist and post-human design theories, indigenous thinking, and practice-led research to trouble norms in digital design and consider alternative futures.

We’re based in London, UK. We also actively collaborate with artists and researchers in Germany and Brazil.

If you must know what the CHAOS acronym stands for, know that we worked backwards and found a good descriptor to fit our name: Computer-Human-Ambiguity Ontologies in Sound (and other Senses).
That's less important than the chaos itself, though.