Sunk Costs: Unsecurities Lab brought maritime practitioners, researchers and artists together to explore what continues after a shipwreck is accounted for as a financial loss. Taking the 2022 fire and sinking of the vehicle carrier Felicity Ace as its starting point, the workshop unfolded within Lancaster University’s Data Immersion Suite. Participants brought perspectives from marine insurance, maritime policy, seafaring, marine biology, finance and the humanities.

Surrounded by underwater imagery and sound, 24 participants encountered three video essays approaching the wreck through labor, ecology and finance. Combining source footage, computer-generated environments and speculative perspectives, the films provided material for discussion. Participants questioned their representations through their own knowledge, then worked at four mixed tables to draw connections between workers, cargo, financial institutions and marine life.

These drawings traced different consequences of the same event. One concentrated a vast supply chain around a single vessel and its crew. Another placed the speed of commercial shipping alongside the movements and timescales of the ocean. Across the conversations, participants distinguished financial settlement from responsibilities and material processes that could continue long afterward.

In a second session, participants adopted human, institutional and nonhuman roles within a fictional Planetary Wrecks Commission. They explored proposals for protecting workers, treating the wreck as a public monument and placing conditions on future access. Organisms, chemicals and currents complicated the discussion through dependencies and processes that did not fit human motives or institutional deadlines. Proposals developed through humor, disagreement and questions that remained unresolved.

Developed within Nathan Jones’s Unsecurities Lab format, the workshop used immersive art, collective drawing and speculative governance to examine who can act on the responsibilities a wreck leaves behind. It asked whether giving an overlooked interest a voice changes what institutions do. Participants’ diagrams, objections and unfinished proposals now inform a Sunk Costs commission in the Azores, developed in collaboration with BlueOasis. This next stage brings island residents’ knowledge and marine observations into the inquiry, asking whose evidence counts and who takes responsibility for the wreck’s continuing consequences.