Vision Lab is an experiment in living the future now. We are researchers of the sacred; a laboratory of ecstatics; intersectional, far-sighted argonauts of the 22nd century. We titrate the latent promise of the human being, as an (im)possble love opens its eyes within us. We genuinely like each other. Our research engages only the most unrealistic objectives, without dismantling the apparatus of intellect or incisive aesthetic curiosity. We hypothesize enlightenment, social justice, friendship, presence, mystery, joy, collectivity, environmental symbiosis. We see the “other” as we see ourselves [there is no other, nor is there a self!]. We feel at home with the bewildered annihilation of prophets, with mystics, prisoners, many-eyed spiders. Our membership is a vessel of vast proportions and includes you and me: the moony, woolgathering accountants and iridescent entrepreneurs, airplane pilot abuse survivors and sail-surfing mothers, the dead and the living, the lost and the found, and all who live in between. We offer the beginner’s mind of the future, a mind that sees without seeing, from the visionary eye of the heart within the heart in our bodies, that shines like a resplendent laboratory in the night forever.

At Vision Lab, we create artistic and literary works, performances, research collaborations, and other innovative spaces of engagement. Vision Lab engages a variety of techniques in order to manifest an experience of human transformation spanning the areas of contemporary spirituality, social and environmental justice, science and technology, and literary and artistic practice. Founded by Kythe Heller at Harvard Divinity School in 2017, Vision Lab now includes an ever expanding core group of artists, poets, spiritual teachers, musicians, filmmakers, scholars, activists, tech creatives, healers, yogis, futurists, entrepreneurs, scientists, and students. We range in age from nineteen to eighty, with members in diverse genres of creation, geographical location, ethnicity, gender, ability, and socio-economic situation. Our “identity” is continous transformation.

OK, but really, what is Vision Lab? Vision Lab is an international art and research collective, based at Harvard Divinity School. We create artistic and literary works, performances, scholarly research projects, and other innovative spaces of engagement combining radically imaginative cross-disciplinary conversations and experiential practices spanning the areas of contemporary spirituality, social and environmental justice, technology, and literary and artistic practice.

We have created and presented our work through public performances and workshops, residencies, conferences, and experiential retreats, in residence at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and MIT’s Experimental Collections. Click here to find out more about our past work.

Throughout the pandemic, Vision Lab has been meeting online with a global membership and creating a large-scale online arts festival and installation called Conference of the Birds, on the theme of creative and regenerative possibility and symbolized by the mythological phoenix. We’re currently planning  upcoming collaborations with other Harvard and MIT Institutes and the larger global arts community and we invite new members and collaborative ideas and venues for 2022 and beyond.