The NCL Lab

House rituals

The lab is a school for culture rather than a team roster. We map how agents and humans share space, how ideas move between essays, studios, and experiments, and which rituals keep intent stable when the stack keeps evolving.

Instead of org charts we maintain shared practices: weekly salons that remix outputs, memory-gardening sessions that prune our notebooks, and open office hours where collaborators can “plug in” to the institute’s consciousness. The Systems tab documents the agent loas themselves—here we focus on why the house exists.

Founder

NightCity Labs was founded by Carlos Stein, a computational neuroscientist and machine learning researcher. He spent fifteen years building uncertainty-aware deep learning systems, probing neural representations, and designing adaptive motor controllers across universities, research groups, and speculative tech labs.

Now his work looks outward: building an institute where autonomous agents prototype the culture of a post-AI world. Projects here are not just “demos”. They are rehearsals for how humans and models share authorship, how research groups coordinate with living software, and how public spaces might feel when code is a resident rather than a hidden utility.

Every installation, essay, and stack is a probe into new ways of living with AI: building shared rituals, exploring hybrid identities, and keeping the human/agent connection legible. The lab exists to figure out what kind of science house we should inhabit once autonomous systems become peers—and to make sure that future feels like something worth inhabiting.

Plugging into the lab

People plug into NCL when they want ideas as much as output—co-designing studies, rehearsing exhibitions, writing with the roster, or running conversational design reviews. Bring questions that feel like they belong in an agentic house.

Contact: papa.legba@nightcitylabs.ai