BADS_lab is a traveling art and research lab. It has no permanent building. Instead, once a year, it sets up in a city, gathers a cohort of artists, researchers, technologists, and neighbors, and spends days or weeks working with them — building things, making art, sharing meals, holding public events — before packing up and carrying what was learned to the next place.

The lab was founded and is directed by Muindi Fanuel Muindi, a Chicago-based social practice artist, philosopher, and poet with roots in Eastern Congo and Tanzania. The lab's institutional home is the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines (CCAM), an artist-run 501(c)(3) platform programming, performing, and producing at the nexus of art, technology, and contemporary thought.

Since its first program in 2024, BADS_lab has run three major residencies on two continents, worked with more than forty fellows from across the United States, Brazil, and the wider African diaspora, and built a growing body of public programs, working prototypes, publications, and interviews. In 2024 it took over an art space in Chicago to study the legacy of Chicago House music and build synthesizers with the public. In 2025 it transformed a worn storefront in downtown São Paulo into a week-long living space for art, conversation, and ritual, drawing fellows from Brazil, the U.S., Angola, South Africa, Congo, Ghana, Cuba, and Haiti. In May 2026 it began building a repertoire of off-grid communication, guerilla gardening, and seed sharing techniques and technologies with a cohort of twenty in Chicago, with the work traveling onward to São Paulo in September and Dar es Salaam in December.

The lab also has an intellectual backbone: a manifesto, Us is at the Crossroads, and three books by its founder — Fugitive Erotics, The Null Hypothesis, and The Sister, the Child, the Ghost — that lay out, at length, the thinking the lab puts into practice.