Mimi Luse mourns the loss of OSB, a short-lived, do-it-yourself (DIY) venue in a local warehouse where she used to see live music multiple times a week.

“It became a sort of third place for me,” says Luse, the head of program production at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, referencing the sociological term for a social space outside of work or home. “I made a lot of wonderful friendships and was exposed to so much amazing art.”

While OSB’s two-year run is over, its legacy lives on. This Friday, Luse will bring a little DIY to the ICA with “No Input,” a new series of free experimental music performances. Instead of curating the acts herself, Luse is handing the reins to a different programmer each night.

“I’m going to take myself out of the equation,” Luse says. “I’m not going to be appropriating these bands and claiming that I was the one who discovered them.”

Friday’s show will be curated by Emma Draga and Sarah Samson, former and current VCU students who publish the local music zine PENG!33. Richmond-based acts Sprout, Destruct O Sound and Scott Clark Landscape Trio will perform. Alex C., a longtime promoter and noise musician who co-founded OSB, has scheduled New York-based Sunk Heaven and Richmond-based artist Three-Brained Robot for the show on Dec. 13.

Asked about the name of the series, Luse says “No Input” has more than one meaning. First, Luse will have no input on the music acts her guest programmers choose. Secondly, it’s a reference to a type of noise music created by routing mixer outputs back into inputs on a sound mixing board, creating feedback and oscillations of the device’s noise; it’s intended as a metaphor for how local music scenes can “feedback” upon themselves, developing regional dialects.

“Some musicians out there are very virtuosic,” Luse says of no input mixing artists. “They can control these mixers and create beats and melodies using just the commercial wiring of a mixing board, no instrument. It’s a meta way of making music, because you’re making music using the interface that instruments are supposed to be plugging into.”

An art historian, musician and former arts journalist, Luse says DIY spaces are vitally important incubators of culture. As these venues aren’t as concerned with making money as for-profit ones, they can host stranger, more fringe artists without having to worry about ticket sales.

“These spaces create the groundwork for interesting new movements,” Luse says. “You can take these risks and you’re not going to have a huge financial loss.”

They’re also ephemeral spaces. Often operating illegally, or, at least, in a legal gray area, DIY venues are regularly at risk of being shut down. Their under-the-radar operations mean that the promotion and documentation of these spaces can threaten their survival. Even though OSB is no more, Luse has asked not to reveal its location for fear of drawing the attention of authorities.

While writing her dissertation on modernism, Luse became aware of the importance of documenting these spaces for posterity.

“The underground can exist, but if there’s no one documenting it and there’s no one archiving it — there’s no journalists contextualizing it within a framework that will later become canonical — it can be amazing, but it won’t get historicized,” Luse says.

The “No Input” series is an attempt to bridge the underground and the establishment.

“Museums are public institutions,” Luse explains. “They’re places where artists can gain a broader audience, but they are not necessarily the incubators of that art. I wanted to invite the people who are already putting on these kinds of shows into the museum.”

This effort had its logistical challenges. As much as Luse loves the ICA, she notes that the bigger the institution, the less flexible it is.

“The premise is really difficult to honor, because institutions like the ICA have very specific logistical constraints that have to do with protecting art and staffing and fire codes, which are all really important,” she says.

In the spring, Luse hopes to host a punk and hardcore show at the ICA, but they’re still working out the details; it will be held outside, most likely.

“No Input” will take place Nov. 1 and Dec. 13, with more dates to follow, at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, 601 W. Broad St. Free. For more information visit icavcu.org or call 804-828-2823.