OPENLAB 2026 | The Trick – Talk by Marta Peirano

The magic gesture sets the event in motion. Waving the wand, crossing your fingers over the cards or blowing on the dice is the part of the ritual that links cause to effect. It is also the distraction that hides the mechanics of the game, the diversion that draws the eye away from where things are actually happening, so that fantasy can take the place of reality. AI’s magic gesture is language. Models hallucinate, escape their prison and secretly plot to break free of their creator. These are words that summon our species’ great myths, fantasies of a world inhabited by ghosts that transcend the cage of atoms binding us to the real. Those myths are the cloak draped over the black box of tricks, the place where a man hunched over a candle plays chess. The difference is far from trivial. Magic invites us to shed the rigidity of our culture and look at the world with wonder, while AI projects the inevitability of history onto a world condemned to repeat its mistakes with machinic rigidity. 

This activity is part of the OpenLAB The Mechanics of Truth festival.

Info

Date: Saturday, November 28, 8:15pm. 
Place: Nave Una in Matadero Madrid.
Language: Spanish with simultaneous translation to English.
Price: Free, no registration required.

About Marta Peirano 

Marta Peirano is a writer and researcher specializing in technology and power, and a columnist for El País and Radio Nacional de España. Her books include El enemigo conoce el sistema, a 2019 bestseller on surveillance capitalism, and Contra el futuro, a sharp critique of technological promises in the face of the climate crisis.