OPENLAB 2025 PROGRAMM The year-long program LAB 4 Weird Futures explored the technological imagination of instability — its power, its instrumentalization, and the possible alternatives hidden within its cracks and failures. In this final act Medialab brings together artists, technologists, designers, thinkers, and engaged publics to investigate the intersections between technological imagination and a society that oscillates between the desire for control and the extreme volatility of the present. At a time when narratives of stability, security, and linear progress are fading, volatility becomes a resource. Cyberpunk fantasies shape political agendas; dystopias turn into business models; what once belonged to fiction now drives material transformations in infrastructures, policies, and protocols. OpenLAB Weird Futures invites us to face that point of friction — to explore the material and symbolic forces that are rewriting the foundations of the twentieth-century world. Over three days of presentations, talks, and performances, Medialab opens space to...

Sunk Costs: The Saga of the Felicity Ace takes the 2022 sinking of the cargo ship Felicity Ace—which went down off the Azores carrying nearly 4,000 luxury electric vehicles—as a case study in the contradictions of “green” capitalism, logistics, and ecological accountability. The project explores what happens when the infrastructures of progress literally catch fire, exposing the volatility and opacity of systems designed to appear seamless. Part speculative storytelling, part forensic reconstruction, the performance interweaves archival narration, manifest readings, sound fragments, and visual cartographies. From different spaces, Elisa and Jamie alternate voices in a hybrid, performative dialogue—moving from the factual to the mythic, from the lithium fire’s chemistry to the moral and material legacies of wreckage. Drawing from environmental forensics, marine policy, and artistic research, the piece situates shipwrecks as forensic remains of late capitalist mythologies. What should remain underwater? What wreckage do we still rely on? What is, in...

Research Unit 1 Thursday, November 27, 2025 - 19:45h Nave 17 The Research Unit is an experimental line of work at Medialab Matadero that probes the weak signals and emerging imaginaries of a world that hasn’t arrived yet. Its mission is to investigate or envision products and services that link speculation with infrastructure, turning future scenarios into tools for making sense of the present. In 2025, Medialab tasked Business Serio™ —a Madrid-based agency for thought, creativity, and cultural action — with coordinating the Research Unit. Medialab gave them one mission: build a creative commando unit capable of spotting traces of strange technological presents, and accelerating them. Business Serio™ with Ana Petra Moriyón, Clara Escalera, Fermín Zabala, Elena Zaghis, Fran Grima, Danya Orlovsky The Sunsetting Project Friday, November 29, 2025 - 19:45h Casa del Lector Auditorium The Sunsetting Project designs recovery technology for organizations moving beyond burnout economies. They develop systems...

Codex Entropia imagines an ancient civilisation that develops delicate forms of animal computation, storing its knowledge within the contours of the land. Composed from century-old anaglyph images discovered in a basement, the short film is a subtle and visionary epic tale that lingers on the fragile bonds between nature, code, and belief. Richard Pell is the founder and director of the Center for PostNatural History (Pittsburgh, USA), an organization dedicated to forms of life that have been intentionally altered through domestication, selective breeding, tissue culture, or genetic engineering. He previously co-founded the art and engineering group The Institute for Applied Autonomy. Full OpenLAB program.

The live video essay moves through infrastructures of seeing and sensing to reflect on how energetic modernity shapes perception and relation. Moving from China’s reform-era optical transfers to Southeast Asia’s sustainable transitions along the Mekong River, and into the underbellies of contemporary communication systems, it draws on filmmaking, archival work, and field research to explore how image, labor, and desire form the politics of connection. Attuned to rhythms and intervals, the practice attends to what remains unrecorded, non-disclosed, or half-remembered– the residues that continue to hum beneath technological systems. It considers the aesthetic and perceptual questions that emerge within systems under transition, asking how shifting geographies and scales transform what can be sensed, represented, and felt. In tracing these movements, it reflects on how we might navigate the monstrous, the uncertain, and the overlapping temporalities of our present through new cultural strategies. Solveig Qu Suess is an artist and researcher...

The Laboratory of Visual Electronics (L.E.V.) proposes an exploratory journey into the possible sonic landscapes of the future. A musical selection aligned with the discursive line of LAB 4 Weird Futures, where strange technological narratives and radical alternatives take center stage. Presented in collaboration with L.E.V. (Laboratorio de Electrónica Visual), the program features two nights devoted to sonic and audiovisual experimentation. On Thursday, the session brings together Nacho de la Vega, founder of the L.E.V. platform, and Shoeg, the project of sound and visual artist Carlos Martorell. In his performance Phantom Touch, Martorell explores the relationship between body, technology, and sound, extending a line of work he has presented at various international festivals. On Saturday, Nacho de la Vega will share the stage with Merche Blasco, who will present Fauna: a live improvisation performance with instruments she has created herself. These sonic creatures come to life through movement, touch, and...