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...

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...

To close Collapse of the Weave Function, the exhibition’s curator Bani Brusadin will be offering guided tours open to all visitors. This is a chance to explore the exhibition alongside its curator, discover insights into the project, and enjoy the final days of the show. Friday, 28 November — 13:00, Nave 17 Saturday, 29 November — 13:00, Nave 17 Sunday, 30 November — 18:00, Nave 17 Free entry, no reservation required. Find out more about Collapse of the Weave Function and Metahaven.

Error 417 Expectation Failed Foundation and Medialab Matadero present 5 Petaflops Against Empire, a series of speculative prototypes, micro-scripts, and instructions/hacks that explore how we can reclaim collective computing power. The project stems from Navrot’s imagination of concrete apartment blocks in his hometown of Wronki, Poland, where he envisioned a scenario in which the residents of post-PRL apartments run their own their modular furniture building GPU micro servers. The project focuses on reclaiming microcomputing power, among other methods, from advertising trackers that operate in all browsers, but also explores the connection of computers in networks and, in general, the search for computing power wherever it may be hidden. In this session Navrot will provide a fictional/speculative framework in which all participants will interact with different roles in a future or potential scenario that will be inspired by Navrot's research and his own experience rooted in the reality of Eastern Europe...

Lyndsey Walsh proposes to examine the history, present, and potential futures of reproductive technologies and so-called reproductive organs, while challenging the doomed narrative of “breeding” that has condemned many and cost countless lives. Building off their speculative “unbearable organs” that blur the boundaries between male and female while also escaping binary censorship of digital regimes, Lyndsey will unfold the history of care, systemic violence, and possible futures of material potential that so-called “reproductive organs” find themselves at the mercy of, extending beyond national borders and intersecting with global issues of healthcare, systemic racism and classism, ableism, sexism, and more. In collaboration with Error 417 Expectation Failed Foundation. Lyndsey Walsh is an artist, writer, and researcher based in Berlin, Germany. Lyndsey’s practice sets out to “undoom narrative” by questioning the cultural binaries of human-non-human, diseased-healthy, and life-machine using Crip, Queer, and intersectional feminist frameworks. Their work has been featured in events...

Set in a speculative Havana infused with the crypto culture of the 2030s, Oracle Index is an expanded cinematic narrative in the form of an imaginary ethnography. It envisions a Cuba that, under intense geopolitical pressure, adopts “futarchy” —a system of governance based on prediction markets, emerging from the same transhumanist milieu that gave rise to cryptocurrencies— as the foundation of its late-stage planned economy. Ideology defines the ends, global speculators determine the means, and those excluded from official platforms respond by inventing parallel betting cultures: rerouting state data streams into La Bolita, Cuba’s historic underground lottery, decoding outcomes through La Charada and the oracles of Santería, and expanding these traditions with digital tools. This narrative unfolds through a kaleidoscopic series of archival fragments drawn from the personal collection of an anonymous anthropologist, comprising interviews, intimate field notes, recordings from Cuban state television, excerpts from social media, and dream diaries...

Jankspace is the grotesque and hollow realm of technocapitalist networks — the residue spilling out of the digital megastructure as it digests the material world and turns it into hallucinogenic sludge. It is the Uber driver’s chaotically wired, multi-screen setup of tangled cables, flickering displays, and incessant notifications. It is, quite literally, us — our beautifully broken, uncomputable bodies that we know aren’t properly programmed and that no optimization will ever fix. In this talk, Jenn Leung will use the concept of “jankspace” to explore some of the central themes of his practice as an audiovisual creator and researcher of emergent scenarios: the aesthetic delirium of contemporary digital popular culture, our deranged and mediated bodies, and the idiotic hallucinations of transhumanism. - Friday, November 29, 2025 - 18:15h Casa del Lector Auditorium Film (UK, 2025, 29’ - English with Spanish subtitles) - Saturday, November 29, 2025 - 19:30h Casa del...

Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo's Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits has been praised as an "era-defining book, a book that carries an idea with the potential resonance of Bratton's The Stack or Hardt & Negri's Empire" (New Models). At the centre of their argument is the idea that capitalism does not belong to humans, it belongs to and is governed by itself. Traditional economic theory struggles to keep up with capitalism's rapid rate of acceleration, and this book steps in to address this. In this lecture Alonso Trillo and Poliks delve into one of the main pillars of this cosmofinancial framework, the notion of “Lift”: what happens when financial abstractions achieve escape velocity from terrestrial constraints? What happens when capitalism doesn't need us anymore? Roberto Alonso Trillo is a theorist and artist whose work spans cultural theory, media philosophy, and experimental sound. A Spanish researcher based in Hong...

“There is no single technique, but multiple cosmotechniques” Inspired by the thought of Yuk Hui, Cosmotécnicas proposes an encounter between the many technological existences that coexist through music, performance, and the visual arts. The proposal by Volumen brings together SYSTEMA (dj set), Pipo del Hierro (Vj set) the performance TECHNOFACIAL (by Nayarit Fuentes and Paula Mira) and the AV live set by Chryso (TSO + Okaro) seeking to materialize that multiplicity through a constellation of practices in dialogue with Madrid’s most experimental scene. Diverse, fragmentary and plural humanities converge here to challenge the global path imposed by a late capitalism on the verge of collapse. The Volumen collective generates a symbiosis between artist and place, embodying the tensions and questions of contemporary art today. Its projects unfold as immersive experiences where installation, music, visual arts, and performance converge in a single gesture. Each event is conceived as a collective intervention...

Collapse of the Weave Function fits within one of the core themes of LAB 4 —“soft” science fiction— understood as poetic interventions in the technological fault lines of the present. The project will take shape through four works: the audiovisual installation Hometown and the textile pieces Collapse of the Weave Function, Vortices, and Centerless, all commissioned by Medialab Matadero specifically for this occasion. Filmed in Kyiv and Beirut in 2017, Hometown (2018) constructs an imaginary city through two places that never meet, yet become a unified landscape across the film’s two screens. Ghina and Lera, the protagonists, are doubles of the same character. While they remain apart, speaking in turns, the film opens up a visual and linguistic space that is more poetic than narrative. The images act as resonances—indirect, suggestive, and polysemic. What should feel ordinary becomes unsettling. Meanwhile, the web and digital layers of reality—abstract and intangible—are rendered...