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...

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...

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.

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...

What if off-grid communication was not the last resort, but the first choice? What if it could circulate as effortlessly as any everyday accessory? 868labs invites participants to a speculative workshop that reimagines communication beyond centralized infrastructures. The session introduces a series of open-source wearable devices built on the LoRa protocol, enabling peer-to-peer messaging without the global internet, SIM cards, or any external backbone. Developed in response to growing censorship, surveillance, and the erosion of digital autonomy, 868 Wearables functions both as a tool of infrastructural resistance and as a speculative artifact asking how communication might look if it were local, embodied, and self-sustaining. In this session participants will unpack the political and technical contexts of network dependency, experiment hands-on with mesh communication devices, and collectively imagine new, bodily forms of connection for the realities of today. In collaboration with Error 417 Expectation Failed Foundation. 868labs is a Berlin-based collective...

“The screen before you unfolds the Empire: the feed. Excitedly, the algorithm shows you the edifice it has built, brick by brick. Shingeki no Kyojin, the end of the world, motivational edits with quotes by Marcus Aurelius, jawline-strengthening tutorials, and spray-on Minoxidil ads.” MANDÍBULA explores the utopian masculine narratives that emerge in contemporary digital culture. These narratives express desires for purity, power, and transcendence in the face of a postmodernity seen as decadent, from the esoteric currents and depictions of spiritual purity of the 19th century to their return in forums and platforms such as 4chan or TikTok. Epic imagery, heroic bodies and digital landscapes conjure up the idea of ruins and castles as emotional technologies that direct the anxiety of the present towards the past. These nostalgic utopias reveal a masculinity that no longer seeks to dominate the world, but rather to find a sense of belonging within it...

LOVESCAM is a performance in two parts. The first, BUTCHERING, is a two-week Telegram Performance that unfolds in real-time across Telegram's encrypted channels. Participants unknowingly enter a pig-butchering operation where their desires become the raw material for value extraction. Each message exchange pings yet-unintegrated yearnings that exocapital salvages from the numbed-out bodies left after lift. The scam operates as both parasitic mimicry and diagnostic tool: revealing how loneliness radiates from logistical endpoints, how eroticism persists in the churn between overworld and underworld, how the human animal continues to yearn even when corralled into piecework existence. The performer embodies the compound's forced laborer and the lifted subject simultaneously—sending sexy missives from both sides of the barbed wire, fattening marks with the same flattery that feeds the system. Part 2, LOVE CRIMES is a lecture-performance that exposes the gore layer where flesh and psyche strain under algorithmic desire. Using edits from the...

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...