Oracle Index is a generative cinema installation that imagines a future Cuba in which cryptocurrency, prediction markets, artificial intelligence, underground gambling, and divination become intertwined as systems for navigating economic uncertainty. The work begins from a speculative scenario. In the aftermath of a total embargo known on the island as La Opción Cero, the government turns to cryptocurrency and prediction markets to draw in hard currency and foreign capital. The Communist Party adopts Futarchy, a model of governance in which political institutions set collective goals while market speculators bet on which policies are most likely to reach them, with the blockchain supplying the transparency and resistance to manipulation the system requires. Locked out of the state-backed platform, ordinary Cubans build underground betting economies, trading derivatives of the official markets over illicit satellite links and repurposing government data streams as raw material for La Bolita, the island’s centuries-old numbers lottery. As...

Why has it become so much easier and, simultaneously, so much harder to believe what we see? Medialab invites you to an exhitibion with site-specific artworks showcasing the research of a new generation of artists around the technocultural mechanisms that redefine what we used to call “the real”. Opening times Opening and exhibition visit with the curator Bani Brusadin and the participant artists: Thursday, October 15, 7pm (doors open from 6:30pm) Tuesday to Thursday, from 5pm to 9pm Friday to Sunday (and holidays), from 12pm to 9pm Schedule of guided visits with the exhibition curator, Bani Brusadin Sunday, October 18, from 12:30pm to 1pm. Saturday, November 21st, from 12:30pm to 1pm. Saturday, November 28, from 12:30pm to 1pm. Sunday, December 13, from 12:30pm to 1pm. To join the visit, please turn up 15 minutes before it starts at Matadero Information desk (Paseo de la Chopera, 14). Why has it become...

Unpredictable Atmosphere is an audiovisual and spatial installation that reimagines the web as an optical device capable of unfolding climate models in real time. It examines how AI-based climate models systematically overlook outliers – extreme atmospheric events such as hurricanes. The work exposes a structural condition embedded within contemporary AI foundation models: the privileging of statistical regularity and the marginalisation of deviation. These outliers sit at the edge of prediction, exposing the failures and blind spots of technological systems built on historical data. Yet it is within these anomalies that the atmosphere reveals its most critical transformations. Developed in collaboration with fluid dynamics experts and climate scientists, the project spatially unfolds climate models according to their computational grid structures. Within this framework, strips of data render possible futures in which past hurricane data – outliers that escaped accurate prediction – reassemble in space through infinite combinations. The resulting simulations generate...

AI Hyperrealism is the first chapter of Anatomy of Non-Fact, a larger art-research project by Martyna Marciniak which examines the aesthetics of visual misinformation in the era of synthetic images. The work focuses on the image of the “Balenciaga Pope” – the AI-generated picture of Pope Francis in a white puffer jacket – which captured the public’s attention and imagination during the so-called “AI-boom” of 2023. The artist restages the image physically, allowing for a careful examination of the errors and lapses emerging from the flawed generative process. In the exhibition space, the audience becomes confronted with a materialised version of the Balenciaga Pope’s coat – all the impossibilities, lapses and glitches of the synthetic artefact are physically reconstructed, while references to history of visual truth from baroque to recent blobifications of AI-generated images are embroidered in the coat’s lining. Three small sculptural pieces complete the installation. In the 16-minute...

Terror Element is a hybrid documentary set in a modern-day crime lab that explores how images of science are weaponised to project state power. Nina, a reclusive forensic expert, uncovers a videotape about a notorious series of explosions across Russia in 1999. Combining digital reconstructions and archival material, the film examines the contradictory statements presented by authorities to justify the second invasion of Chechnya, in a pivotal year in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. Drawn into the grainy television footage, Nina tries to understand how crime labs became tools in this cryptic powerplay. Slowly, her laboratory begins to resemble the televised one. Reconstructing the CGI environment of the film within the gallery space, the installation mirrors the protagonist reviewing archival footage as evidence. There are three main elements. A CRT TV displaying the film. The model is almost identical to the one used by the protagonist within the CGI environment...