The perception of the world has always been a contested territory. But why has it become so easy—and at the same time so difficult—to believe in what we see? The current proliferation of AI generated content produces hyperrealistic versions of reality: images and narratives so shiny and polished that they end up merging with the desires and fears of those who, faced with a deluge of stimuli, seek to absorb large doses of truth quickly and with minimal effort. This condition extends far beyond an individual epistemological dilemma. Rather, it signals deep structural shifts, accelerated by...

LAB 4 Weird Futures is an interdisciplinary program developed by Medialab Matadero from May to November 2025, bringing together artists, technologists, experimental designers, critical thinkers, students, experts from various fields, and citizens in general to explore the deep instability that contemporary society is going through, obsessed with control over the future and at the same time immersed in extremely uncertain scenarios.

From June 14th until February 2024, LAB#03 'Synthetic Minds' offers a journey into the core ontology of intelligence itself, intertwined with the planetary potential nestled within its reconceptualization." White Paper LAB#03. Distributed cognition, cybernetics, non-human intelligences, AGI, complex systems, alien semiotics... these are just some topics at the core of 'Synthetic Minds', the third speculative research and production laboratory developed by Medialab Matadero. LAB#03 Synthetic Minds consist of a eight-month interdisciplinary program where citizens from all over the world can join...

LAB#02 'The Metabolic Sublime' is the second in a series of interdisciplinary laboratories for research and collaborative production that Medialab Matadero will deploy throughout 2022 and 2023 to materialize and operationalize collective intelligences. LAB#02 has a six-month program that will run from September to February in different spaces of Matadero Madrid, and will offer a collaborative prototyping workshop, conferences, courses, seminars, artistic projects and a large OpenLAB event where the activities carried out during the six months of the program will be made visible. Energy...

LAB#01 Medios Sintientes is the first of a series of multidisciplinary research and collaborative production laboratories designed to materialize and activate collective intelligences that Medialab Matadero will deploy throughout 2022 and 2023. With a quarterly program, which will run from January to March in different spaces of Matadero Madrid, it will offer a collaborative prototyping workshop, conferences, courses, seminars, artistic projects and a great OpenLAB event where the activities carried out during the three months of the program will be made visible. The theme of the activities of...

Estudio de Sistemas (Study of Systems) series is a set of events in multiple formats that examines how complex technological systems operate and the real consequences they produce. With this new strand, Medialab approaches technology as a question of scale: infrastructures that are woven into everyday life yet, in practice, operate beyond the thresholds of the sensible — whether due to their speed, their unfolding over deep temporal arcs, their entanglement with geological processes, or the opacity of the technical apparatuses that constitute them. Through this series, Medialab brings together...

Residencies to develop three site-specific research projects in dialogue with the communities linked to Medialab.

In Medialab, working groups formed by users who wish to develop some kind of project or activity meet periodically. These groups are open to the participation of anyone and give back to the community their work in the form of documentation of their processes, organization of workshops, talks, etc.