LAB 4 Weird Futures

LAB 4 Futuros Raros

LAB 4 Weird Futures is an interdisciplinary programme that takes place throughout the year and culminates in November 2025 with a three-day festival: the OpenLAB. During these months, Medialab Matadero invites artists, technologists, experimental designers, critical thinkers, students, experts from various fields and citizens in general to explore the profound instability that contemporary society is going through, obsessed with control over the future and at the same time immersed in extremely uncertain scenarios.  

In a context in which the narratives of stability, security and linear progress are fading in the face of the growing and deliberate production of volatility and its instrumentalisation, technological promises play a fundamental role. The literary visions of cyberpunk become strategic plans. Dystopias become business models. Weird Futures is an invitation to explore in concrete terms some of the material and symbolic vectors that, by invoking possible futures, are actively redesigning key aspects of contemporary society. 

LAB 4 Weird Futures proposes an exploration of extreme cases, radical alternatives and examples of strange technological narratives that help us understand the transformation of technological mediation and power in 21st-century society, coagulated around an irregular and unstable phenomenon that we call teslaforming. A neologism that not only refers to a new production model, like Fordism or Toyotism, nor is it limited to a brand or a type of technical object, but, through an extravagant and monstrous concept, addresses phenomena that are equally disproportionate, confusing and still in the process of creation. 

The main coordinates of teslaforming are both material and symbolic, and unexpectedly unite layers of society that until now were considered separate: the technological narrative of an aggressive and extreme era; the design of its presumed material manifestations (inexhaustible energies, ubiquitous and uncontrolled communication, effortless mobility, colonisation of the earth and space, transcending biological limits and technologies of immortality); new forms of irregular and unrecognisable propaganda, inspired by shitposting and cosplay; the mutation of the hacker spirit and the hyperlibertarian redefinition of democratic mechanisms. 

 

Public program Spring - Fall 2025 


May - June 2025 
Open Call for projects for the Collaborative Prototyping Lab 
Deadline June 15 

July - September 2025 
Open Call for collaborators for the Collaborative Prototyping Lab 
Deadline September 2 

September 24 – 25, 2025  
Internet Core  
A community meeting / conference about digital cultures and other small mythologies 

October – December 2025 
Estudio de Sistemas  
Public program of talks, workshops and open studios. 

November 2025 
Exhibition Metahaven "Collapse of the Weave Function"
Opening: November 6 at 7 p.m.

November 2025 
Weird Futures screening program  
In collaboration with Cineteca Madrid  

November 12-27, 2025  
Collaborative Prototyping Lab 
A two-weeks residency for the development of five selected projects. 

November 27-29, 2025 
OpenLAB Weird Futures 
A festival and conference with project presentations, talks, performative lectures, professional meetings, and music. 

 

LAB 4 Faculty
 

> Joel Blanco  
MANDIBULA — Joel Blanco’s approach to Weird Futures 

> Alex M. F. Quicho  
A monster, futurist realism — Alex Quicho’s approach to Weird Futures 

> Solveig Qu Suess 
Intimate territories — Solveig Qu Suess’ approach to Weird Futures 

 

Selected projects for the Collaborative Prototyping Lab 
 

 

Resources
 

> White Paper, by Bani Brusadin, curator of LAB 4 Weird Futures

(LAB 4 graphic design by León Romero)

 

Activities

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Past
Underway
Coming
Xenomorphosis. Laboratory of poetics and alien politics with Michel Nieva

Xenomorphosis. Laboratory of poetics and alien politics with Michel Nieva

Presentación/conferencia
30 May 2025 from 19:30 to 21h
Through social media, digital and AI-generated images, the discussion and representation of the ‘alien’ is at the centre of the cultural and political contestation of our time. This lab will explore
Internet Core

Internet Core: Tiny mythologies

Actuación en directo Presentación/conferencia Seminario
24 and 25 September 2025 from 18 to 22h.
Internet Core : Tiny mythologies is a tribal portal to a space of crossover, critical reflection and collective action around internet aesthetics and subcultures. In this two-day meeting, we will
Estudio de Sistemas. Jussi Parikka and Iris Long

Estudio de Sistemas. Jussi Parikka and Iris Long

Debate/mesa redonda Presentación/conferencia
Desde las 19:00 hasta 21:30 el 29/10/2025
Estudio de Sistemas (Study of Systems) is a new program from Medialab that addresses the functioning of complex technological infrastructures and their material, social, and cultural effects from
Expo Metahaven. Hometown. Medialab. Matadero Madrid

Exhibition: Metahaven "Collapse of the Weave Function"

Exhibición
6-30 NOVEMBER
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
Attention: From Condition to Currency. Post-Screen Objects

Attention: From Condition to Currency. Post-Screen Objects

Taller de formación
7 & 8 November
This is a workshop for artists, designers, and filmmakers interested in the present and future of attention. Attention itself—and distraction in its many variations—seems to have evolved from a
OpenLAB: Weird Futures

OpenLAB: Weird Futures

Festival
From 27 to 29 November
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
Sunk Costs: The Saga of the Felicity Ace. Elisa Cuesta Fernández & Jamie Allen

Elisa Cuesta Fernández & Jamie Allen. Sunk Costs: The Saga of the Felicity Ace

Presentación/conferencia
OpenLAB - 27 November
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
Research Unit

Research Unit OpenLAB

Presentación/conferencia Taller de producción
OpenLAB - 27, 28 and 29 November
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
Rich Pell - Codex Entropia

Rich Pell - Codex Entropia

Exhibición
OpenLAB - 27 November
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
Rhythms of the Energetic: Scale, Connection, Disappearance

Solveig Qu Suess - Rhythms of the Energetic: Scale, Connection, Disappearance

Presentación/conferencia
OpenLAB - 27 November
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
Medialab by L.E.V.

Medialab by L.E.V.

Actuación en directo Festival
OpenLAB - 27 and 29 November
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
Exhibition Collapse of the Weave Function

Guided tours Metahaven’s exhibition "Collapse of the Weave Function"

Exhibición
28, 29 and 30 November
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

Blog

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World

Solveig Qu Suess, LAB 4 Weird Futures faculty

Solveig Qu Suess is a filmmaker and researcher currently based in Shanghai. Her work explores how large-scale systems—whether energy grids, optical technologies, or planetary sensing networks—imprint themselves on intimate terrains...
Alex M. F. Quicho

Alex M. F. Quicho, LAB 4 Weird Futures faculty

Alex M. F. Quicho is a writer and observer of the technological world, currently based in London. Alex is joining Medialab as faculty of the fourth LAB program, titled Weird...
Planetary Ideology

Joel Blanco, LAB 4 Weird Futures faculty

​​Joel Blanco is an artist, designer, researcher and consultant specialising in future scenarios, speculative design and design fiction. Joel is joining Medialab as faculty of the 4th LAB program, titled...
White paper

LAB 4 WHITE PAPER

In a context where narratives of stability, security and linear progress fade in the face of the increasing and deliberate production of volatility and its instrumentalisation, technological promises become instruments...