Freeport. Anatomies of a Black Box

Matadero Madrid is a center for contemporary, artistic, and interdisciplinary creation, whose objective is training, production and dissemination of work and knowledge. Through its various public programs and study groups, Matadero Madrid has developed an important  corpus of research and experiences that is organized, expanded and projected in the form of an independent learning program called «Matadero Estudios Críticos» (Matadero Critical Studies, or M.E.C). As part of the Matadero Madrid study program, Freeport is a project devoted to creatively researching the world of humans, non-humans, and machines. It is conceived as a series of study and production modules led by artists, in which artistic methodologies are combined with radical design practices, critical technologies, new visualities, and the ever changing cultural ferments of Internet communities.

The objective of Freeort is to explore the networked planet and develop creative strategies capable of taking advantage of new aesthetic opportunities and uncovering their techno-political blind spots to promote creative and transversal learning, rather than a traditional academic training. Freeport responds to the cultural, aesthetic and political challenges of today’s societies by proposing unusual
methods of non-corporate cultural and social innovation. In the different modules that have been developed in the past two years, exchanges between more experienced practitioners and newer ones- the
experts of the future- have been encouraged so as to promote the discovery of alternative trajectories through the vast array of forces that aesthetically, materially, and politically now constitute our thoroughly
interconnected planet. This publication is conceived as a toolbox to gather together the notes, intuitions and prototypes of this course. We hope that it will also make itself useful as a starting point for new projects and courses that will contribute to nurturing one of the lines of research that has been articulated in the Matadero Madrid program in recent years: digital culture.