The OpenLAB Futuros Raros festival arrives: three days to explore uncertain technological imaginaries

• The conclusions of the Collaborative Prototyping Lab, the core of LAB 4, will be presented to the public for the first time at OpenLAB alongside international speakers
• Thanks to its interdisciplinary nature, the festival includes screenings, talks, presentations, and performances by international artists and researchers
• Among the participants are researcher Alex MF Quicho; Exocapitalism authors Poliks and Alonso Trillo; and the duo Nestor Siré and Steffen Kohn, authors of Handmade Networks

Medialab Matadero, a programme of the Department of Culture, Tourism and Sport of the Madrid City Council, will host a new edition of OpenLAB from 27 to 29 November. This event serves as the final presentation of its six-month research laboratory which, under the title LAB 4 Futuros Raros, has focused on examining uncertain technological imaginaries and the sociotechnical landscapes emerging from contemporary instability.

Over the course of three days, artists, technologists, filmmakers, theorists, activists, and experimental collectives will present prototypes, projects, performative lectures, films, speculative sessions, and sound performances that probe a present fractured by the collapse of narratives of stability and the acceleration of control infrastructures. Medialab thus invites us to think from the edges, trace less visible connections, and open space for radical alternatives. Ultimately, the aim is to observe how technological power oscillates between control and chaos, prompting individuals to ask themselves how much of that vertigo they are willing to inhabit.

OpenLAB also marks the culmination of the Collaborative Prototyping Lab (LPC), the core of LAB 4, where five projects selected through an open call investigate real phenomena—infrastructures, devices, surveillance systems, alternative economies, urban imaginaries, and scam networks—to broaden the notion of “weird futures”: technological narratives and dynamics that, though marginal or speculative, are already shaping deep transformations in our societies.

The 2025 edition revolves around the concept of teslaformation, a neologism proposed by curator Bani Brusadin to describe a global, uneven and unstable process in which emerging technologies, algorithmic financialisation, automation, and technocultural aesthetics simultaneously reconfigure material infrastructures and collective subjectivities. The central question running through LAB 4—and amplified by OpenLAB—is how we might read, imagine, and remap these processes from their points of friction: where control becomes inoperative, where fiction dictates politics, and where failure opens unexpected horizons.

An international programme of cinema, talks, and presentations

Interdisciplinarity is key in this festival, which explores contemporary volatility from every possible angle. OpenLAB unfolds a wide-ranging programme in Nave 17 and the Casa del Lector auditorium, featuring screenings, talks, experimental research, and performances by international artists and researchers.

Among the screenings and audiovisual works, OpenLAB will show Codex Entropia, a story about animal computing technologies in alternative civilisations by Rich Pell, founder and director of the Center for PostNatural History (Pittsburgh, USA). Audiences will also be able to watch Welcome to Jankspace, Babes by Jenn Leung—professor, researcher, and simulation developer—and Daniel Felstead—director of the MA in Fashion Media and Communication at the London College of Fashion—who will later offer a talk on the grotesque residue of technocapitalism and the overflowing bodies it produces.

In the section devoted to performative lectures and experimental presentations, artist, researcher, and filmmaker Solveig Qu Suess will open the programme with Rhythms of Energy: Scale, Connection, Disappearance, an unpublished live video-essay exploring how energy modernity shapes our ways of seeing and relating. Artist, writer and researcher Lyndsey Walsh will also present Unbearable, conceived as a practice of resistance around reproductive technologies, systemic violence, and speculative organs.

Meanwhile, Roberto Alonso Trillo and Marek Poliks, recipients of the Google Art + Machine Intelligence Award, will offer the talk Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits, addressing capitalism as a self-governing system operating beyond the human. Recognised by Forbes as one of Spain’s 40 most influential futurists (2022), artist and designer Joel Blanco will give a lecture titled Mandíbula, exploring the masculine utopian fictions emerging in contemporary digital culture.

Also joining the presentations is the duo Nestor Siré—Cuban artist and recent recipient of the prestigious Rijksakademie residency in Amsterdam—and German anthropologist Steffen Kohn, authors of the book Handmade Networks. They will present Oracle Index, an expanded cinematic narrative in the form of an imaginary ethnography set in a speculative, crypto-infused Havana of the 2030s.

Closing this section is the performative lecture LOVESCAM, by technology theorist and researcher Alex MF Quicho, on erotic scams, algorithmic desire, and the emotional economies of exocapital.

Speculative sessions and workshops

Error 417 Expectation Failed—an independent foundation supporting artistic practices linked to digital cultures and urgent technopolitical themes—and Medialab Matadero present 5 Petaflops Against Empire, a series of speculative prototypes, micro-scripts, and instructions/hacks exploring how we might reclaim collective computational power. Visual artist, technologist, and AI programmer Martix Navrot will lead a collective speculative session in which participants take on various roles within a future scenario.

What if off-network communication were not a last resort but the first choice? The Berlin-based collective 868labs will invite participants to the speculative workshop 868 Wearables: Bodies as Nodes, to explore what communication could look like if it were local, embodied, and self-sustaining.

Sound and visual performances

As a culmination of the Thursday and Saturday sessions, Medialab and L.E.V. (Laboratorio de Electrónica Visual) have designed two evenings dedicated to sonic and audiovisual experimentation, featuring multimedia artists Carlos Martorell, Merche Blasco, and Nacho de la Vega. On Friday, the spotlight shifts to the collective Volumen, which—drawing inspiration from the thought of Yuk Hui—will propose an encounter of multiple technological experiences through music, performance, and visual arts.

Prototype presentations

Under the mentorship of LAB 4 curator Bani Brusadin, filmmaker and researcher based in Shanghai Solveig Qu Suess, London-based writer and observer of contemporary technological phenomena Alex MF Quicho, and artist, designer, researcher and consultant Joel Blanco, the following projects were developed by interdisciplinary groups spanning fields such as art, architecture, economics, environmental sciences, philosophy, engineering, social studies, political sciences, programming, and activism.

Project 1: Ktown: Future Epistemologies of Intelogenesis – Colectivo Gaara (Spain)
An experimental mod of the videogame Dwarf Fortress, powered by AI, evoking a speculative world where technological instability is amplified by disruptive events.

Project 2: The Alice Guo Studies Institute (copy) – Mac Andre Arboleda (Philippines)
An agency for research and content production that investigates pirate strategies, media capabilities, and governance networks through the figure of scammer Alice Guo.

Project 3: Exploring Militarised Urban Futures – Mark Cinkevich (Belarus / Poland)
An interactive prototype exploring urban spaces shaped by ubiquitous algorithmic surveillance and subtle forms of personalised control.

Project 4: Iblīs Lives on a Line – Noura Tafeche (Italy)
A dissection of NEOM’s smart megacity as an example of performative urbanism, where hyper-stylised representations operate as instruments of authority, extraction, and ethnic cleansing.

Project 5: POCAS – Poca Organización Colaborativa de Auto-servicio – Pablo Somonte Ruano (Mexico / Germany)
A work of economic science fiction imagining an autonomous mutualist network in an alternative contemporary Mexico City, where distributed computing competes with capitalism.

Exhibition: Collapse of the Weave Function by Metahaven

Alongside the development of the Collaborative Prototyping Lab calls and the celebration of the OpenLAB festival, LAB 4 completes its programme with exhibitions, installations, and creative workshops that delve into the concepts and themes of Futuros Raros.

Until 30 November, Matadero Madrid’s Nave 1 hosts the exhibition Collapse of the Weave Function by the artistic collective Metahaven. Based in Amsterdam and led by Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk, Metahaven is internationally recognised for its influential trajectory in audiovisual languages, design, and essayistic practice over the past two decades.
Collapse of the Weave Function aligns with one of the key axes of LAB 4: “soft” science fiction—poetic interventions that resonate with the technological tensions of the present. The exhibition comprises 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 the occasion.

More information: medialab-matadero.es