Guided Tours: Exhibition La Mecánica de la Verdad

Exhibition La Mecánica de la Verdad

Why has it become so easy, yet so difficult, to believe what we see? Medialab invites you to an exhibition with site-specific works that addresses the research of a new generation of artists into the techno-cultural mechanisms redefining what we used to call "the real."

Why has it become so easy, and at the same time so hard, to believe what we see? The perception of reality has always been a contested territory: every fact is the result of specific instruments and decisions about what we consider proven. But clearly, something is changing. We are witnessing a profound transformation in the conditions under which what we collectively define as "the real" is produced, shared, and generates trust. Digital tools have expanded our ability to verify facts, but also to simulate or convincingly deny them. This mutation is happening quickly and crystallizing rapidly.

La Mecánica de la Verdad addresses the research that a new generation of artists—deeply familiar with digital technologies—is conducting not only into "truth," but also into its "mechanics." Through a combination of previously unreleased works and site-specific installations, the exhibition confronts us with the techno-cultural mechanisms redefining what we used to call "the real." The artists conjure digital narratives and artifacts—some found, others created specifically for this show—that remind us that no technical system is innocent, and that approaching the truth is, and must always be, a collective and hybrid effort.

AI Hyperrealism, by Martyna Marciniak, dives into new, unstable regimes of attention and visual trust. As AI image generation merges into everyday life, our way of perceiving reality is transformed by new "ways of seeing." Synthetic images spread like wildfire, reaching millions of people in near real time. But they are much more than simple "fake" images. They are cultural objects that undermine the old rationalist faith in visual objectivity (a faith that, in fact, was already in need of a deep revision). And the challenge they leave behind is real: how is trust in images constantly renegotiated? What happens in this negotiation when facing synthetic images that result from collective acts of co-creation with AI? AI Hyperrealism and its surrounding research invite us to embrace the irony and absurdity of these images, while building reading keys that do not yet exist.

The perception of the real is not only changing; it is becoming a tangible, non-metaphorical battlefield. Terror Element addresses a specific case where the media actively contributed to the rise of contemporary Russian imperialism, highlighting the fundamental link between forensic science and the power of the colonial state. Engelhardt and Cinkevich are experts in open-source research techniques, but they are also aware that the laboratory aesthetic is a powerful cultural device that can be used to manufacture propaganda. Even more insidiously, it can be distorted to undermine the very possibility of trusting any knowledge, leaving room for despair and submission—the raw material that authoritarianism has always fed on.

Unpredictable Atmosphere, by Rebolino and Petrini, shifts focus to an apparently different terrain—climate and its prediction—yet delves right into a shared and crucial question: if we want to fight for justice, both human and planetary, we need to rely on facts. But what counts as a fact? Because climate change is not a single event, but the result of aggregating data into patterns, and patterns into models. A "super-fact," a "hyper-event." Weather models applied to climate change are a clear example of how mathematical simulations can oversimplify, overlook phenomena considered irrelevant, and occasionally even manipulate. But simulations can also come to the rescue as what Lucia Rebolino calls "counter-models": alternative simulations capable of making sense of apparent anomalies, capturing realities that fall outside the threshold of what conventional models are designed to detect.

At the end of this journey, we enter the unstable territory of what Siré and Köhn (Latency.club)—creators of Oracle Index—call "imaginary ethnography." An anthropologist—as fictional as she is rooted in the real ethnographic work of her creators—documents the use of an unusual mix of Santería, old number lotteries (La Bolita), AI, and blockchain in a (semi)speculative Cuba, where the Communist Party adopts prediction markets to attract capital and survive an increasingly suffocating embargo. What if algorithmic governance and electronic betting were not just a table at the capitalist casino and a crypto-bro deregulation fantasy, but a survival tactic against them? As facts emerge from dreams, are traded, and calculated, digital divination becomes an attempt to extract knowledge from a state of permanent crisis.

About the Participating Artists

Martyna Marciniak is a Polish artist, researcher, and 3D designer based in Berlin. Her work explores visual storytelling through animation, film, writing, and digital model making.

Her artistic practice relies on speculative fictions and allegories to expose technological and visual biases, while bridging the realms of aesthetics, law, politics, and the theory of communication technologies.

Martyna has worked with Forensic Architecture, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, among other NGOs. The research group Border Emergency Collective, which she co-founded, investigated and documented stories of migrants at the border between Poland and Belarus. Her work has been exhibited at the Ars Electronica festival, the Onassis Foundation (Athens), the Warsaw Biennale, Kinema ICON in Bucharest, Haus Gropius in Dessau, and the deTour festival in Hong Kong, among others.

Anna Engelhardt is a London-based video artist and writer working with video installations, computer-generated animation, and archival research.

Her films follow semi-fictional characters caught in environments of political conflict. The themes stem from her investigations into contested histories of technology, extraction, occupation, and dispossession. Since official documentation of political violence is often censored or staged, her works use fiction as an instrument of storytelling.

Her research builds on her Master's in Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, London, employing methods ranging from satellite image analysis to on-site interviews. This approach has developed through a series of commissions, including Cues for Film and Video Umbrella (2026), as well as a new work for her upcoming solo exhibition at Gasworks, London (2027). Her work has been shown at ICA, London; HKW, Berlin; the Kyiv Biennial; and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, among others. She has published essays in e-flux, The Funambulist, Spector Books, and Duke University Press.

Mark Cinkevich is a researcher and artist whose work explores how visual technologies and infrastructures organize power.

Focusing on social and infrastructural landscapes, he examines how surveillance, logistics, and extraction shape environments of control. In his artistic practice, he focuses on the critical and speculative aspects of art operating at the intersection of fact and fiction.

His works have been presented internationally, including at transmediale (Berlin), steirischer herbst (Graz), the BFI London Film Festival, Ars Electronica (Linz), the National Gallery of Art of Lithuania (Vilnius), and the Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art (Ljubljana), among others.

Lucia Rebolino is a research-oriented artist, architect, and computational designer. She is currently a researcher at Forensic Architecture in London.

Lucia conceives her practice as a space where different branches of science and design can conceptualize, critique, visualize, and provoke vibrant new aesthetics to draw attention to complex and invisible systems.

Her spatial and conceptual thinking is grounded in a research-based practice developed during her time as a Teaching Associate at Columbia GSAPP and as a researcher at the Center for Spatial Research in New York, where she tested new tools in research projects, exploring data visualization and new aesthetics of counter-cartography. Since 2023, Lucia has been a researcher at Forensic Architecture, combining mapping, remote sensing, and web platforms in support of environmental justice and human rights investigations.

latency.club is an evolving collaborative platform initiated by Nestor Siré and Steffen Köhn, operating between Havana, Berlin, and other contexts.

Working at the intersection of art, film, and ethnography, they explore how financial, data, and governance infrastructures infiltrate daily life, and how people build, modify, and reappropriate these systems under conditions of scarcity, exclusion, and control.

Their works have been presented in museums and institutions worldwide, such as the Seoul Museum of Art, the Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art, the Warsaw Biennale, the Hong-Gah Museum in Taipei, The Photographers' Gallery in London, and the New York Latin American Art Triennial, among others.