LAB 4 Weird Futures
In a context where narratives of stability, security, and linear progress are fading in the face of the growing and deliberate production of volatility and its instrumentalization, technological promises play a fundamental role. Literary visions of cyberpunk become strategic plans. Dystopias become business models. Rare Futures is an invitation to explore some of the material and symbolic vectors that, by invoking possible futures, are actively redesigning key aspects of contemporary society.
LAB 4 Rare 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 we call teslaformation. This neologism does not only refer to a new productive model, such as Fordism or Toyotism, nor is it limited to a brand or type of technical object. Rather, through an extravagant and monstrous concept, it addresses phenomena that are equally disproportionate, confusing, and still in the process of creation.
The main coordinates of teslaformation are both material and symbolic, unexpectedly linking 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, colonization of land and space, overcoming biological limits and technologies of immortality); new forms of irregular and unrecognizable propaganda, inspired by shitposting and cosplay; the mutation of the hacker spirit and the hyper-libertarian redefinition of democratic mechanisms.
> Activities
May-June 2025
Open Call for PROJECTS (Collaborative Prototiping Laboratory)
July-September 2025
Open Call for COLLABORATORS (Collaborative Prototiping Laboratory)
Autumn 2025
Exhibitions and installations
Artistic workshops and working groups activation
12-27th November 2025
Collaborative Prototiping Laboratory
27-29th November 2025
OpenLAB Weird Futures
