OpenLAB: Weird Futures

OpenLAB marks the closing of LAB 4 Weird Futures, a program that explores the technological imagination of instability — its power, its instrumentalization, and the possible alternatives hidden within its cracks and failures.

Medialab Matadero brings together artists, technologists, designers, thinkers, and engaged publics to investigate the intersections between technological imagination and a society that oscillates between the desire for control and the extreme volatility of the present.

At a time when narratives of stability, security, and linear progress are fading, volatility becomes a resource. Cyberpunk fantasies shape political agendas; dystopias turn into business models; what once belonged to fiction now drives material transformations in infrastructures, policies, and protocols.

OpenLAB Weird Futures invites us to face that point of friction — to explore the material and symbolic forces that are rewriting the foundations of the twentieth-century world. Over three days of presentations, talks, and performances, Medialab opens space to think from the edges, trace hidden connections, and imagine radical alternatives.

Ultimately, it is about observing how technological power oscillates between control and chaos — and asking which part of that vertigo we are willing, or unwilling, to inhabit.

More information about LAB 4 Weird Futures 
 

Programme 

Thursday November 27, 2025

Nave Una

18:30-22:30

Bani Brusadin
Weird Futures
welcome

Pablo Somonte Ruano with Laura Budia Piña, Javier Arango Garfias, Lien Tran, Rok Kranjc
POCAS - Poca Organización Colaborativa de Auto-servicio
collaborative prototype

Elisa Cuesta Fernández & Jamie Allen
Sunk Costs: the Felicity Ace Saga
lecture and project presentation

Business Serio™
Research Unit 1
project presentation

Mark Cinkevich with Carey Yuping Chen, Freddie Sanders, Delfín van Peborgh, Saúl Zamorano
Navigating Militarized Urban Futures
collaborative prototype

Codex Entropia
A short film by Rich Pell (Center for PostNatural Studies)
interlude

Solveig Qu Suess
Notes on Rhythm, Energy, and Disappearance
live video-essay

Medialab by L.E.V.
dj set and performance

 

Friday November 28, 2025

OpenLAB Studio - Aulario

16:00-18:00

Martix Navrot
5 PETAFLOPS AGAINST EMPIRE
presentation and collective speculative session

Lyndsey Walsh
Unbearable
presentation

 

Auditorio de Casa del Lector

18:00-21:00
doors open

Welcome to Jankspace, Babes
by Daniel Felstead with Jenn Leung
prelude

Colectivo Gaara with Gadea Autric, David Tiemstra, Esben Holk, Valentina Giniger
Ktown: Futuras epistemologías de la intelogenesis
collaborative prototype

Nestor Siré y Steffen Köhn
Oracle Index
talk and project presentation

Mac Andre Arboleda with Hsiang-Yun Huang, Sergio Pinilla Lopez, Anuphong Sup-adulchai, Ginevra Mazzoni
The Institute of Alice Guo Studies (copy)
collaborative prototype

Research Unit 3
The Sunsetting Project
presentation

Roberto Alonso Trillo & Marek Poliks 
Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits
talk

 

Nave Una

21:00 - 23:00

Cosmotechnics — Volumen x Medialab Matadero
dj set & performances

 

Saturday November 29, 2025

OpenLAB Studio - Terrario

16:00-16:30

Research Unit 2
United States of Europe - Let’s get POP-FED!
presentations and brainstorming sessions

Research Unit 5
WARMONY - Killing is Obsolete

 

Aulario

16:30-18:30

868 Labs 
Guerrilla Wearables: A LoRa-Based Toolkit For Resilient Communication
presentation and demo

 

Casa del Lector Auditorium

18:30-21:00

Research Unit 4
The End of Death
presentation

Noura Tafeche with Nadia Armstrong, Valentina Ruiz D'Eramo, Miguel Ruipérez de la Fuente, Angela Rodríguez Relaño
Iblīs dwells a Line
collaborative prototype

Joel Blanco
MANDIBULA
talk

Jenn Leung & Daniel Felstead
Welcome to Jankspace, babes
talk

Alex MF Quicho
FOR LOVE
lecture-performance

 

Nave Una

21:00–23:00h

Medialab by L.E.V.
dj set y performance