Weird Futures series

The Weird Futures series showcases examples of fiction, video essays, documentary films, and nonfiction that explore problematic depictions of the present and the future, encompassing narratives of prediction and control, as well as uncanny scenarios that may sound vaguely familiar yet subtly disturbing. At a time when narratives of stability, security, and progress are fading due to growing uncertainty and the deliberate exploitation of volatility, this series of films and videos employs a combination of speculation, irony, and sheer absurdity to amplify the strangeness of the dominant technological imaginaries, while emphasizing the inherent violence and urge for control that defines them. 

This activity, curated by Bani Brusadin in collaboration with artist and researcher Solveig Qu Suess, is part of Medialab Matadero's LAB 4 Weird Futures program (September–December 2025). 

01/11/2025

Rola Rolls (업체 eobchae, Korea, 2024, 10’) 
The artist collective 업체 eobchae imagines post-petroleum future in which an ecologist guerrilla develops an uncanny yet eerily convincing bodily mutation as a survival tactic in the face of ecological and political collapse. 

The Seasteaders (Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Daniel Keller, USA, 2018, 28’) 
Seeing rule by the majority as ineffective and oppressive, the Seasteaders propose a libertarian future of floating microgovernments, where governments are selected in an open market and climate change can be “hacked.” The film is a firsthand account of the first Seasteading conference and their background.  

Welcome to Jankspace, Babes (Daniel Felstead y Jenn Leung, UK, 2025, 29’) 
In 2001 Rem Koolhaas came up with the term junkspace for the spaces left unaccounted for in the bureaucratic architecture of modernity. Similarly, Jankspace is the grotesque, empty space in the digital network of technocapitalism that we fill with our slimy human bodies. Ozempic, AI slop, Bryan Johnson, Dress to Impress, Uber drivers, algorithms and Luigi Mangione. Take a seat and tune in… 

02/11/2025

Fresh Kill (Shu Lea Cheang, USA, 1994, 80’) 
Fresh Kill is a highly stylised and satirical attack on neo-liberal reality. The child of a young lesbian couple living on Staten Island mysteriously vanishes after consuming radiated fish. The battle to find the missing child and the culprits responsible for the disappearance is joined by a group of cyber-warriors. Everyone finds themselves ensnared in a vast conspiracy involving a ghost ship of nuclear refuse, ominous media messages, and deadly cat food! 
(Spanish subtitles by Cyborgrrrls) 

04/11/2015

CODEX ENTROPIA (Richard Pell, USA, 2020, 9’) 
Told through 100-year-old stereoscopic photographs, CODEX ENTROPIA is the story of a forgotten civilisation that developed computing technologies using only well-trained animals and storeing information in landscapes. 

Random Access (Zike HE, China, 2023, 14’) 
On the second day after the unexpected crash and reboot of the city’s central data centre, the server keeper meets the cloud system in a disordered digital world. A retired taxi driver and a passenger embark on a journey through the city trying to locate their sense of direction. 

Never Rest/Unrest (Tiffany Sia, Hong Kong, 2020, 28’) 
Never Rest/Unrest is a hand-held experimental short film about the relentless political actions in Hong Kong, spanning early summer to late 2019. Dominant narratives of crisis pushed by news journalism are resisted. Instead, crisis poses ambiguous, anachronistic and often banal time, depicted as an oral history scaled at the digital vernacular form of vertical 16:9 aspect ratio. Subtitles are intentionally omitted as a means to interrogate the viewer about her distance or proximity from the events. 

Shokouk: A Cosmicomedy in Four Acts (Rouzbeh Akhbari and Felix Kalmenson, Uzbekistan-Canada, 2023, 17’) 
Shokouk is a transhistorical hybrid documentary that traces a polyphony of characters, sites and encounters related to infrastructures of space travel and cosmic imaginaries. Following a vertiginous narrative connecting various cosmic machinations from the 12th century Persianate world to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the present moment, the film weaves historical facts and archival fabulations, and questions our common perceptions of time and space.  

07/11/2025

The Future Is Now Finally Weird AF (The Ultimate AI CoreCore Experience) - Part Three (Silvia Dal Dosso, Italia, 2025, 12’) 
Through the synthetic voice of Adam Curtis, the movie tells the story of how humans may survive in a world that is becoming weirder, harder, and faster: dead celebrities are brought back from heaven, gen AI is rising, millionaires are hiding in the bottom of the earth. We feel stuck in a mediated reality, where love is constantly intercepted by emotional advertising, robots, and deepfakes. But… 

Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (Ayoung KIM, Corea, 2022, 25’) 
In this game simulation, you take on the role of a female delivery driver navigating a labyrinthine futuristic Seoul under the control of a master algorithm called Dancemaster. You are moving to a countdown clock, much like a gig worker, in the uncanny but awkwardly familiar world of platform economy, hypersurveillance and body optimization. 

Everything But The World (DIS, USA, 2021, 37’) 
Everything But The World is a TV pilot and an experimental multi-genre docu-sci-fi made by the renowned artistic and curatorial collective DIS. The series departs from the premise of a nature show by turning the camera onto nature’s least natural invention: us. If we realize that this is not the world, but a world among many possible, what worlds might we see come, after the end?