lab 4 weird futures
Medialab Matadero opens the second call to participate in the 5 interdisciplinary working groups of the Collaborative Prototyping Lab residency that will take place on November 12 - 26, 2025. For Medialab prototyping means testing ideas through collaborative work. The laboratory consists of an intensive two-week residency in which 25 people, organized in interdisciplinary working groups, will develop 5 prototype proposals. This call is precisely for those who want to join the development of the 5 selected proposals.
The goal of this laboratory is testing ideas and develop collaborative, interdisciplinary projects through groups of collaborators coordinated by the project promoter. Medialab will provide workspace and other facilities and the groups will receive support and advice from the international mentors, Medialab’s curator, and other experts. Throughout the laboratory, open source standards and tools will be used as much as possible. The outcome will be available under Creative Commons licenses to foster further development, reuse, and distribution. In addition, the resulting prototypes will be presented publicly in the framework of the OpenLAB Weird Futures festival that will take place at Medialab Matadero on November 27 - 29, 2025.
¿What's the topic? ¿Why “Weird Futures”?
In a context in which the narratives of stability, security and linear progress are fading in the face of the growing and deliberate production of volatility and its instrumentalisation, technological promises play a fundamental role. The literary visions of cyberpunk become strategic plans. Dystopias become business models. Weird Futures is an invitation to explore in concrete terms some of the material and symbolic vectors that, by invoking possible futures, are actively redesigning key aspects of contemporary society. This residency 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.
These are the 5 selected proposals:
Ktown: Future Epistemologies in Intelogenesis by Gaara collective (Spain) - An experimental, AI-boosted Dwarf Fortress mod that evokes a speculative world where technological instability is amplified by disruptive events.
The Institute of Alice Guo Studies (copy) by Mac Andre Arboleda (Philippines) - The Institute of Alice Guo Studies is a research and production agency centered around the fraudster Alice Guo to investigate pirate strategies, mediatic capacities, and governance networks. More info here.
Navigating Militarized Urban Futures by Mark Cinkevich (Belarus / Poland) - Building an interactive prototype that explores urban spaces shaped by pervasive algorithmic surveillance and subtle targeted control.
Iblīs dwells a Line by Noura Tafeche (Italy) - A dissection of NEOM's mega smart-city as an example of “performative urbanism” where hyper-stylized renderings operate as tools of authority, extraction, and ethnic cleansing.
POCAS - Poca Organización Colaborativa de Auto-servicio by Pablo Somonte Ruano (Mexico / Germany) - POCAS uses economic sci-fi to imagine an autonomous mutualist network in an alternative version of contemporary Mexico City, leveraging distributed computation as a viable competitor to capitalism.