The technological imaginaries of uncertainty
Programme Activity
November 27 - 29, 2025
Nave 17 & Casa del Lector Auditorium
OpenLAB Weird Futures
The year-long program LAB 4 Weird Futures explored the technological imagination of instability — its power, its instrumentalization, and the possible alternatives hidden within its cracks and failures. In this final act Medialab 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.
For more information → medialab-matadero.es
POCAS - Poca Organización Colaborativa de Auto-servicio
Thursday, November 27, 2025 - 19:00h
Nave 17
Pablo Somonte Ruano con Laura Budia Piña, Javier Arango Garfias, Lien Tran, Rok Kranjc
Collaborative prototype presentation
POCAS uses economic science fiction to imagine an autonomous mutualist network in an alternative version of contemporary Mexico City, where distributed computing competes with capitalism.
It is a research project that explores how distributed computing can sustain mutualist and post-capitalist economies. Inspired by centuries of self-governance and decades of peer-to-peer technologies, it maps how existing tools and practices can enable autonomous and collaborative infrastructures today.
https://pocas.store/
This prototype has been developed collaboratively based on an initial proposal by Pablo Somonte Ruano
https://pablo.sx/
Sunk Costs: The Saga of the Felicity Ace
Thursday, November 27, 2025 - 19:15h
Nave 17
Elisa Cuesta Fernández & Jamie Allen
Project presentation
Sunk Costs: The Saga of the Felicity Ace takes the 2022 sinking of the cargo ship Felicity Ace— which went down off the Azores carrying nearly 4,000 luxury electric vehicles—as a case study in the contradictions of “green” capitalism, logistics, and ecological accountability.
The project explores what happens when the infrastructures of progress literally catch fire, exposing the volatility and opacity of systems designed to appear seamless. Part speculative storytelling, part forensic reconstruction, the performance interweaves archival narration, manifest readings, sound fragments, and visual cartographies. From different spaces, Elisa and Jamie alternate voices in a hybrid, performative dialogue—moving from the factual to the mythic, from the lithium fire’s chemistry to the moral and
material legacies of wreckage. Drawing from environmental forensics, marine policy, and artistic research, the piece situates shipwrecks as forensic remains of late capitalist mythologies. What should remain underwater? What wreckage do we still rely on? What is, in fact, down there?
Sunk Costs is a collaborative project steered by
Jamie Allen, Matthew J. Lutz, Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, Chris Woebken, Louise Emily Carver and Elisa Cuesta
BIOS
Elisa Cuesta is an artist and industrial designer whose work examines the entanglements between ecological systems, infrastructures, and speculative storytelling. Combining artistic research and hybrid making, she creates installations, cartographies, and artefacts that merge traditional and experimental techniques. Her practice, grounded in transdisciplinary collaboration, spans institutional and independent contexts. Her work has been exhibited at Science Gallery Dublin, LABoral Gijón, Nest The Hague, or the Belgrade Museum of Science and Technology. In 2024 she was commissioned the pre-biennial territorial analysis for the Climate Biennial (Avilés, 2026). She currently collaborates with TBA21–Academy.
https://elisacuesta.com/
Jamie Allen is an artist and researcher exploring how infrastructures and technologies shape ecological, social, and symbolic life. With a background in engineering and media art, his work combines research, speculative storytelling, and infrastructural critique through installations and publications. He is Senior Researcher at HGK Basel, Visiting Fellow at Cambridge HPS, and member of metaLAB (Harvard+Basel+Berlin) and continent. The ongoing collaborative project Sunk Costs explores maritime losses and ecological afterlives, including the 2022 Felicity Ace shipwreck.
https://jamieallen.com/
Research Unit Medialab Business Serio™
Presentación de proyectos
with Ana Petra
Moriyón, Clara Escalera, Fermín Zabala, Elena Zaghis, Fran Grima, Danya Orlovsky
Thursday, November 27, 2025 - 19:45h Nave 17
The Research Unit is an experimental line of work at Medialab Matadero that probes the weak signals and emerging imaginaries of a world that hasn’t arrived yet. Its mission is to investigate or envision products and services that link speculation with infrastructure, turning future scenarios into tools for making sense of the present.
In 2025, Medialab tasked Business Serio™ —a Madrid-based agency for thought, creativity, and cultural action (https://serio.business/)— with coordinating the Research Unit. Medialab gave them one mission: build a creative commando unit capable of spotting traces of strange technological presents, and accelerating them.
The Sunsetting Project
The Sunsetting Project designs recovery technology for organizations moving beyond burnout economies. They develop systems for structured rest, corporate deceleration and workforce
Friday, November 29, 2025 - 19:45h Casa del Lector Auditorium regeneration at scale. Productivity has a new architecture built on pause, return and endurance.
Eurocore - A workshop about volatile aesthetics and geopolitical moods
Saturday, November 29, 2025 - 16:00h
Nave 17 Terrario
Eurocore treats Europe as an emerging field of volatile aesthetics, where the constant circulation and mutation of coded imaginaries stoke uncertainty and fuel authoritarian fantasies. This micro-experimental project uses the very language of the networks to observe how our understanding of propaganda is shifting: from a traditional top-down model to an ambient, subliminal persuasion that doesn’t flow like a message, but like a vibe.
WARMONY - Killing is Obsolete
Saturday, November 29, 2025 - 17:00h
Nave 17 Terrario
Warmony is a defense platform for the post-lethal era. Autonomous systems detect, isolate and neutralize threats while keeping them visible to public record. Warfare becomes design: mea-
surable, traceable and accountable. Welcome to the new survival: control, exposure and recovery.
The End of Death
Saturday, November 29, 2025 - 18:45h
Casa del Lector Auditorium
The End of Death is a public archive that documents the contemporary redefinition of death. We collect and share audiovisual records of emerging practices related to immortality, including cryonics, AI legacies, digital cemeteries, posthuman memorials, transhumanist conventions and new spiritual infrastructures.
Navigating Militarized Urban Futures
Thursday, November 27, 2025 - 20:00h
Nave 17
Mark Cinkevich, Carey Yuping Chen, Freddie Sanders, Delfín
van Peborgh, Saúl Zamorano
Collaborative prototype presentation
Navigating Militarized Urban Futures is a speculative research project that analyzes how architecture, surveillance, and technology intertwine in the production of militarized urban futures.
Through an interdisciplinary approach, the prototype examines the mechanisms by which warlike logic infiltrates urban planning, security devices, and the management of public space, exploring possible scenarios of resistance and reappropriation.
This prototype has been developed collaboratively based on an initial proposal by Mark Cinkevich
https://www.instagram.com/m_cinkevich/
Codex Entropia
Thursday, November 27, 2025 - 20:15h Nave 17
Rich Pell (Center for PostNatural History)
Codex Entropia imagines an ancient civilisation that develops delicate forms of animal computation, storing its knowledge within the contours of the land.
Composed from century-old anaglyph images discovered in a basement, the short film is a subtle and visionary epic tale that lingers on the fragile bonds between nature, code, and belief.
BIO
Richard Pell is the founder and director of the Center for PostNatural History (Pittsburgh, USA),
an organization dedicated to forms of life that have been intentionally altered through domestication, selective breeding, tissue culture, or genetic engineering. He previously co-founded the art and engineering group The Institute for Applied Autonomy.
https://www.postnatural.org/
Rhythms of the Energetic: Scale, Connection, Disappearance
Thursday, November 27, 2025 - 20:30h Nave 17
Solveig Qu Suess
Lecture performance
The live video essay moves through infrastructures of seeing and sensing to reflect on how energetic modernity shapes perception and relation.
Moving from China’s reform-era optical transfers to Southeast Asia’s sustainable transitions along the Mekong River, and into the underbellies of contemporary communication systems, it draws on filmmaking, archival work, and field research to explore how image, labor, and desire form the politics of connection.
Attuned to rhythms and intervals, the practice attends to what remains unrecorded, non-disclosed, or half-remembered– the residues that continue to hum beneath technological systems. It considers the aesthetic and perceptual questions that emerge within systems under transition, asking how shifting geographies and scales transform what can be sensed, represented, and felt. In tracing these movements, it reflects on how we might navigate the monstrous, the uncertain, and the overlapping temporalities of our present through new cultural strategies.
BIO
Solveig Qu Suess is an artist and researcher working across documentary cinema, installation, and writing. Her practice moves through the intervals of systemic change, tracing how power and technology shape collective and intimate experiences of time and space. Moving between planetary systems and private archives, her work draws out the relations between infrastructural and emotional landscapes. Her films and installations have been presented internationally at institutions and festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Onassis Stegi (Athens), the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Jameel Arts Centre (Dubai), ZKM (Karlsruhe), the Guangzhou Image Triennial, the Göteborg Biennial, and Kunsthall Trondheim, among others.
https://www.instagram.com/solveigsuess/
5 Petaflops Against Empire Martix Navrot
Friday, November 29, 2025 - 16:00h
Nave 17 Aulario
Error 417 Expectation Failed Foundation and Medialab Matadero present 5 Petaflops Against Empire, a series of speculative prototypes, micro-scripts, and instructions/hacks that explore how we can reclaim collective computing power.
Project presentation & collective speculative game
The project stems from Navrot’s imagination of concrete apartment blocks in his hometown of Wronki, Poland, where he envisioned a scenario in which the residents of post-PRL apartments run their own modular furniture building GPU micro servers. The project focuses on reclaiming microcomputing power, among other methods, from advertising trackers that operate in all browsers, but also explores the connection of computers in networks and, in general, the search for computing power wherever it may be hidden.
In this session Navrot will provide a fictional/ speculative framework in which all participants will interact with different roles in a future or potential scenario that will be inspired by Navrot’s research and his own experience rooted in the reality of Eastern Europe.
BIOS
Martix Navrot is a performer, poet, visual artist, university lecturer, creative technologist, and AI programmer working at the intersection of video games, open-source culture, and blockchain thinking. Their artistic and research practice revolves around queer futurism, radical imagi-
nation, and the critique of Big Tech, absurdity, and play. They create systems, games, LARPs, apps, physical objects, and performances that use code and speculative fiction as tools of resistance against dominant infrastructures and conventions, exploring the microaesthetics of the internet and guerrilla digital practices. Martix has exhibited their work and led workshops and talks at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Krupa Art Foundation in Wrocław, the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the Morris Gallery in London, SODA Manchester, and the Unsound Festival in Kraków, among others.
https://martixnavrot.com/
Error 417 Expectation Failed is an independent foundation supporting radically contemporary internet and net-based art practices. In 2025, it focuses on projects that challenge tech-authoritarian systems through misdirection, opting out, and pushing back, resisting in solidarity and creating spaces for technological practices that serve collective needs rather than exploit them.
https://error417.expectation.fail/
Friday, November 29, 2025 - 17:00h
Nave 17 Aularioo
Unbearable Lyndsey Walsh
Performative project presentation
Artist Lyndsey Walsh has generated and regenerated Unbearable as a frictional practice of resistance against the doomed narrative of “breeding” and its many technoscientific and digital mutations.
This practice has grown from the artist’s series Unbearable, which are organs generated from an unruly technologically mediated imagination that cannot carry any reproductive potential and instead spawn new potential modes of biologically and biomaterially being. For OpenLAB Weird Futures, Lyndsey will enact Unbearable as a performance lecture to unfold the history of care, DIY practices, technoscience, and systemic violence surrounding so-called reproductive organs and the bodies that carry them. Lyndsey will critically speculate and imagine possible futures to call into question the very constructions of digital and authoritarian regimes attempting to seize the means of reproduction. In collaboration with Error 417 Expectation Failed Foundation.
https://error417.expectation.fail/
BIO
Lyndsey Walsh is an artist, writer, and researcher based in Berlin, Germany. Lyndsey’s practice sets out to “undoom narrative” by questioning the cultural binaries of human-non-human, diseased-healthy, and life-machine using Crip, Queer, and intersectional feminist frameworks. Their work has been featured in events and with institutions such as Frieze Art Week New York, the Humboldt Forum, the Ural Biennial, the Berlin Biennale, Athens Digital Arts Festival, and Transmediale/CTM and has received the S+T+ARTS Prize 2024 Honorary Mention.
https://lyndseywalsh.com/
Ktown: Future Epistemologies in Intelogenesis
Friday, November 29, 2025 - 18:45h
Casa del Lector Auditorium
Colectivo Gaara, Gadea Autric, David Tiemstra, Esben Holk, Valentina Giniger
Collaborative prototype presentation
Ktown: Future Epistemologies in Intelogenesis, is a mod for Dwarf Fortress, a world simulator known for its complexity and emergent narratives.
This experimental project integrates opensource generative AI APIs to enrich the game with dynamic events, satirical dialogues, and environmental descriptions responsive to the simulation. The resulting narratives are overwhelming, chaotic, and unpredictable, evoking weird futures through fragmented digital aesthetics.
This prototype has been developed collaboratively based on an initial proposal by Gaara collective (Ian Margo y Levi ‘Yitzhak’ Jiménez)
https://www.instagram.com/levi.yitzhak/ https://www.instagram.com/3_fieldware/
Oracle Index
Friday, November 29, 2025 - 19:00h
Casa del Lector Auditorium
Nestor Siré & Steffen Köhn
Project presentation
Set in a speculative Havana infused with the crypto culture of the 2030s, Oracle Index is an expanded cinematic narrative in the form of an imaginary ethnography.
It envisions a Cuba that, under intense geopolitical pressure, adopts “futarchy” —a system of governance based on prediction markets, emerging from the same transhumanist milieu that gave rise to cryptocurrencies— as the foundation of its late-stage planned economy.
Ideology defines the ends, global speculators determine the means, and those excluded from official platforms respond by inventing parallel betting cultures: rerouting state data streams into La Bolita, Cuba’s historic underground
lottery, decoding outcomes through La Charada and the oracles of Santería, and expanding these traditions with digital tools.
This narrative unfolds through a kaleidoscopic series of archival fragments drawn from the personal collection of an anonymous anthropologist, comprising interviews, intimate field notes, recordings from Cuban state television, excerpts from social media, and dream diaries of underground La Bolita players.
BIOS
Nestor Siré is a Cuban multimedia artist based in Havana and Amsterdam whose transdisciplinary research explores how technological infrastructures shape everyday social life—and, in turn, how they are shaped by it. Drawing from anthropology, network studies, and critical media theory, he translates the informal circuits and vernacular hacks of the Global South into interactive installations, digital platforms, and site-specific interventions. His projects have been presented at institutions such as the New Museum, The Photographers’ Gallery, MUAC, and major international biennials.
https://nestorsire.com/
Steffen Köhn is a filmmaker, video artist, and associate professor at Aarhus University. Working across cinema, art, and ethnography, he explores alternative infrastructures and survival strategies in today’s uneven sociotechnical worlds. Combining experimental ethnography, STS, and fiction, his works appropriate emerging technologies and the aesthetics of DIY networks and video games. His films and installations have been shown at major venues including Berlinale, Aksioma Institute, Kunsthaus Graz, and The Photographers’ Gallery London.
https://steffenkoehn.com/
The Institute of Alice Guo Studies (copy)
Friday, November 29, 2025 - 19:30h
Casa del Lector Auditorium
Mac Andre Arboleda con Hsiang-Yun Huang, Sergio Pinilla Lopez,
Anuphong Sup-adulchai, Ginevra
Mazzoni
Collaborative prototype presentation
The Institute of Alice Guo Studies (copy) is a research and production agency concentrating on pirate strategies, mediatic capacities, and governance networks that condition “another” Philippine life.
Fugitive mayor and fraudster Alice Guo is our person of interest, using her as a medium to investigate our extreme realities. What do we take from love scam operations, fictive identities, and seductive Tiktok propaganda in the formation of new institutes that could face our current conditions?
This prototype has been developed collaboratively based on an initial proposal by Mac Andre Arboleda
https://sickinternet.me/
Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits
Friday, November 29, 2025 - 20:00h
Casa del Lector Auditoriu
Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo’s Exocapitalism has been praised as an “era-defining book, a book that carries an idea with the potential resonance of Bratton’s The Stack or Hardt & Negri’s Empire” (New Models).
Roberto Alonso Trillo & Marek Poliks
Lecture
At the centre of their argument is the idea that capitalism does not belong to humans, it belongs to and is governed by itself.
Traditional economic theory struggles to keep up with capitalism’s rapid rate of acceleration, and this book steps in to address this. In this lecture Alonso Trillo and Poliks delve into one of the main pillars of this cosmofinancial framework, the notion of “Lift”: what happens when financial abstractions achieve escape velocity from terrestrial constraints? What happens when capitalism doesn’t need us anymore?
BIOS
Roberto Alonso Trillo is a theorist and artist whose work spans cultural theory, media philosophy, and experimental sound. A Spanish researcher based in Hong Kong, his work focuses on the aesthetic and political dimensions of machine learning, with particular attention to infrastructural critique and performativity. In ongoing collaboration with Marek Poliks, he explores AI
theory and speculative design as part of a broader inquiry into automation and cultural production. His interdisciplinary practice extends to sound art, post-instrumental music, and critical pedagogy. Roberto and Marek won Google’s 2024 Art + Machine Intelligence award. He coauthors the Disintegrator podcast with Marek Poliks.
https://robertoalonsotrillo.com/
Marek Poliks is a researcher in the philosophy of technology, with a focus on deep learning. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Together with his main research partner, Roberto Alonso Trillo (HKBU), Poliks has been working to position deep learning tools as endosymbiotic reproductive infrastructures—inorganic vehicles through which biological, epistemological, and social information is encoded, subjected to contingent processes, and transmitted. He coauthors the Disintegrator podcast with Roberto.
https://www.marekpoliks.com/
868 Wearables: Bodies as Nodes
Saturday, November 29, 2025 - 16:30h
Nave 17 Aulario
Project presentation
What if off-grid communication was not the last resort, but the first choice? What if it could circulate as effortlessly as any everyday accessory? 868labs invites participants to a speculative workshop that reimagines communication beyond centralized infrastructures.
The session introduces a series of open-source wearable devices built on the LoRa protocol, enabling peer-to-peer messaging without the global internet, SIM cards, or any external backbone.
Developed in response to growing censorship, surveillance, and the erosion of digital autonomy, 868 Wearables functions both as a tool of infrastructural resistance and as a speculative artifact asking how communication might look if it were local, embodied, and self-sustaining. In this session participants will unpack the political and technical contexts of network dependency, experiment hands-on with mesh communication devices, and collectively imagine new, bodily forms of connection for the realities of today.
In collaboration with Error 417 Expectation Failed Foundation
https://error417.expectation.fail/
BIO
868labs is a Berlin-based collective developing tactical tools for decentralized, off-grid communication. Initiated by new media artists Helena Nikonole, Katerina Kataeva, and collaborators remaining anonymous, the group’s first prototype, 868Wearables, is a peer-to-peer, open-source communication device enabling encrypted, longrange messaging over the 868 MHz radio band. Designed to be assembled, adapted, and shared, their work challenges commercial infrastructures and invites users to build their own resilient alternatives.
https://www.868labs.net/ https://www.instagram.com/868.labs/
Iblīs Dwells a Line
Saturday, November 29, 2025 - 20:00h
Casa del Lector Auditorium
Noura Tafeche, Nadia Armstrong, Valentina Ruiz
D’Eramo,
Miguel Ruipérez de la Fuente, Ángela
Rodríguez Relaño
Collaborative prototype presentation
Launched in 2017 as part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 economic diversification plan, NEOM is presented as a futuristic city powered by renewable energy, artificial intelligence, and zero-emission infrastructures.
This prototype approaches NEOM not as a traditional urban plan but as a visual apparatus—a system of codes that pre-enact and project how the future is prophesied, sold, and imposed. In this sense, NEOM becomes a case study for examining how contemporary nation-building intersects with institutional futurism and the aestheticisation of public policy. The future is imagined, constructed, and made desirable.
This prototype has been developed collaboratively based on an initial proposal by Noura Tafeche.
Iblīs Dwells a Line has been funded by the Italian Council (Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity – MIC).
MANDÍBULA
Saturday, November 29, 2025 - 19:00h
Joel Blanco
Casa del Lector Auditorium Talk BIO
“The screen before you unfolds the Empire: the feed. Excitedly, the algorithm shows you the edifice it has built, brick by brick. Shingeki no Kyojin, the end of the world, motivational edits with quotes by Marcus Aurelius, jawline-strengthening tutorials, and spray-on Minoxidil ads.”
MANDÍBULA explores the utopian masculine narratives that emerge in contemporary digital culture. These narratives express desires for purity, power, and transcendence in the face of a postmodernity seen as decadent, from the esoteric currents and depictions of spiritual purity of the 19th century to their return in forums and platforms such as 4chan or TikTok. Epic imagery, heroic bodies and digital landscapes conjure up the idea of ruins and castles as emotional technologies that direct the anxiety of the present towards the past. These nostalgic utopias reveal a masculinity that no longer seeks to dominate the world, but rather to find a sense of belonging within it.
Joel Blanco is an artist and designer. He describes himself as an “inactive member of the Pokémon generation and junk food expert.” His work, deeply influenced by popular culture, lies between visual art, design, and research. He is the curatorial director of Mayrit, a biennial festival of design and critical thinking in Madrid. Recognized by Forbes as one of the 40 most influential futurists in Spain (2022), he has been an artist in residence at the Real Academia de España en Roma (2025).
https://www.joelblanco.com/
Welcome to Jankspace, Babes
Friday, November 29, 2025 - 18:15h
Casa del Lector Auditorium
Film (UK, 2025, 29’ - English with Spanish subtitles)
Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung
Saturday, November 29, 2025 - 19:30h
Casa del Lector Auditorium
Project presentation
“Jankspace” is the grotesque and hollow realm of technocapitalist networks — the residue spilling out of the digital megastructure as it digests the material world and turns it into hallucinogenic sludge.
It is the Uber driver’s chaotically wired, multi-screen setup of tangled cables, flickering displays, and incessant notifications. It is, quite literally, us — our beautifully broken, uncomputable bodies that we know aren’t properly programmed and that no optimization will ever fix.
In the talk that accompanies the screening, Jenn Leung will use the concept of “jankspace” to explore some of the central themes of her practice as a researcher in computation, audiovisual creator and expert in emergent scenarios: the aesthetic delirium of contemporary digital popular culture, our deranged and mediated bodies, and the idiotic hallucinations of transhumanism.
BIOS
Jenn Leung is a lecturer, researcher, and simulation developer investigating the intersections of neuroscience, computation, and real-time media. She develops Unreal Engine interfaces for brain organoids and agent behaviour simulation, with publications in MIT Antikythera Journal and Neu-
rIPS 2025. A Lecturer at the University of the Arts London, she also researches at Lifefabs Institute and The Bartlett (UCL). Her work has shown at Ars Electronica and Tai Kwun, and she collaborates with Daniel Felstead on commissioned films for DIS.art.
https://jennleung.xyz/
Daniel Felstead is an academic and content producer whose work focuses on the intersections of the body, technology, and culture. He is the Course Leader for the MA in Fashion Media and Communication at the London College of Fashion (UAL) and has lectured at institutions such as the Architectural Association, transmediale, the ICA, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. His doctoral research examined speculative production and complex systems in participatory art. He currently produces short films on the mythologies of the metaverse, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology.
https://www.instagram.com/felstead.daniel/
Sábado 29 noviembre 2025, 20:15h
Auditorio Casa del Lector
LOVESCAM Alex MF Quicho
Conferencia performativa
LOVESCAM is a performance in two parts. The first, BUTCHERING, is a two-week Telegram Performance that unfolds in real-time across Telegram’s encrypted channels. Participants unknowingly enter a pig-butchering operation where their desires become the raw material for value extraction.
Each message exchange pings yet-unintegrated yearnings that exocapital salvages from the numbed-out bodies left after lift. The scam operates as both parasitic mimicry and diagnostic tool: revealing how loneliness radiates from logistical endpoints, how eroticism persists in the churn between overworld and underworld, how the human animal continues to yearn even when corralled into piecework existence. The performer embodies the compound’s forced laborer and the lifted subject simultaneously—sending sexy missives from both sides of the barbed wire, fattening marks with the same flattery that feeds the system.
Part 2, FOR LOVE is a lecture-performance that exposes the gore layer where flesh and psyche strain under algorithmic desire. Using edits from the film in development IT GIRL—raw footage bleeding into synthetic imagery, total exposure collapsing into radical opacity—the performance tracks how we can become infinitely attractive to extraction while believing ourselves untouchable. The lecture moves through the unnarratable: following links to links to links, scrambling between the macro-economics of $17 billion in annual lovescam revenue and the micro-erotics of a ping, a heartjump, the prick of a PIN. It
examines how the “girl intelligence” model of seductive legibility operates across both human and machine learning, creating loops of mutual entrapment that still fail to capture the excesses of love. The performance reveals lovescams not as aberrations but as the pragmatic function of a system that makes criminality the norm—where extra-judicial seduction supports the spin of extractive capital into abstracted experience, crushing loneliness and blood into interfaces that feel light as an oleophobic touch.
BIO
Alex Quicho is a theorist and research director in London who collaborates with arts institutions including Tate Britain, Somerset House Studios, Singapore Art Museum, Power Station of Art Shanghai, Julia Stoschek Collection, Nationalgalerie Berlin, Fondation Pernod-Ricard, and Rennie Museum. She teaches narrative theory for MA Narrative Environments at Central Saint Martins, and studied Critical Writing at the Royal College of Art. Alex is from Manila, where she is in leadership of SYM, a think-tank for political narrative in Southeast Asia.
http://amfq.xyz/
Photo by Hidhir Badaruddin
Alex Quicho, Gore Layer (2024-2025)
Medialab by L.E.V.
Thursday, November 27, 2025 - 21:00 - 22:30
Nave 17
Saturday, November 29, 2025 - 21:00 - 23:00h
Nave 17
L.E.V. - Carlos MartorellMerche Blasco
Presented in collaboration with L.E.V. (Laboratorio de Electrónica Visual), the program features two nights devoted to sonic and audiovisual experimentation.
On Thursday, the session brings together Nacho de la Vega, founder of the L.E.V. platform, and Shoeg, the project of sound and visual artist Carlos Martorell. In his performance Phantom Touch, Martorell explores the relationship between body, technology, and sound, extending a line of work he has presented at various international festivals.
On Saturday, Nacho de la Vega will share the stage with Merche Blasco, who will present Fauna: a live improvisation performance with instruments she has created herself. These sonic creatures come to life through movement, touch, and light, shaping an embodied and vibrational form of electronic music that connects all bodies present.
With more than eighteen years of experience, L.E.V. stands as a platform for creation, production, and experimentation in digital art, electronic sound, and audiovisual practices, fostering innovation and the exploration of new technological narratives through festivals and collaborations that expand the boundaries of the perceptible.
BIO
Nacho de la Vega, cultural activist, multimedia artist, and founding member of the L.E.V. (Laboratorio de Electrónica Visual) platform.
https://levfestival.com/
Shoeg is the main project of Carlos Martorell, combining sound collage and electronic experimentation. Martorell is a sound and visual artist whose work explores the relationship between body, technology, and sound. He has participated in festivals such as Sónar+D, L.E.V., and MUTEK.
https://www.carlosmartorell.net/shoeg
Merche Blasco is a multimedia artist and composer based between Berlin and Barcelona. She creates deliberately imprecise technological assemblages that enable embodied and collaborative forms of live electronic composition. Her performances—staged with self-built instruments—explore listening, materiality, and collective resonance, and have been presented at venues such as Ars Electronica, La Biennale di Venezia, and the Whitney Museum in New York.
https://www.instagram.com/blasco.merche/
Fauna, Merche Blasco Soeg
Cosmotechniques
Friday, November 29, 2025 - 21:00 - 23:00h
Nave 17
Colectivo Volumen
DJ set & performance
“There is no single technique, but multiple cosmotechniques.” Inspired by the thought of Yuk Hui, Cosmotécnicas proposes an encounter between the many technological existences that coexist through music, performance, and the visual arts.
The proposal by Volumen brings together SYSTEMA (DJ set), Pipo del Hierro (VJ set), the performance TECHNOFACIAL (by Nayarit Fuentes and Paula Mira), and the AV live set by Chryso (TSO + Okaro), seeking to materialize that multiplicity through a constellation of practices in dialogue with Madrid’s most experimental scene. Diverse, fragmentary and plural humanities converge here to challenge the global path imposed by a late capitalism on the verge of collapse.
BIO
The Volumen collective generates a symbiosis between artist and place, embodying the tensions and questions of contemporary art today. Its projects unfold as immersive experi-
ences where installation, music, visual arts, and performance converge in a single gesture. Each event is conceived as a collective intervention in space—a sensory eruption that engages perception, the body, and the commons. Formed by Adrián Canto, Adrián M. Abellán, Álvaro Jarabo, Curtiso, Jimena Vila, Nacho González, Nicolás Escalona, Nuria Ballester, and Violeta Arana, the collective understands art as an open and expanded conversation among the creative agents of society. Their practice advocates for collaboration and the creation of plural networks activated through open calls and shared processes.
https://www.instagram.com/volumen____/
Colectivo Volumen
Chryso -AV live set (TSO + Okaro)
Jueves 27 Noviembre
Thursday, November 27
NAVE 17
18:30 - 21:00 h
Traducción simultánea EN-ES
Simultaneous interpretation ES-EN
Futuros raros (teslaformación)
Bani Brusadin Introducción / Introduction
POCAS: Poca Organización Colaborativa de Auto-servicio
Pablo Somonte Ruano, Laura Budia Piña, Javier Arango Garfias, Lien Tran, Rok Kranjc Presentación de prototipo / Prototype presentation
Costes hundidos: la saga del Felicity Ace
Elisa Cuesta Fernández & Jamie Allen Conferencia performativa / Lecture-performance
Research Unit 1
Business Serio™ Presentación de proyecto / Project presentation
Navigating Militarized Urban Futures
Mark Cinkevich, Carey Yuping Chen, Freddie Sanders, Delfín van Peborgh, Saúl Zamorano Presentación de prototipo / Prototype presentation
Codex Entropia
Un cortometraje de / A short film by Rich Pell (Center for PostNatural History)
Rhythms of the Energetic: Scale, Connection, Disappearance
Solveig Qu Suess Video ensayo en vivo / live video essay
21:00-22:30 h
Nacho de la Vega + Shoeg PHANTOM TOUCH DJ set + Performance
Viernes 28 Noviembre
Friday, November 28
NAVE 17 Aulario
16:00 - 18:00 h
Traducción simultánea EN-ES
Simultaneous interpretation ES-EN
5 PETAFLOPS AGAINST EMPIRE
Martix Navrot
Presentación y juego de especulación colectiva / Presentation & collective speculative game
Unbearable
Lyndsey Walsh
Presentación de proyecto / Project presentation
AUDITORIO CASA DEL LECTOR
18:30 - 21:00 h
Welcome to Jankspace, Babes
Un film de / A film by Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung
Ktown: Futuras epistemologías de la intelogenesis
Colectivo Gaara, Gadea Autric, David Tiemstra, Esben Holk, Valentina Giniger Presentación de prototipo / Prototype presentation
Oracle Index
Nestor Siré & Steffen Köhn
Presentación de proyecto / Project presentation
The Institute of Alice Guo Studies (copy)
Mac Andre Arboleda, Hsiang-Yun Huang, Sergio Pinilla Lopez, Anuphong Sup-adulchai, Ginevra Mazzoni Presentación de prototipo / Prototype presentation
The Sunsetting Project
Ana Petra Moriyón & Clara Escalera Presentación de proyecto / Project presentation
Roberto Alonso Trillo & Marek Poliks Conferencia / Lecture
NAVE 17
21:00 - 23:00 h Exocapitalismo:
Saturday, November 29
NAVE 17 Terrario
16:00 - 18:00
Fermín Zabala & Elena Zaghis Taller / Workshop
Eurocore WARMONY Sábado 29 Noviembre
Danya Orlovsky & Business Serio™ Presentación de proyecto y lluvia de ideas / Project presentation & brainstorming session
NAVE 17 Aulario
16:30 - 18:00 h
Traducción simultánea EN-ES
Simultaneous interpretation ES-EN
868 Wearables: Bodies as Nodes
868 Labs Presentación de proyecto / Project presentation
AUDITORIO CASA DEL LECTOR
18:30 - 21:00 h
El fin de la muerte
Fran Grima & Business Serio™ Presentación de proyecto / Project presentation
Iblīs habita una Línea
NAVE 17
21:00 - 23:00 h
MANDÍBULA
Joel Blanco Charla / Talk
Welcome to Jankspace, Babes
Jenn Leung Presentación de proyectos / Project presentation,
FOR LOVE
Alex MF Quicho Conferencia performativa / Lecture-performance
Medialab by L.E.V
Nacho de la Vega + Merche Blasco FAUNA DJ set + Performance
Noura Tafeche, Nadia Armstrong, Valentina Ruiz D’Eramo, Miguel Ruipérez de la Fuente, Angela Rodríguez Relaño Presentación de prototipo / Prototype presentation
