In Spring 2025 I developed a year-long program for Medialab Matadero in Madrid. It consists of a festival, a short-term collaborative residency, a long-term research residency, 2 open calls for projects and collaborators, workshops, and exhibition, a screen program and other activities. 

For it I coined the term "teslaforming", inspired by ideas I gathered from technologists, artists, and the observation of the strange feedback loops between the dream of smooth technologies (of control), sick irony, the undermining of 20th century democracy, the pursue of immortality (for billionaires) and space travel. 

The text below is just an introduction.

LAB 4 Weird Futures is an interdisciplinary programme that takes place throughout the year and culminates in November 2025 with a three-day festival: the OpenLAB. During these months, Medialab Matadero invites artists, technologists, experimental designers, critical thinkers, students, experts from various fields and citizens in general to explore the profound instability that contemporary society is going through, obsessed with control over the future and at the same time immersed in extremely uncertain scenarios.  

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. 

LAB 4 Weird 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 that we call teslaforming. A neologism that not only refers to a new production model, like Fordism or Toyotism, nor is it limited to a brand or a type of technical object, but, through an extravagant and monstrous concept, addresses phenomena that are equally disproportionate, confusing and still in the process of creation. 

The main coordinates of teslaforming are both material and symbolic, and unexpectedly unite 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, colonisation of the earth and space, transcending biological limits and technologies of immortality); new forms of irregular and unrecognisable propaganda, inspired by shitposting and cosplay; the mutation of the hacker spirit and the hyperlibertarian redefinition of democratic mechanisms.