LAB#01: Medios Sintientes

Medialab Matadero presents LAB#01 “Medios Sintientes” (Sentient Media), the first of a series of interdisciplinary research and collaborative production laboratories designed to materialise and activate collective intelligences. As a cultural platform for contemporary creation and innovation, Medialab Matadero’s goal is to create a suitable context that will allow shared intelligence to emerge. We have given the name LAB(s) to these ‘contexts’ in which people, issues, experiences and learning intertwine to forge new findings. Each one is made up of workshops, critical seminars, artistic projects and collaborative prototyping laboratories based on an open and international call for the production of open projects. The work developed during the course of each LAB(s) will be presented at a major public event and, at the end of each laboratory, working groups will be set up to provide continuity to the most important projects.

What new readings of the world will these sensorial systems deploy over the course of the coming decades? Can these new readings act as frameworks from which to contemplate better social or environmental dynamics? How can we use them to improve our governance structures? These are just some of the questions that Medialab Matadero will be asking during LAB#01, a programme in which citizens from different fields of endeavour will join forces with a group of artists, critical thinkers and experts to explore media technologies together, as well as sensorial infrastructures, predictive modelling, data-driven governance, pattern simulation and predicting the future.

The activities that make up the programme of LAB#01 “Medios Sintientes” will take place until May in different venues within Matadero Madrid, following an international public call for proposals for the development of 8 collective projects. All the expenses incurred by the promotors of the selected projects will be covered so that they can come to Madrid for two weeks to develop their offerings alongside other international artists and experts.

LAB#01 “Medios Sintientes” explores to what extent sensorial technologies are able to render visible the invisible, and how this visibility contains substantial information with which to conceive the world in a different way in such issues as health, energy or our relationship with the environment.

The programme will feature the participation of emerging and established members of the international cultural scene whose practice explores the link between the sentient media and the processes of global transformation that we are currently facing. Those taking part shall include the artist Abelardo Gil-Fournier, whose work explores the two-way journey between the transformations of the planet’s surfaces and the media and infrastructures employed in those changes; Nerea Calvillo, an architect and researcher working at the intersection between spatial design, feminist technoscience and environmental studies; the artistic research duo Quadrature, whose work taps the most advanced scientific theories to explore the cognitive limits of the human mind and its relationship with the cosmos; Marta Peirano, a journalist and author of The Enemy Knows the System, who will be exploring how tools used in art and design can also be used to pursue a new kind of investigative journalism; Bellingcat, an international collective of researchers and citizen journalists who use open-source information and the social networks to investigate everything from Mexican drug cartels to tracking chemical weapons in conflict zones; Adam Harvey, an artist and researcher whose work focuses on privacy, surveillance and computer vision and pays special attention to the misappropriation of biometric surveillance technology; the Current collective, which produces volumetric film pieces that explore the relationships between virtual and physical spaces; the artist Luiza Crosman, who explores the feedback between forms of human organisation, new technologies and global systems to propose new mechanisms of governance; or the artist Gary Zhexy Zhang, who is researching the ‘catastrophe industry’, a multi-million euro market offering insurance policies against hurricanes, earthquakes and droughts, whose cost is calculated through climate simulations and financial models.