Once upon a time there was no such thing as bacteria. It was back in 1676, when Antoni van Leeuwenhoek first peered into his microscope, that he brought them into existence. Only from then on could these little beings become the target of a possible treatment that would save millions of lives. Microscopes did not create bacteria, but it is as if they did. After their invention, we could never conceive the world in the same way ever again. Technology has this power, the power to constantly transform the way we understand the world, reframing in response the means by which we can act back upon it.

Our First LAB#01 Medios Sintientes (Sentient Media), it is like a microscope. It will focus on the ability of sensory, modeling and simulation systems to make the invisible visible, to mediate through information storage, transmission and transformation flows in order to change the way we sense and make sense of the world.

The capacity of any organism to adequately understand its environment is the main premise for proposing an adequate response to it. These perceptual apparatuses are not only descriptive tools capable of changing the logic of human beings’ relationship with their environment, but also constitute operational interfaces from which to actively design back the very things that have been revealed.

COVID has shown us that those societies capable of monitoring and generating adequate transmission and tracking models have been the best at combating the spread of the virus. Even the very concept of climate change – and therefore any kind of response to it – would not exist without the sensing organ we have deployed around the globe to measure with extreme granularity the alterations in weather patterns.

‘Medios Sintientes’ looks with special attention at the set of human sensing infrastructures and how they render our bodies, cities and the entire planet in multiple and diverse ways. But it also looks at the Earth itself as a medium, as a data-capturing device capable of recording an enormous amount of information through its multiple non-anthropogenic sensoriums.

What new readings of the world will these sensory systems deploy in the coming decades? Can these new readings act as frameworks from which to propose better social and/or environmental dynamics? And, if so, how can we use them to enhance our collective agency?

These are some of the questions we will seek to address during the ‘Medios Sintientes’ LAB, a three-month transdisciplinary program where citizens can join a group of artists, critical thinkers and experts to explore together ideas and practices around forensic journalism, sensing infrastructures, predictive modeling, data-driven governance, pattern simulation and future forecasting.

The LAB’s main activity consists of a two-week prototyping laboratory led by renowned artists and thinkers for the development of 8 collective projects related to Sentient Media’s themes. These projects will be selected through an international and public call for proposals. Once selected, the projects will be made public and we will launch a second open call looking for collaborators who want to join us at Medialab at Matadero to help us develop them.

The promoters of the selected projects will have their expenses covered to come to Madrid during the duration of the workshop, regardless of their place of origin.

We have one goal: to bring together innovators from all around the world to create radical innovative projects. Do you have one? Do you want to collaborate? Apply now and join us live in Madrid!

The Collaborative Prototyping Lab (CPL) consists of an intensive two-week workshop mentored by internationally renowned experts/artists to collectively develop projects related to the theme of Sentient Media.

The workshop will take place at Matadero Madrid facilities, in Madrid, between April 21st and May 4th.

The projects will be developed collectively by multidisciplinary teams selected through this open call, whose stay in Madrid during the days of the workshop will be covered by Medialab.

For the selection of the projects and the multidisciplinary teams that will develop them, the Collaborative Prototyping Lab consists of a two-phase selection process.

Phase 1: Call for Proposals (January 28 – February 27)
Until February 27th Medialab at Matadero is open to receive all types of proposals related to the theme of ‘Medios Sintientes’. Proposals may be submitted individually or collectively.

Phase 2: Call for collaborators (March 14 – April 3)
After the selection of the proposals made during phase 1, these proposals will be made public and the registration phase will be opened for those who wish to participate as collaborators in their development.

Phase 3: Collaborative Prototyping Workshop (April 21- May 4)
Promoters, collaborators and experts meet in Madrid for a two-week intensive production workshop to develop the proposals selected in Phase 1.

This Call for Proposals consists of two application modalities:

– as a promoter of a proposal
– as a collaborator of a proposal submitted by another promoter.

If you have an idea or proposal that you would like to develop, we encourage you to apply as a promoter of it. If you do not have a project at the moment but would nevertheless like to be part of the Lab, apply as a collaborator and join a transdisciplinary group of people from all over the world to produce a collaborative project.

The Call for promoters will be open until February 27th.

The Call for collaborators will be open from March 14 until April 3. However, you can sign up for the waiting list and you will be notified the moment the selected projects are published.

You can apply simultaneously as both promoter and collaborator, as well as collaborator of several projects at the same time.

We believe that creativity and social innovation must come from the most varied and diverse corners of society.

The Collaborative Prototyping Labs is aimed at individuals and collectives from Spain and abroad from any level of degree and from diverse disciplines such as design, art, architecture, urbanism, economics, film, photography, journalism, digital media, environmental sciences, philosophy, engineering, social studies, political science, programming, materials science, activism or any other field.

Equal priority will be given to profiles without degrees or institutional affiliation that can demonstrate a high level of creativity, critical thinking and other potential.
There is no age limit for applicants. No curriculum vitae or letters of recommendation are requested.

The workshop will be conducted in English and Spanish.

We are interested in all types of projects – from the most technical to the most speculative – and at any stage of development – from incipient ideas to projects in their final stages of definition and testing – that benefit from the context of collaboration and co-creation offered by Medialab and address in one way or another the broad topic of ‘Medios Sintientes’.

This includes proposals that aim to operationalize non-human sentient systems, or reorient existing remote sensing and/or monitoring technologies towards new and better purposes, but also the invention, construction and deployment of new sensory and visualization tools, driving research in both physical environments – e.g, the design and engineering of sensors, hardware, or new mechanisms for health or ecological monitoring-, as well as in digital environments -simulations, geomaps, interactive models, remote sensing, or automation of processes-, encouraging their application in a multiplicity of fields ranging from the microscopic to the planetary scale.

The ‘Medios Sintientes‘ Collaborative Prototyping Lab addresses the capacity of sensory technologies to make the invisible visible, and how this visibility has substantial information to conceive the world differently on issues such as health, energy or our relationship with the environment. It does so, however, from a broad understanding of what we consider as technology, to include a technodiversity made of the set of human and non-human media alike and the capacity of these media to contribute to an adequate collective agency.

In Medialab we want to offer open research and production frameworks; specific in their themes but broad enough to incorporate diverse perspectives and interests. We build our laboratories from the chorality of a multiplicity of voices and not from a single point of view.

For more information, be sure to read the complete terms and conditions of the call and take a look at the Lab’s Syllabus, where you will find links and reflections on how LAB mentors approach the topic of ‘Medios Sintientes’.

A speculative cinema workshop to experiment with the potential of 3D technologies to build new cinematic languages. Participants will learn how to produce audiovisual experiences in three-dimensional environments produced with generative algorithms, 3D data flow and machine learning. We will explore the future of cinema and its effect on the radical transformation of our relationship with our physical and digital environments.

The advent of new sensory technologies has changed the contemporary experience of audiovisual content to include 3 dimensions. With satellite remote sensing we have moved from viewing the Earth from a flat map to a 3-D globe. LIDAR depth sensors, motion trackers used in film, virtual reality and the video game industry have transformed the cinematic language to include new navigation-based editing techniques: instead of cut-based post-production and editing techniques, we now experience seamless and continuous world-to-world transitions. Within a VR environment, space is constructed as the user navigates through it, providing a recursive interaction where users shape the content they experience as they navigate through it.

The perception of information in a dynamic space embeds data without deconstructing its complexity, thus constituting a new way of seeing: from the visual to the immersive, from the flat to the volumetric. Volumetric techniques redefine what it means to narrate and observe, collapsing both actions into a single figure.

Volumetric cinema turns the cinematic scene into a manipulable object, offering new kinds of non-linear narratives by materializing time spatially. When we treat time as a volumetric object, we are no longer limited to a linear sequence of images, but can navigate the time and space of moving images in previously unimaginable ways.

In this workshop, the Current team will explore with the participants new methods for crafting personas and narratives in digital environments. In particular, emerging trends in omniverse, digital humans, and how this 3D data can be synthesized and automated using neural networks as scalable workflows.

With the goal of using open source tools accessible to anyone and democratizing the production of digital narratives, Current’s workflow takes into consideration the limitations of working exclusively with proprietary software. Participants will learn to use a mixed workflow that combines open source and proprietary algorithms and software, with a 3D data flow that incorporates the use of machine learning (ML) with various computer graphics (CG) modeling interfaces. Current invites participants to incorporate their own points of view, collaborating with various AI algorithms to imagine digital diversity and inclusion, forming a kind of collaborative intelligence.

In this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to work together in the digital space, focusing on collaborative scene composition. Through both technical and theoretical means, this workshop equips participants with knowledge of volumetric cinema techniques and the most up-to-date digital tools – from GPT2, StyleGAN2, PiFUHD, Blender, Houdini, Mixamo, Meshroom, to PlayCanvas and Unreal. The workflow distributes computational needs to the tools that do the job best without establishing a rigid methodology, but rather a way of thinking that allows data to be moved between different interfaces. Participants will have the autonomy to bring 3D data into their own software applications.

Instead of rejecting tools that make our understanding of digital design more complex, how can we adapt them to our workflow? How can we use them to work together on collective projects?

Video game designers, visual artists, gamers, storytellers, architects, filmmakers, students of any branch of design or anyone with the desire and dedication to approach new narrative methodologies using open digital design software. Previous knowledge of 3D modeling, design and navigation software, as well as some familiarity with image and video editing software will be an asset.

Enrolled participants must commit to attend all workshop sessions and to carry out a final collaborative project with other participants.

The workshop will be conducted in English.

Attendance and completion of the course entitles participants to obtain a Certificate of Participation issued by Medialab Matadero.

Cycle of conferences and discussions on unconventional journalistic practices based on open source research, situated curatorship, artificial intelligence and forensic documentalism. The seminar will feature experts from different disciplines who use methodologies based on social sciences, archival work, algorithmic design or computer vision to reveal stories that could not be told in other ways. The goal is to explore the implications that interdisciplinary artistic practices will have for the future of journalism.

Curated by journalist and writer Marta Peirano.

A new journalism is flourishing far from newsrooms, television and traditional media. It incorporates tools from architecture, biology or forensic analysis, geophysical simulation techniques and statistical projection on the databases that surveillance capitalism generates automatically in real time, to portray spaces and places in a complex, systemic and up-to-date way. Around this model, a growing community of professors, scientists, lawyers, hackers, human rights organizations and artists expands and socializes research processes, creating collaborative networks that hybridize multiple disciplines to tell the story of reality. Often with the common goal of responding to the parallel reality of populist governments and exposing the repressive violence of authoritarian states and the opportunistic narrative of multinationals, but also to make visible the slow violence produced by inadequate collective agency or the negligent obsolescence of our ecosystemic governance models.

The concept of “deep time” is used to relate geological times, temporal intervals so vast that they escape human comprehension. This seminar proposes the concept of Deep Journalism to describe a new model of investigative journalism in the era of big data, where the journalist is confronted with masses of information so vast that they escape human comprehension, and require cognitive expansion facilitated by emerging tools of analysis, synthesis and detection.

We want to talk about investigative multiscalarity and polytemporality to wonder about other possible journalistic practices. Practices that combine methodologies so far reserved for the visual arts, archeology or cinema, and that are capable of engaging with issues that transcend what we consider “current affairs” to incorporate and question other agents beyond the human.

The seminar will be held on the weekend of April 12 and 13 over two sessions of 3 hours each. Each session will feature different guests who will make presentations on their unique journalistic practice. The presentations will be followed by a discussion between the artists open to public participation.

Session 1: Counter-surveillance and open source journalism
12.03 (17:00-20:00)

This session will feature Adam Harvey and Christo Buschek, whose practices will offer resources for investigating the massive databases produced by the vast digital surveillance infrastructure that facilitate the identification of people and objects such as illegal incendiary weapons during the Syrian conflict or biometric identification systems that enable verification strategies that often contradict the official narrative. Also the use of satellites that record every second of the earth’s surface, observing geophysical phenomena, as well as the development of infrastructures that reveal illegal projects, such as the network of Chinese concentration camps for the genocide of the Uygur minority.

Session 2: Xenojournalism and Investigative Aesthetics
13.03 (12:00-15:00)

The second session of Deep Journalism will feature Alfredo Puente and Susan Schuppli, whose practices render a world of indivisibility, entanglement and systemic concatenations. We live in a time of technological upheaval, in which computation is changing the way we experience space and time. A world where the microscopic and the macroscopic are necessarily interdependent, and where our human stories are intertwined with temporalities and agencies that challenge current models of journalistic investigation. These ‘metabolisms of information’ demand new processes and tools with which to look, situate and construct stories.

Practical workshops to learn how to use journalistic research tools and techniques based on the use of open source information, satellite images, artificial vision and 3D simulation. We offer two independent but complementary workshops, which will teach how to process open databases, digital verification techniques, algorithmic programming and other artificial intelligence technologies to develop collaborative research projects.

Curated in collaboration with journalist and writer Marta Peirano.

In this intensive two-day workshop, participants will learn how to apply computer vision technologies to the field of research. The course will provide an introduction, a theoretical background, a survey of trends and capabilities, exploration of training datasets, and teach attendees how to develop a computer vision application so they can later apply it to their own research projects.

The workshop will focus on research and code developed for the Exposing.ai and VFRAME.io computer vision projects, but will also cover a wide range of computer vision topics and technologies. Python code samples will be provided in Jupyter notebooks that can be run locally.

Journalists, programmers, artists, independent researchers, computer engineers, architects, or anyone with minimal coding skills (or willing to learn) are good candidates to participate in the workshop.

There are no prerequisites, although some familiarity with writing code is recommended. However, participants can partner with each other for the more technical sections.

Enrolled participants must commit to attend both sessions of the workshop in full.

The workshop will be held at El Espacio de la Nave 17 at Matadero Madrid and will be conducted in English.

Attendance and use of the course entitles the participant to obtain a certificate of participation issued by Medialab.

Over the last few years, data-driven investigation as a field has gained ground. It has become an essential aspect of journalists’ daily work and human rights defenders worldwide. Data-driven investigations are applied for various outcomes, from producing stories covering bias in predictive policing to indicting warlords to the International Criminal Court. Data allows us to develop compelling stories which expose the misuse of power and human rights abuses.

This workshop will dive into different concepts and parts that together make up the field of data-driven investigation. It is meant for journalists who want to start to make data a part of their investigative workflows. We will look at how the Panama Papers handled large troves of documents, find internment camps in Xinjiang using satellite imagery and verify videos from social media.

While data-driven investigations are a vast and diverse field, we hope this workshop will introduce many elements of data-driven investigation. Participants should walk away from it with practical skills and a plan to make data a part of their investigative toolbox.

Researchers, journalists or any citizen from any discipline are welcome to attend the workshop. The program is designed to be absolutely accessible, so no previous knowledge of any kind is required. It is only necessary to bring a computer.

Registered participants must commit to fully attend the three sessions of the workshop.
The workshop will be held at El Espacio de la Nave 17 at Matadero Madrid and will be conducted in English.

Attendance and use of the course entitles the participant to obtain a certificate of participation issued by Medialab.

Experimental film proposal in collaboration with Cineteca Madrid with a program composed of independent titles that confront the viewer with other modes of perception beyond the human. The audiovisual works that are part of this series present our planet as a gigantic sensory apparatus, a vast distributed sensory network formed by the interweaving of human and non-human infrastructures -particle accelerators, ice cores, surveillance cameras, oceans, satellite images, astronomical observatories- capable of constructing other ways of seeing our sensitive reality. Modes that emphasize the interconnection between advanced networks of global sensoriality, where the boundaries between geological, organic and technological systems are so subtle that they are sometimes indiscernible, configuring new forms of planetary consciousness.