ferestecs is an experimental creative technology initiative that brings together artists, technologists, researchers, and curious participants to collectively explore alternative relationships between technology, ecology, and shared learning. Conceived as a temporary outdoor laboratory, the project takes place in natural environments where small groups gather to investigate landscapes through hands-on experimentation, collective inquiry, and open-ended prototyping. Rather than positioning technology as a tool for efficiency or production, ferestecs treats it as a medium for observation, imagination, and dialogue with the more-than-human world.
At the heart of the project is a process-driven philosophy that values exploration over outcomes and curiosity over expertise. Participants collaborate to design and build simple, often handmade devices—such as environmental sensors, camera traps, or speculative instruments—that reveal phenomena normally hidden from human perception, including animal activity, environmental patterns, or subtle ecological signals. These devices are not understood as finished products but as catalysts for reflection and discovery, and there is no expectation that projects must be completed. The emphasis instead lies in the shared experience of making, testing, and thinking together.
ferestecs operates as a flexible framework rather than a single event, allowing each edition to adapt its location, mentors, and focus while maintaining a consistent ethos. The gatherings typically combine collective living, outdoor workspaces, shared meals, exploratory walks, and informal discussions, creating a temporary community shaped as much by social interaction as by technical experimentation. Learning emerges through doing and through exchange among participants, regardless of their background or level of expertise, fostering an atmosphere where knowledge circulates horizontally rather than being delivered from the top down.
The initiative is organized by the Generative Art Museum together with Creative Coding Barcelona, organizations dedicated to expanding the cultural and artistic possibilities of technology and supporting interdisciplinary collaboration. Through this framework, ferestecs positions itself at the intersection of environmental art, creative coding, experimental pedagogy, and open hardware culture, proposing alternative technological imaginaries grounded in slowness, tactility, and situated experience.
Ultimately, ferestecs is less a workshop or residency than a living platform for collective exploration. Its outcomes are not defined by polished results but by shared insights, prototypes, conversations, and relationships that continue beyond each gathering. By situating technological experimentation within natural contexts and collaborative structures, the project invites participants to reconsider how tools, environments, and communities can co-evolve, and how creative practice can become a means of sensing and reimagining the world together.
