on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
https://transmediale.de/en/programme/lattice-labs
Working towards the next festival edition, we are excited to announce the open calls for the Lattice Labs 💫 The labs are a process-based educational format for emerging artists, researchers, and practitioners looking to develop their practice in dialogue with others. Building towards transmediale 2027, the five working groups are dedicated to rethinking and testing alternatives to the technological monocultures of extraction and surveillance.
** TRANSMEDIALE 2027
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transmediale 2027 invites applications for the Lattice Labs, a series of experimental working groups dedicated to rethinking and testing alternatives to technological monocultures of extraction and surveillance. Building towards the festival, the Lattice Labs introduce a process-based approach to collective learning and knowledge dissemination. Each lab is formed by about five participants and guided by an experienced artist or technologist. The call is open for early career and emerging artists, researchers, curators, students, and practitioners from all disciplines.
Participation in a Lattice Lab requires a commitment to an active working process from July 2026 through to the transmediale 2027 festival edition at the end of January 2027, including the availability to travel to Berlin for the festival. Each lab requires different time and availability commitments, please make sure to check these for each call carefully.
Application deadline is June 7, 2026 (23:59 CEST)
Learn more (https://transmediale.de/en/programme/lattice-labs?mc_cid=cb3f68fb6e&mc_eid=UNIQID)
** Playful Misuse (of everyday software) Lab
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** Led by viola he
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Google Suite, Slack, email, LLM assistants, social media… Everyday software is where we live most of our digital life. These mundane tools, designed for administrative tasks and productivity, carry a capacity for creative misuse. This lab is an invitation to build a more direct and playful relationship to software, by reappropriating existing tools as instruments for collective performance and play. Participants explore how intentional playful engagement can rebuild a sense of agency, and how we can learn to love the computer (and through that, trust each other) again.
viola he is a Shanghai / NYC-based multimedia artist, educator, electronic musician, and creative technologist. They create audio-visual performances, installations, XR theatre, and experimental games.
The lab takes place fully remote, with presence in Berlin during the festival (January 26 – February 1, 2027).
âž” Read the full open call (https://transmediale.de/en/news/playful-misuse-of-everyday-software-lab?mc_cid=cb3f68fb6e&mc_eid=UNIQID)
** Obscure Detritus Lab
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** Led by Alex Declino
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Obscure Detritus acts as revenge for the dead tech that refuses to die, the ghosts in the machines that refuse to be exorcised, matter self-organising in silence before snapping free from its containers and screeching out across the streets. Inspired by the tradition of Commedia Dell’Arte, this lab will build a cohort of AI characters defined by personality and obsession rather than competence and utility and set them loose in a world simulation to observe what narratives, conflicts, and unexpected behaviours emerge.
Alex Declino is a game designer exploring authority and control in digital and online systems. His narratives and simulations are fueled by themes of tech-driven espionage, CEO meltdowns, the innovative exploitations of late-stage capitalism, and the almost Sisyphean tragicomedies of crypto.
The lab will take place mostly online, with the possibility of meeting in person at Sybil in Berlin from September. During all-hands production it would be best for participants to be in Berlin.
âž” Read the full open call (https://transmediale.de/en/news/obscure-detritus-lab?mc_cid=cb3f68fb6e&mc_eid=UNIQID)
** Minor Indexes Lab
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** Led by selfservice.studio
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A frontend inversion is taking place: websites become backends for AI, chat interfaces and terminals the new frontend. Content increasingly manifests as datasets, mediated by APIs, and practitioners and communities surface through cycles of ingestion, embedding, retrieval, and generation, compressed into patterns a model can resolve. The lab’s substrate is a Minor Index — a situated dataset built to confront the conditions of control: activated, composable, accessible, additive within a local hold. Working from this base, the lab develops strategies for autonomy, confrontation, and resilience under conditions of consolidation, capture, and surveillance.
selfservice.studio is an open platform exploring infrastructure anxiety through ongoing research, prototypes, and deployments – examining how communities can build, own, and maintain their own technological infrastructures. selfservice.studio was initiated in 2025 by Christopher Dake-Outhet and Leïth Benkhedda at Trust in Berlin.
This Lab takes place in Berlin, and presence in the city is required throughout the whole time. Participation for Berlin based artists and researchers only.
âž” Read the full open call (https://transmediale.de/en/news/minor-indexes-lab?mc_cid=cb3f68fb6e&mc_eid=UNIQID)
** Reclaiming the Interface Lab
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** Led by Olia Lialina
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The Reclaiming the Interface Lab proposes an intervention into the ongoing dissolution of the interface. With the rise of AI-driven interaction, interfaces are increasingly rendered invisible, displaced by conversational systems that obscure their own structure while shaping user behaviour. The rise of the “agentic web” undermines the idea that the WWW can belong to the people who make it. Through historical inquiry and speculative making, the lab revisits the interface as a staged performance inviting the development of prototypes, gestures, and fictions that reclaim it as a space of imagination, negotiation, and agency.
Olia Lialina is an early-days, network-based art pioneer. Her early work had a great impact on recognizing the Internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. Since 1999 she is a professor for art and design online at Merz Akademie.
The lab takes place fully remote, with presence in Berlin during the festival (January 26 – February 1, 2027).
âž” Read the full open call (https://transmediale.de/en/news/reclaiming-the-interface-lab?mc_cid=cb3f68fb6e&mc_eid=UNIQID)
** Solidarity Economies Lab
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** Led by Sepp Eckenhaussen and Geert Lovink
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The Solidarity Economies Lab aims to develop its own collaborative economic model tailored to the specific needs of its cohort: a group of practicing art workers. Participants will review existing models of value creation and redistribution and think of platform cooperatives, rotating funds, cultural publishing ventures, NFTs, DAOs, community currencies, basic income experiments, fair payment guidelines, and trade and social unions. Participants will select one model to develop further together, based on shared interests and urgencies.
Sepp Eckenhaussen is an artwriter, researcher, and organiser based in Amsterdam. He works at the Institute of Network Cultures and Caradt. Geert Lovink is a media theorist and the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures.
The meetings will take place online. However, this Lab requires participation in the Design Sprint in Berlin (first weekend of October) and the festival (January 26 – February 1, 2027).
âž” Read the full open call (https://transmediale.de/en/news/solidarity-economies-lab?mc_cid=cb3f68fb6e&mc_eid=UNIQID)
Die Open Calls sind ausschließlich auf Englisch veröffentlicht. Die Teilnahme an einer Lab erfordert Englischkenntnisse.
Check our website news feed for regular updates (https://transmediale.de/en/feed?mc_cid=cb3f68fb6e&mc_eid=UNIQID)
Follow us in Telegram (https://t.me/transmediale?mc_cid=cb3f68fb6e&mc_eid=UNIQID)
Images: Open Calls design by Bárbara Acevedo Strange; Lab images courtesy of the Lab leads; Silvio Lorusso, Shouldn’t You Be Working, 2016.
Die Kulturstiftung des Bundes fördert die transmediale bereits seit 2004
als kulturelle Spitzeneinrichtung.
transmediale is funded as a cultural institution of excellence by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) since 2004.