Organizer Information
transmediale is one of Europe's most prominent and historically significant international festival platforms for contemporary media art and digital culture. Based in Berlin, Germany, the non-profit platform has spent decades exploring the critical intersections of art, technology, infrastructure, politics, and social systems. Through its annual festival showcases, symposia, publishing networks, and ongoing research initiatives, transmediale serves as an institutional counter-weight to dominant technological structures, creating vital pockets of cultural autonomy, network critique, and alternative digital imaginaries.
Title & Description
The Transmediale Lattice Labs Open Call (transmediale 2027 edition).
Moving away from traditional production commissions or solo residency formats, this flagship initiative invites applications for a series of experimental working groups designed to actively rethink, handle, and test structural alternatives to technological monocultures of corporate extraction and surveillance. The program establishes infrastructures for slow, collective inquiry in preparation for the winter festival. Instead of demanding isolated individual deliverables, the labs focus on process-driven inquiry, collective experimentation, flat operational hierarchies, and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing from the inside out. The ultimate objective is to co-develop functional prototypes, software counter-tools, or collaborative projects that articulate shared languages of resistance, organization, and alternative ways of living online.
The Four Thematic Lattice Labs:
Applicants must apply directly into one specific lab tier based on material compatibility with their existing methodologies, rather than the overall program broadly:
- The Playful Misuse (of everyday software) Lab: Investigating the tactical subversion, creative hacking, and functional repurposing of everyday commercial software tools as active artistic and political strategies.
- Minor Indexes Lab: Investigating institutional indexing frameworks, the politics of digital metadata, community archive preservation, and alternative counter-cataloging practices.
- Reclaiming the Interface Lab: Dissecting modern digital user interfaces as weaponized ideological infrastructures that restrict human behavior, filter information access, and control social dynamics.
- Solidarity Economies Lab: Prototyping cooperative digital networks, collective community organization blueprints, and alternative economic structures within cultural production to survive extractive market paradigms.
THE THREE-PHASE PROGRAM STRUCTURE
- Phase 1: Collective Inquiry (July – Autumn 2026): A foundational block focused on vocabulary-building, reading seminars, and critical discourse managed via bi-weekly online studio sessions led by the designated Lab steward.
- Phase 2: Collective Production (Autumn 2026 – January 2027): A technical making phase where each five-member cohort collaboratively designs and builds a prototype tool or project, backed by a dedicated institutional production budget.
- Phase 3: Festival Activation (January 26–31, 2027): The final physical aggregation in Berlin, Germany, where each lab presents, tests, and activates their collective projects through public workshops, open labs, discursive panel formats, and festival events.
Categories
- Digital Art / New Media,
- Art History / Research / Archive Studies, Curatorial Practice / Criticism,
- Software Culture / Critical Tech Studies,
- and Interdisciplinary / Social Practice.
Eligibility
- Global Boundary: Open to international and domestic practitioners from all disciplines.
- Career Milestones: Specifically tailored for early-career and emerging visual artists, independent curators, critical technologies researchers, writers, and interdisciplinary thinkers.
- Academic Allowance: Current students and Ph.D. candidates are highly eligible to apply.
- Operational Commitment: Participants must commit to a multi-phase working process spanning from July 2026 through January 2027. This requires absolute attendance at all scheduled bi-weekly online assemblies and mandatory physical travel to Berlin for the live festival activation week.
Program Benefits and Financial Architecture
- Curated Lab Placement: Inclusion within one of four highly specialized working groups, each strictly limited to about five (5) selected participants to maintain deep collaborative rigor.
- Expert Stewardship: Daily access, peer facilitation, and project guidance from an invited, highly experienced artist or technologist acting as the lab steward.
- Dedicated Production Capital: Access to a central, institutional production budget to materialistically realize the group prototype.
- Fully Funded Festival Hospitality: For the mandatory physical iteration in Berlin (January 26–31, 2027), transmediale provides fully covered local accommodation and round-trip travel arrangements. The festival prioritizes eco-conscious train transit wherever logistically viable, and provides official institutional invitation letters to support international visa processing.
- Elite Discursive Platform: Full integration into transmediale 2027's main programming track, introducing your practice to an international network of curators, media theorists, and civic organizations.
Fees
- Application Fee: None (Completely free to submit portfolios across all individual labs).
Application Requirements
Applications must be submitted in English via transmediale’s digital submission form. Proposals centered entirely on finished solo artworks are discouraged; portfolios must foreground a willingness to work horizontally within shared peer frameworks. Submissions require:
- Complete personal contact information, active website fields, and confirmation of preferred discipline.
- Selection of exactly one (1) desired thematic lab track.
- Application Form Data (PDF): Documenting your artistic or research background and detailing your methodological clarity.
- Statement of Intent: Articulating your collaborative readiness, your specific interest in peer-to-peer lateral learning, and how your current technique intersects with the chosen lab's research question.
- Professional Curriculum Vitae (CV) & Portfolio: Showcasing recent process-oriented projects, software code, research papers, curatorial texts, or performance logs.
- Two Letters of Recommendation: Uploaded directly to the interface to support your collaborative stance.
How to Apply?
Download the official "Application Package_ICR2027" asset corresponding to your track, read through the technical criteria outline, populate the interactive form fields, open the digital online form, and upload your compiled texts, letters, and portfolio.
Key Dates
- Application Submission Cutoff: Sunday, June 7, 2026, at 23:59 CEST (Central European Summer Time).
- Online Collaborative Term: July 2026 through January 2027.
- Physical Festival Residency (Berlin): January 26 – January 31, 2027.
Location
Germany, Berlin (Physical activations at the transmediale festival venues) & Online (Bi-weekly virtual working modules).
Additional Details
The evaluation framework places supreme competitive weight on an applicant's methodological transparency, appetite for lateral experimentation, and alignment with the unique structural question of their chosen lab. Because the Lattice Labs function strictly on flat, non-hierarchical peer-to-peer structures, there are no traditional lecturers or passive audiences; all selected members are expected to actively build collective understanding through sustained technical or conceptual exchange.