The festival programme is built around three keynote conversations on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, which take up this current moment of flux, examining the political dimensions of information technologies, proposing alternative models of governance, and speculating on the darkest potentials of infrastructure.

Every launch has a footprint on Earth. Lisa Parks and Ryan Bishop trace the repercussions of spaceports on the communities, ecologies, and territories that surround them.

What happens when infrastructure is designed as a commons or enclosed in platforms? Primavera De Filippi and Nick Srnicek discuss labour, ownership and democratic agency in post-capitalist futures, caught between decentralised governance and platform monopoly.

A conversation on automation, artificial intelligence and the reconfiguration of agency. Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso Trillo, and Hito Steyerl consider the entanglement between human and machine labour across data, culture, and computation.

These conversations form frames of analysis, to which a discursive programme of panels, lecture performances, and film responds in practice. Each evening ends with a performance. A series of workshops forms a space for embodiment and reflection alongside presentations and installative elements from the Lattice Labs, five experimental working groups that have been meeting since July. Throughout the festival, a newly commissioned installation by Yehwan Song occupies the Betonhalle, reflecting on the energy overconsumption of generative systems.

The programme is organised in three thematic clusters across the different formats.

Infrastructure rehearses counter-infrastructures at the edges of systems we‘ve inherited, exploring distributed systems and power topologies against a backdrop of extraction, addressed in conversations such as those on community-led data centres.

Governance approaches stewardship as a more-than-human, so that “collectively” spans species, systems, and scales, asking, as one panel does, how cooperative structures could make accountability intrinsic to AI systems.

Interface refuses seamless communication and resists optimisation at the level of form, with poetic web-making, experimental publishing, and community-driven handmade interfaces disrupting the grammar of standardised platforms, a thread taken up in a performance that braids memory with internet connectivity, moving beyond dark forest self-enforcing fragmentation.

Building towards the festival, the Lattice Labs introduce a process-based approach to collective learning and knowledge dissemination. The Labs are a series of experimental working groups dedicated to rethinking and testing alternatives to technological monocultures of extraction and surveillance. Running in the months before the festival, they bring artists and researchers together for sustained cycles of critical discussion and collaborative making, functioning as infrastructures for collective inquiry.