more comments on the forthcoming protocol

RFC 40 is a document from the early history of the internet. Request for Comments (RFC) is an unofficial note series on the development of ARPANET. It circulated among a small group of researchers, and gathered documents with internet specifications, protocols and events that later configured the workings of our today’s internet. The name RFC was chosen to avoid being deterministic: Request for Comments made no claim to finality. It acknowledged that no single voice had the complete picture, and that any protocol would only stabilise through collective response and revision. These were, by design, open drafts that invited disagreement as a condition of progress. Published in March 1970, and inspiring transmediale at its 40th anniversary, RFC 40 was titled more comments on the forthcoming protocol.

The paper's subject was error: how a network speaks about what fails, and remains open and functional nonetheless. Error here is understood as a communicative event, something the network must be able to name and transmit in order to keep functioning. What vocabulary do connected systems share for failure? How does a network stay legible to itself while things are breaking down? These are the questions RFC 40 was working through, questions that, in a way, remain unsolved and relevant today.

transmediale's first edition took place in 1988, back then still under the name VideoFest, at a moment when media technologies were primarily understood as tools of broadcast: centralised, directional, controlled by institutions. What the festival did from the beginning was to implicitly refuse this understanding of media, creating a space for artists and researchers asking what else media could be and do, in a critical, yet often playful way. Over four decades, transmediale built a network of artists, researchers and practitioners working at the margins of dominant technological culture, sustaining forms of exchange, knowledge production, and collective imagination towards a different kind of technomediated present.

Looking at this becoming, transmediale acts as a counter-infrastructure. Not a fixed entity that critiques infrastructure from a position of comfort, but an ever-evolving practice, shaped by and responding to changing conditions and demands. Inhabiting this space, counter-infrastructure becomes above all a generative one: a practice of construction, keeping open the spaces where people can understand, respond to, and shape the technological conditions they inhabit.