RFC 40 is a document from the early history of the internet. The 40th in a series that over time created the specifications and protocols that configured the workings of the internet. Its name 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. How does a network stay legible to itself while things are breaking down? A question RFC 40 was working through, and questions that, in a way, remain unsolved and relevant today. Published in March 1970 and inspiring transmediale at its 40th anniversary, RFC 40 was titled more comments on the forthcoming protocol.

Over four decades, transmediale stayed at the crossroads of 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; an ever-evolving practice, shaped by and responding to changing conditions and demands. transmediale RFC 40 will present a festival and an exhibition. Under the title groundstates, the festival’s programme will take place during the last week of January 2027 in silent green Kulturquartier. The exhibition fragile currents will be on show at the Akademie der Künste (Hanseatenweg) until March.

Under the title groundstates, the festival unfolds as a decentralised system, foregrounding a multiplicity of internets and resisting the expectation of a single technological future. It looks at the subterranean currents of imagination that build collective stories, rabbit holes, and speculations of the communities populating semi-shadowed worlds. At its core, the festival presents a discursive and performance programme across four days, bringing embodied reflection to questions that resist analysis and critique alone. groundstates revolves around the human scale of technology to bring forward new forms of collective stewardship. The festival is curated by Barbara Cueto.

At a moment when the infrastructural entanglement of political and technological realities intensifies, what comes into view are the complex networks of dependencies, asymmetries, and unequal technological positions that connect them across the globe. The exhibition presents a series of artworks and installations and is organised around a living centre: an agora-like installation that holds space for a public programme developed with partner institutions operating in contexts shaped by extractivism, technological dependency, and infrastructural fragility, including Greece, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Chile. Working with ruins as a method, fragile currents treats infrastructural breakdown not as a moment of collapse but as a condition from which other forms of organisation can emerge. The exhibition is curated by Antonina Stebur.