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.

In physics, the ground state implies a latent potential. It represents the instant before excitation, when a system at its lowest energy possesses the capacity to activate a network. groundstates uses the lattice as both metaphor and method to build alternative technological futures at the edges of dominant infrastructures. A lattice is a structure that provides the scaffolding upon which complexity builds. Lattices exist across nature and science, from crystal formations to neural networks and cryptographic systems.

This structure mirrors the conditions we inhabit digitally: the networked world seems saturated, yet interstices continue to exist. These gaps are poorly indexed, non-optimised, non-gamified, and often overlooked. Yet these apparently blank spaces sustain the experimental and political imagination of digital culture. Like the ground state, they are not empty. They hold what has not yet been activated.

This edition takes inspiration from these spaces and builds a counter-infrastructure. groundstates gathers communities building in the margins: systems that do not extract, protocols that refuse optimisation, infrastructures sustained without the promise of return. Technology is understood as a lived condition, continuously reshaped through use and misuse, where the conditions of living together are organised and contested. Bringing embodied reflection to questions that resist analysis and critique alone, groundstates keeps the human scale of technology to bring forward new forms of collective stewardship.

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. Against the backdrop of extraction and surveillance, the labs carve out spaces of autonomy; here, technology is something to be collectively handled, tested at its edges, and rethought from the inside out. The goal is to produce prototypes, tools and projects that test and articulate shared languages to organise, resist, and live otherwise.

Fragility is connected to uncertainty, breakdown, unstable ground beneath our feet, and fears produced by technological asymmetries, unequal access, and complex lines of co-dependence and exploitation. Our bodies are under surveillance, caught in a condition of constant exhaustion, while infrastructures become increasingly alienated from us, as if control over what is happening no longer belongs to us: drones sing in kill zones, AI systems slip from the hands of their developers. At the intersection of all this are our tired, burnt-out, vulnerable bodies.

At the centre of fragile currents is the idea of holding tension: between exploitation and resistance, asymmetry and cooperation. Much like an electric current, where a difference in potential generates a flow, fragile currents emerges from differences that are not resolved. Dissensus reveals not only the darker side of infrastructure but also opens possibilities and hope for resistance and solidarity, and for imagining other scenarios for the future.

Marking transmediale’s 40th anniversary, fragile currents asks not what transmediale remembers, but what transmediale can do. From this perspective, the exhibition reactivates transmediale as a counter-infrastructure, a fragile and provisional arrangement through which other social and political relations can be assembled under conditions of exploitation, militarisation, and ecological breakdown.

fragile currents unfolds through three operations. The first brings together artistic works from regions shaped by technological asymmetries, exploitation, and extractive practices. Through fragile bodily experience, their artworks expose how infrastructures redistribute power and dependency across territories and institutions and trace forms of political imagination and counter-practices emerging within these conditions.

The second works with the archive. Looking through damaged VHS tapes, Polaroids, catalogues, recordings, chronicles, abandoned and unrealised versions of the future, the exhibition proposes a tactical approach to the festival’s archives. This archaeological gesture is not out of nostalgia, but political: a revision, gathering and rethinking potential political practices of resistance and solidarity, as well as ideas to reactivate and use inactions today.

The third operation is the performative node Ruined Assembly. At the physical centre of the exhibition, Ruined Assembly unfolds as a public space created through the collective efforts of a group of researchers and institutions working under conditions of technological asymmetry and instability, and at the intersections of extractive practices. Here, as in an electric current, tension is generated between mapping extractive co-dependencies and the counter-tactics or practices. Even under conditions of instability and vulnerability, there remains a possibility to resist, to continue working, to create communities, and to build counter-infrastructures together.

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.