Call for Participation
Art Meets Radical Openness 2026
Becoming unreadable

Festival dates:
13th–16th May 2026, Linz (AT)
 

Call DEADLINE: Fr. 16th January 2026, 16:26 CET

servus.at is calling for contributions to the upcoming edition of AMRO26 “Becoming unreadable”.

Art Meets Radical Openness (AMRO) is a biennial community festival for art, hacktivism and open cultures. The festival offers a context for discussing the challenges of digital cultures, software and network infrastructures, art and everyday life, education, politics and activism. The event examines contemporary techno-social politics and digital networked cultures through critical media art practices, self-developed digital tools, and participatory formats. The program gives spaces to workshops, performances, artworks, talks, lectures; other open and experimental formats can also be included.

AMRO has been organized since 2008 by servus.at in cooperation with the Linz University of Art, Department of Time-Based Media. The four-day event includes: a discursive program with keynotes, panels and lectures, workshops and showcases, exhibitions and a nightline.
Archive of past editions can be found here: https://radical-openness.org/en/archive

Working Title: Becoming unreadable

For the current edition, titled “Becoming unreadable,” we explore ways of resisting the toxic dimensions of contemporary hypervisibility. By this, we refer to the current logic of platform-mediated social and political discourse, to the global-scale extraction and appropriation infrastructures feeding the AI and strengthening new and old colonial threads. We also refer to the current discourse in the F/LOSS communities that calls for a new understanding of collaboration and digital commons.

The upcoming issue of AMRO questions and criticises the digital conditions under which we live and work. It challenges the notion that a constant online omnipresence is normal and desirable, and traces these uncritical assumptions down to the sphere of Open Source software. This interconnectedness forms the basis of mainstream digital cultures and serves as a tool for ubiquitous surveillance and the exploitative appropriation of works and data by big tech, which demands critical opposition.

AMRO26 aims at challenging the common understanding of AI, networks and computers, and through its programme, explores approaches that offer real change: low-tech, feminist and community IT, computing within limits, up to even more radical ideas around de-computing, de-networking, de-scaling and de-platforming ourselves. 'Becoming Unreadable' involves evading surveillance by oligarchic tech corporations, operate under the radar, and refuse to comply to the total AI cloud. Non-commercial community infrastructures are fundamental tools in this process, but even more importantly we need to develop new ways of understanding each others and being together as humans. Art Meets Radical Openness wants to be a space dedicated to that.

Call for participation

We are looking for contributions for AMRO26!

Proposed projects should explore, address, react to current topics within critical media arts and community-oriented, artistic run infrastructural cultures. They should provide experimental, critical approaches of the uses of technology. They can be media art pieces, tech-prototypes, but also modalities and scenarios in which such technologies are implemented and used, or analyze issues within the current tech and media landscapes.

We welcome finished and unfinished works, participatory investigation formats, but also projects still in development that can be presented for feedback and new contributions.

Formats:

• Lectures or Panel proposals (20 to 40 minutes)

• Workshops (1-3 hours, max ca 15 participants)

• Artwork presentations & project showcases (demos)

• Video works & short movies

• Performances (ca 30 min)

   

DEADLINE:
Fr 16th January 2026, 16:26 CET

Timeline:

• Phase 1: Proposal Review and selection by mid February.

• Phase 2: Contact of selected projects, collection of production details for program finalization. (End of March)

• Beginning of April: Program is published.

• Festival dates: 13th–16th May (setup from 9th–May)