Late January 2026, StreamArtNetwork (SAN) took part in the Transmediale festival in Berlin with an ‘Archipelago:’ a distributed chain of small studio-nodes hybrid-streaming together over several days of the festival. SAN’s program was expansive, moving across a wide range of theory, practice, performance and organizing; from experimental audiovisual and music sets to sessions mapping tools and infrastructures for activism; from the post-fossil internet to cyberfeminist genealogies and the weaponisation of livestreaming; from geopolitics and solidarity media to media theory of the stream; alongside SAN’s own reflexive conversations about its evolving identity (“What is SAN?”, “Does SAN have politics?”). The Archipelago unfolded through overlapping strands and intermingling currents, including network self-definition and governance; streaming theory and media philosophy; solidarities, war and translocal organising; ‘dark’ or antagonistic livestreaming and its weaponisation; feminist genealogies and hands-on practice; tools and infrastructures for activism (i.e. https://rdcl.tools/); post-fossil and non-extractive infrastructures; and performance and transmission experiments that turned streaming toward the atmospheric.
This year, Berlin did what Berlin used to do: it was properly cold. Snow fell and ice formed on the ground, and the city became physically treacherous, with slips and falls, a constant low-level negotiation with the streets. In one sense, that sat in contrast with the intertropical curatorial framing of the festival, By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road. Yet in another sense, the weather was also a fitting allegory for transmediale’s current slippery status, which now shifts year-by-year through a guest-curator model and an increasingly reconfigurable program. Developed by Neema Githere and Juan Pablo García Sossa, the 39th edition theme proposed ‘curatorial coordinates’ of compassing, metaphoring and protocoling across south-south relations, presenting transmediale as a living, recursive carrier-net, stretched across de-Westernised rhythms and systems, often in ways that resonated strongly with SAN’s ethos. The framing, moreover, helped to widen the festival’s traditional reference points, bringing concepts like the pluriverse and cosmotechnics to the fore, while making space for practices and lineages that have not always been centrally elevated.
SAN’s first involvement with transmediale came with the Green Deal Studio in 2025, a pop-up streaming and hang-out zone at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) that functioned as a stage, social space and gateway to distributed, intermedial transmissions. In 2026, with the festival epicentre shifting to the silent green Kulturquartier (and CANK), the atmosphere felt more hidden-away, you could follow the signal if you were in-the-know, or else drift in by chance. On-site, the Archipelago became a makeshift base of operations for the expanded StreamArt network, bringing together four nodes IRL – UKRAiNATV (Kyiv/Kraków), CDI-TV (Warwick), Konfluxus (Budapest), 3022 (Vilnius) – with Watermelon Studios connecting remotely from Munich. This setup built on its hybrid Green Deal precursor, remaining practical enough to support serious discussion, but also configured for experimental live mixing. One effect of operating as a ‘festival-inside-the-festival’ was that people arrived in different ways, some stayed for long conversations; others wandered in and out, catching ten minutes or so, then moving on, only to return back later. This was an expectation of the long-form festival-style marathon. Hybrid streaming doesn’t demand total attention, anyway; it can be ambient. An experimental infrastructural gesture reinforced this. Alongside the networked streams, SAN introduced a local analogue ‘broadcast’ layer, using second-hand TVs picked up in Berlin and scattered around silent green. The point was to make the stream present as a material array, a media ecology in the room, reframing streaming as situated, hybrid and post-digital. Those TVs underscored a broader ambition: to ask something different from ourselves as publics, not influencer-style audiencing, but greater infrastructural participation.
Another connective bridge between the Archipelago and the wider festival was a set of artist interviews that translated transmediale’s broader program into specific featured practices and works. In conversation with Nat Skoczylas and Huang Po-Chih, we discussed their collaborative installation Paper Mulberry Commons & Slurplus Salas, presented in the installations program: a shared, living work that uses the paper mulberry as a material and historical hinge for thinking about commons, surplus and alternative economic arrangements. We also spoke with Shaheer Tarar about his lecture-performance The Compression Zone, which takes compression algorithms seriously as a cultural force, tracing how today’s platform infrastructures process and govern the distribution of the sensible (Rancière). Both conversations, in different registers, helped ground the festival’s carrier-net imaginaries organically, technically and socially.
Throughout the more self-reflexive discussions, one undercurrent of the Archipelago was the question “Does SAN have politics?” How this is understood matters when streaming is so easily deployed for propaganda, culture-war spectacle and clickbait. One segment took up far-right ‘auditing’ streams in the UK as a form of weaponised visibility, producing ‘negative solidarity’ through the filming of deprivation and vulnerability, and posing the uncomfortable, but necessary question of how livestream innovations travel across the political spectrum. We returned to what many network participants recognised as common ground and shared commitments: streaming against war, neo-imperialism, genocide and uneven mobility regimes; streaming against the monopolisation of attention by big-tech platforms and the influencer economy; streaming in favor of hybrid, translocal, decentralised, non-extractive encounters and new solidarities. SAN stands for the radical spread of low-budget, high-intensity green-screen studios and collaborative media labs as reversible infrastructures for equal, multi-directional communication across political, geographical and technological boundaries. One ultimate horizon is clear: reclaim the internet, reclaim our cultural archives and critical digital culture.
The Archipelago, then, could be considered as an experiment in organisational form, learning from recent transformations of occupations: a streaming commons that contains assembly-like characteristics for deliberation and coordination as opposed to the weak-tie capture and swarm dynamics of big tech platforms. It is a fragile commons, always situated, contingent on those who can safely stream and who have access to the necessary resources, including time. Within this mix, SAN attempts to forge novel connections across layered time-space, resonant with the pink-and-green symbolism of UKRAiNATV, the diversity and potential of new solidarities: hybrid togetherness. Yet at the same time, the Archipelago remains situated within European cultural infrastructures, camera pipelines and bandwidth corridors that carry their own geopolitical, racial and historical entanglements. Streaming as we practice it here is already shaped by such material pasts in imaging systems and by uneven access to visibility, safety and mobility. Part of SAN’s ongoing work is to recognise these limits and to work at their edges, where instabilities open up new reflexivities and recursions.
A transmediale session that developed some of these themes was a conversation with Berlin-based Ukrainian artists Dmytro Fedorenko (I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free), Dmyrto Filatov (BURRE) and Serafyma Brig (ACUD), run from Watermelon Studios, which picked up from SAN’s beginnings in anti-war transmissions to explore recent translocal, cultural organising in the city: building lateral conversations across communities, scenes and situated locations, insisting on the power of co-creation rather than only oppositional address. Their activities range from fundraising and protest to cultural events like Aggressive Language, an audio-visual/clubnight ‘crossfade’ dedicated to resisting imperial aggression while searching for shared messages across Ukrainian, Palestinian and Syrian communities. Fedorenko, Filatov and Brig each spoke of the exhausting labour of frequently encountering and combating pervasive propaganda, having to constantly educate people (whether one wants to or not), and the shared frustration that voices of reason, truth and peace are often missing from prevalent social media discourses – not only regarding Ukraine, but other war zones and authoritarian contexts, where manipulation now rapidly travels far and wide.
They returned again and again, however, to the practical effects of organising, communicating and sharing lived experiences. Conversations between Syrian, Palestinian and Ukrainian artists and activists, in this respect, can offer understandings of life in controlled zones of everyday survival, and a direct witnessing of the politics of security, surveillance, arrest, torture, imprisonment, disappearance and death. Such first-hand accounts make the stakes harder to evade, but are also suggestive of the potential for new patterns of connection to be woven across distinct histories of oppression. The discussion also turned to the specific pressures and censorship experienced in Berlin’s recent cultural climate, which has become a frontline in the wider conflict over Gaza. Since 2023, the art scene has been marked by repeated controversies over event cancellations, imposed funding conditions and policing under claims to be combating antisemitism, which have in turn been contested by artists and cultural workers as producing a chilling effect on speech, especially for Palestinian artists, Arab and Muslim communities, and those expressing solidarity with Gaza. transmediale has notably found itself at the centre of these conflicts, such that SAN enters into this domain with a practical insistence of keeping the translocal lines open when conditions otherwise become risk-averse or procedurally constrained. These concerns also extended beyond Berlin. Further hybrid sessions led by 3022 took up discussions of struggles against authoritarianism in other local contexts across Baltic countries, including stories from the Pavilion of Free Speech mass protest movements in Vilnius to the organising activity of the Anarchist Book Fair in Latvia. In doing so, they continued SAN’s centrifugal force: bringing situated reportage and live exchange into the Archipelago without collapsing differences into a single consensus language, and with an effort to minimise second-hand representation by letting those closest to events speak for themselves.
A related session focused on a direct action organising through a conversation with Susan Abdallah and Cameron Tribe from Global Sumud Flotilla interviewed by Alex Murray-Leslie (Chicks on Speed). Abdallah – a Palestinian-Norwegian teacher, translator and local-politician active with Norwegian People’s Aid in Sunnhordland – discussed ‘waves of solidarity’ that drive such actions as the goal of generational displacement and the repetitive burden of explanation placed on Palestinians. Tribe spoke as a flotilla participant about the gap between experiential realities and what makes it back through dominant media, describing the action as collectively confronting and documenting the enforcement of the illegal blockade and the risks attached in the successful action of October 2025, which involved 42 vessels and 450+ participants. Both also highlighted the volatility and fragility of witnessing on commercial platforms like TikTok, where presence can be removed and erased without warning, a political shift that Geert Lovink has recently covered in Platform Brutality. Both pointed to emergent social media destinations such as UpScrolled, which has recently grown through Palestine-related activism and sharing.
Finally, a new thread of nonhuman philosophical themes for SAN was introduced by Gytis Dovydaitis from 3022 in a lecture performance on weird objects and strange things, which drew on object-oriented ontology (OOO) to explore sublime aesthetics from neutron stars to identity, microbial gut flora and memes. Emerging environmental themes also appeared in the CDI-TV conversation between Kristoffer Gansing and Amelie Buchinger, which covered the Non-Extractive Art School (NEAS) as an ongoing extra-disciplinary inquiry at the intersection of artistic research, education and technology. NEAS likewise follows a radically nonhuman approach, but applies it to practical issues of the dependencies of art and design schooling on extractive infrastructures, from hosting, procurement and archiving to the organisation of labour and maintenance. Through Buchinger’s research, the conversation further considered the radical imaginaries opened up by transdisciplinary projects like Solar Protocol, Low-Tech Magazine’s solar powered website and various artworks by Joana Moll. Both Dovydaitis’ lecture and the NEAS session connect in turn to SAN’s increasing exploration of fediverse systems like PeerTube and permacomputing principles against the hyperscale backdrop of the climate crisis.
Across the three days, the Archipelago also functioned as an expanded performance space. StreamArt regularly shifts gears and changing shape from discussion to a club-like space, jam session or something else entirely. At a certain point: enough talk. Networked sound experiments and late-night improvised sets act as social infrastructure: they keep the vibe going, cascading and inhabited, and at times intentionally or not, render the technical substrate of streaming (timing, participation, latency, switching) sensible through crashes and glitches. The workshop ‘Knitting: Cyberfeminist Genealogies’ by Konfluxus also offered a different tempo and method: a hands-on, relational practice that treated ‘genealogies’ as something always in progress, recreated together through craft, care, repetition and shared technique as much as statements and positioning. Such action cannot be separated from politics or theory; it becomes part of how a temporary, hybrid commons is woven together and creates unique, expanded space-times. That concern also extends to publishing, as CDI-TV launched their book, Hybrid Encounters, containing transcriptions of livestreams in an experiment that turns up further critical work needed on the extractive infrastructures of automated speech recognition (ASR) now embedded in so many platform systems. Taken together, these currents from transmediale Archipelago suggest that SAN remains an unfinished project and evolving method: building reversible infrastructures for translocal presence, while speaking directly to, and working against, the antagonisms, asymmetries and platform violence that undermine, even block, what solidarity as togetherness can mean now; including the uneven work of holding these streams, translations and archives together. The future, for SAN, lies along the edges of keyed chroma green: organisation and aesthetics outside the rectangle cage, where frames loop, interlace, collide and refuse a confined POV.
The SAN Archipelago archive is available here: https://ukrainatv.streamart.studio/
Yours,
StreamArtNetwork