AMRO26 – Call for Participation

Art Meets Radical Openness
Call for Participation

AMRO26
Becoming Unreadable

13th–16th May 2026, Linz (AT)
afo – architekturforum oberösterreich, Stadtwerkstatt, Kunstuniversität Linz, MAERZ, bb15 – Space for Contemporary Art, DH5, /dev/lol/ and more …

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 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)

Proposal review & condition of participation

The proposal for participation will be reviewed by a group of long-time AMRO community members who will assess the thematic affinity of the proposal with the AMRO26 themes and our festival guidelines (see below).

AMRO is a community festival and therefore your active participation is valued throughout the whole event. If your work is selected for the festival, we expect you to be in Linz for the entire event and to be open to present your work in more than one format. (e.g.: project showcase in combination with lecture or workshop.).

We support participants with travel reimbursement within Europe, accommodation, food and a fee based on the type and length of the contribution. Let us know in the form what you need for your participation (eg: eventual allergies, sign language interpretation, wheelchair accessibility etc).

Even if your work is not selected for AMRO26, we might still contact you for future events or projects. Your data will not be shared with third parties.

AMRO26 Policies

A proposal by humans for humans

Please apply with a project developed by yourself, of which you stand behind, and that you see contributing to the festival topic and its context. AMRO is a community festival and as a compact event aims to deepen specific topics in a collegial atmosphere. It offers occasions to get to know and interact with other likeminded and similarly operating people.

The CfP review is done by humans, and namely a small group of AMRO community people. As we hear of open access journals closing submissions because of the huge amount of AI papers, we think the same: We are simply not able to process huge numbers of applications.

If you see your work as contributing to the topics we deal with at AMRO, you are most welcome to submit your proposal. We’ll take as much care as we can in reviewing your proposal.

Specifically on AI

We are very interested in network technologies and novel forms of computation. Yet as people we don’t like to receive AI-generated applications. This is mostly a shortcut to quickly generate a nicely sounding yet content-wise empty project proposal that takes too much valuable time to evaluate.

Rather than reviewing AI-generated or hallucinated submissions, we aim to address questions of AI critically within the festival programme itself. We therefore welcome drafts, imperfect language, and experimental sketches, and prefer these over polished texts whose authorship is unclear.

AMRO as an occasion to liberate your tech

AMRO is shaped by the spirit of the Free Software movement and we believe that, especially nowadays, following such principles is a fundamental part of any critical and progressive approach to art and culture.

We are looking for contributions that are primarily grounded on Free/Libre Open Source Software, self-developed, independent/alternative software, community-based technologies, or whatever you call them: in short - nonproprietary/nonMAGMA*. Your project proposal should emphasize these principles, either technically or conceptually/philosophically, in your work.

We are aware of the specificity and limits of such terms and we don’t take for granted that everyone has the same opportunities or resources to get exposed to those principles. If your work is not yet FLOSS, you can use AMRO26 as an opportunity to rebuild / restructure / reorient it. If your proposal is selected, we'll be happy to help you (in a reasonable way) to take steps in that direction.

*MAGMA stands for Meta, Amazon, Google Microsoft, Apple, but also other big tech companies would fall under the same category.

Sharing Documents & Files

As an extension of the previous point: AMRO and servus.at support open standards and put a lot of energy into maintaining tools to avoid using extractive 3rd party services as much as possible (Google, DropBox, wetransfer, etc.).

→ #adv: https://book.servus.at/en/toolbox/

If you want to share something with us, it should be accessible through open document stardards (odt, ods, pdf, txt, md).

For additional materials, please use the next cloud drop link that will be made available for that.

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

Here the form link https://umfrage.servus.at/index.php/725165?lang=en 
Downloadable files with survey questions are available here: https://publications.servus.at/2026-AMRO26/cfp/

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)

Questions?