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ASchool is an informal network of cultural workers generating critical pedagogies through collaborative teaching, learning, and collective knowledge creation. We examine the technical, institutional, cultural, and political conditions of how we talk about, teach, and understand media and technology today. For transmediale 26: By the Mango Belt and Tamarind Road, ASchool has been invited to become one of the festival's “Guerrilla Theory Incubators”—a temporary, participatory theory/praxis group that formed collaborative reading, watching, listening and theorising nodes prior to the festival. Leading up to the festival, and in the spirit of early public internet cafés, we invite you to a walk-in retreat for digesting content, cake, and cables. We have collectively assembled materials that express our common curiosity in the crossings of emancipatory feminist, trans(hack)feminist, and cyberfeminist approaches to learning, talking about, and intervening in media and technology today. The space we offer anchors in reading circles, game stations, gossiping and chatting at a counter, serving network cakes, seating for typing and emailing, and a DIY word-and-cable-weaving action similar to 90s Scooby Doo string figure chains. We'll share periodic readings from texts we've engaged with, creating moments of action and reflection. Theory/praxis is not abstract, it is played with, prompted, recited, and made accessible through pedagogical experimentation. As a group who temporally came together for learning, we understand our position as one of caring and humble Parallelities: as parallel to the many lineages of emancipatory feminisms, as in parallel to each other, and as in parallel to this year’s festival edition time-space stretch, where centers dissolve into lateral structures. This position indicates a loose-to-close-knit proximity of threads, with the given possibility that these corresponding lines meet in infinity. Each pathway, crossing and distant echo we explore produces traces—citational maps, protocols, rituals,—that we understand as documentation-as-praxis. This isn’t a workshop with predetermined outcomes—it’s a working group atmosphere, partly choreographed (patterned), partly fuzzy, and partly open-ended. We propose a gathering area where different modes of attention and reflection coexist: some eat cake, others play a game alone or in communion; some read aloud, others weave words in silence, some leave traces, others lurk around. The session embodies transversality—movement across and through—as both framework and practice. Drop in anytime and choose your path: gaming, reading, making, talking, eating, or simply being present. Bring unused cables or use ours to forge material connections and digest the stories these technologies hold. Bring your own laptop for game play or use one of our two game stations. Share your favorite texts on the topic, or find inspiration in the quotes offered. ASchool was initiated in 2024 by network partners transmediale, Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, TU Dresden, Het Nieuwe Instituut, and the University of Limerick. In addition to these informal institutional links, the network comprises independent artists, researchers, and curators. The 2026 edition of ASchool is conceived by the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, University of Applied Arts Vienna, in dialogue with curators Juan Pablo García Sossa and Neema Githere, and transmediale’s Anna-Lena Panter and Lucas Matray.
