Low Tide at transmediale 2026 tunes into living infrastructures and Tropical-powered movement.

Across three days, Petja Ivanova creates a one-on-one lecture-performance in a nail-salon-like environment, offering a way of indexing knowledge through the body.

Sculptural nails, embedded with an NFC tag, become carriers of dream fragments, bodily recordings, and geo-somatic notes. The exchange frames intimacy as a form of infrastructure and the heart as a compassing organ across ecological and ancestral terrains.

Check the opening hours of the Paprika Nails salon and get a nail done!

In sourdough architecture, a durational drop-in installation by Catherine Anabella Lie , a living starter functions as both material and clock, structuring daily rhythms through cultivated waiting. Fermentation as a way of sensing and synchronising with time/space. Visitors are welcome to observe these processes as they unfold, linger, rest, and return later to notice how materials, smells, textures, and spaces have shifted to accommodate the dough.

The temporary architecture will host a series of food-related events across the festival days.

In the walk-in event Bring your own chips, participants are encouraged to bring their own crunchy chips and join Su Yu Hsin in a conversation on landscapes and how they are transformed through industrial production. A video trilogy exploring the environmental extraction that accompanies tech-infrastructure will be playing in tandem with the discussion.

On Saturday (31.01), Liquid Assets with Sarah Friend , Gosia Lehmann and Arkadiy Kukarkin , turns US Dollar notes into sugar syrup and cocktails, carefully tested and fit for human consumption. Each cocktail on the menu will dictate your fate and how you navigate this game of sticky liquidity and unreasonable consumption. As usual, nothing is free – in order to seal this sweet deal, you will need to sign one-sided contracts and make future bets…

Huang Po-Chih will share about his long-term project 500 Lemon Trees, which funded the reactivation of abandoned Taiwanese farmland through 500 subscribers who collectively produce limoncello. Blending art, farming, and social practice, the project rethinks production and consumption by placing community, transparency, and shared responsibility at the centre of a living, evolving artwork.

And in Tropical Sweat (Dance Dance Revolution), a dance tournament hosted by Johnson & Jeison is powered by sounds from the tropical region club scene. A stepmania mod becomes a playful meeting place for steppers, passers-by, lazy fitness enthusiasts, and anyone who enjoys making or losing friendships while showing off their cardio skills.