The Marshall McLuhan Lecture is a cooperation with the Embassy of Canada in Berlin and traditionally forms the prelude to transmediale’s festival programme. Every year, the lecture features Canadian voices within the context of media studies and theory, in dialogue with the festival’s thematic framework. For the 2026 edition of transmediale By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road , the curators conceive the McLuhan Lecture as a recursive conversational format addressing AI sovereignty and pluriversal intelligences. This discursive format has long anticipated shifts in media that recalibrate how societies think, govern, and imagine.

In 2026, it becomes a pluriversal roundtable without a table – a forum on AI sovereignty, understood as the right of nations, peoples, and knowledge systems to build and govern their own models. In conversation, Scott Benesiinaabandan, Camila Lombana Diaz and Lucas LaRochelle, moderated by Juan Pablo García Sossa, bring perspectives from Canada and across the planet, re-wiring the root codes of artificial intelligence through endemic and multi-situated epistemologies.

Tuesday 27 January, 18:30-21:00 (doors open at 17:45)
Embassy of Canada, Berlin
free admission, registration open