▫️ Inspired by the tradition of Commedia Dell'Arte, we will build a cohort of AI characters defined by personality and obsession rather than competence and utility, each one with its own inner logic, blind spots, and ways of going wrong.
▫️ We will orchestrate them in a world simulation, observing what narratives, conflicts, and unexpected behaviours emerge when characters with no interest in being useful are left to their own devices.
▫️ We will build a device to host them and their simulation to exhibit in a final installation.

The lab will be structured as a game studio, assembling a multidisciplinary team of practitioners who each bring a developed, autonomous practice. We are looking for applicants who are already deep in their own discipline and curious about what happens when that expertise collides with others. We will pool our competences to work collectively toward a final installation, each participant contributing from a position of genuine mastery. Practices we are drawn to: game development, protocol and narrative design, animation and CG, architecture, model making, music, behavioural psychology.

The lab operates under the concept of “Tecnologia Povera”, inspired by Arte Povera's conviction that technologies are not neutral containers but carriers of mythology — a partial panpsychism of tools. An e-paper screen and an LED display do not simply show differently: they think differently, carry different histories, propose different relationships to time, attention, and imagination.
The lab will work with obscure and overlooked technologies and low-fidelity tools whose limitations generate character rather than spectacle. The poverty of means is not aesthetic but conceptual — not a nostalgic gesture, not a luddite rejection of the present, but an insistence that imagination, not compute, is the primary material for conjuring new worlds. From this foundation the lab will develop its own methodology, tech stack and tool suite. We are unbounded by any specific language or software.

Research – July to September
The lab opens with a collective research phase. Through weekly meetings, participants will map references, test tools, and develop a shared vocabulary — exploring the theoretical and practical territory of Obscure Detritus. By the end of this phase the lab will have agreed on a direction and begun developing individual characters.

Prototyping – September to November
Participants prototype their characters, working toward a functioning cast and a sketch of the world simulation they will inhabit. In parallel, the lab develops initial concepts for the device that will house them in the final installation.

Production – November to January
The lab moves into full production. Meetings become biweekly as the team works collectively toward the final installation at Silent Green, Berlin, opening in January.

The lab will take place mostly online, with the possibility of meeting in person at Sybil in Berlin from September. During all-hands production it would be best for participants to be in Berlin.

transmediale can take care of only one trip to Berlin from your country of residence.

▫️ transmediale covers travel costs for each participant to attend the festival in Berlin. Train travel is prioritised where possible; otherwise, round-trip economy flights will be provided.
▫️ Accommodation is provided for the duration of the festival and the installation period.
▫️ Travel and accommodation arrangements are coordinated by transmediale.
▫️ transmediale supports visa applications by providing letters of invitation.

▫️ Participate in all meetings.
▫️ Commit to develop a collective project.
▫️ Availability to travel to Berlin during the Festival (26–31 January 2027).

Alex Declino is a game designer exploring authority and control in digital and online systems. He is the program director of Sybil – an r&d space for weird gaming – the co-founder of the gaming studio Moving Castles, and member of The Dark Forest Collective initiated by Yancey Strickler. His narratives and simulations are fueled by themes of tech-driven espionage, CEO meltdowns, the innovative exploitations of late-stage capitalism, and the almost Sisyphean tragicomedies of crypto. Alumnus of Fabrica, the Jan Van Eyck Academie, and the Sandberg Instituut; former lecturer on real-time CG at Goldsmiths University, London, and Staedelschule, Frankfurt.