critical infrastructure lab

AMRO, Art Meets Radical Openness, is a festival, a platform and a community for art, hacktivism and open cultures, organised since 2008 by
servus.at in cooperation with the Linz University of Art, Department of Time-Based Media.

In this workshop, we will explore the possibilities for setting up a decentralized off-grid communications system using the Reticulum communication protocol stack.  We choose to focus on Reticulum because it is designed for heterogeneous networks built from various cheap devices, to be deployed in a bottom-up way by small communities.

https://radical-openness.org/en/programm/2026/low-profile-and-low-energy-autonomous-networking-reticulum

A session of lectures and presentations about the current uncontrolled rise of data centres across the globe. Impact on the environment, current project explorations, local examples like Kronstorf, but also in the Netherlands. We’ll discuss then also current resistance modes against datacenter constructions, how to oppose such projects, learn from other experiences and plan to be effective on scale.

https://radical-openness.org/en/programm/2026/morning-session-how-boil-data-center

Towards Critical Internet Governance: Centering Power and Struggles for Justice and Distribution

Special Issue Editors: Niels ten Oever, Fieke Jansen, Fernanda Rosa, Roxana Radu

TL;DR: Please submit a 750-word extended abstract outlining your research question, theoretical framework, methodology, and contribution to the field of critical internet governance by July 1 to submission@criticalinfralab.net . We will notify you by September 1 whether your abstract has been accepted, and will inform you of the target journal as soon as possible.

Over the past three decades, the Internet has shifted from an exploratory, experimental space to a densely financialised and highly consolidated infrastructure (Ortiz Freuler 2022). Where the “early Internet” was an unknown place that nonetheless felt like a home to a nascent community actively shaping its ecosystem, there were already many power structures at play (DeNardis 2009, Russell 2014, Carr 2015, Radu 2019). Today’s Internet is intimately familiar to billions, mostly as users and consumers, yet increasingly inhospitable and ungovernable to many (Bhat 2020). This transformation has profound implications for how Internet governance should be understood, practised, and studied.

Internet governance as a field emerged in a period when the Internet was widely perceived as a space for exploration in modes of connection and institutional experimentation, rather than extraction. In this zeitgeist, scholarly interest in the concentration of power in a distributed infrastructure focused primarily on theorizing about its technical coordination, regulatory design, and institutional arrangements. In doing so, scholars often omit to engage with other disciplines that situate these developments within histories of exploitation and extraction, such as decolonial, feminist, environmental, and broader social justice perspectives (Rosa 2022, Jansen 2025). 

The contemporary Internet, structured around platform capitalism, corporate concentration, and opaque infrastructural arrangements invites a transformation of Internet governance scholarship. The Internet’s significant social, economic, and environmental dependencies demand dialogue and engagement with a wider set of perspectives that offer critique and imagine “emancipatory alternatives to transcend the status quo” (Gunderson, 2020, p. 89; Ruha, 2024). This Special Issue takes up that challenge by asking: How do critical approaches to internet governance reveal the infrastructural and institutional foundations of power and ideology in the contemporary Internet, and in what ways can these insights generate alternative trajectories and pluriversal perspectives aimed at reconfiguring individual/collective rights, agency, and opportunity?

This Special Issue on Critical Internet Governance builds on a 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) pre-conference held at the University of Amsterdam in July 2024, and a satellite event at AOIR (Association of Internet Researchers) held in Rio de Janeiro in July 2025, where scholars from around the world convened to rethink what a critical field of Internet governance could be. Participants highlighted how crucial questions of power, materiality, environmental justice, disability, gender, race, ethnicity, socio-economic inequalities, digital colonialism, and sovereignty, along with the role of non-human actors and ecologies, remain marginal in mainstream Internet governance debates, even as they are increasingly central to emerging work on infrastructures, platforms, and AI.

The Special Issue invites contributions that foreground the technopolitics of the Internet and its infrastructures through plural, critical, and situated approaches. We particularly welcome work that:

• Foregrounds the study of power in internet governance, including infrastructural consolidation, materiality, and political economy 
• Brings decolonial, Black, anti-racist, feminist, Indigenous, and anti-fascist perspectives to Internet governance institutions, practices, and standards 
• Connects Internet governance to environmental justice, resource extraction, and the materialities of digital infrastructures
• Reconsiders sovereignty, jurisdiction, and control in relation to transnational power asymmetries and global South perspectives 
• Examines how AI, platforms, and other “applications on top” of the Internet reconfigure governance, responsibility, and accountability
• Centers marginalized actors and “invisible” forms of governance, including community networks, and grassroots initiatives 
• Expands the unit of analysis beyond states and corporations to include non-human actors, ecologies, and long-durée historical, social, political, and economic  processes

By bringing together Internet governance scholars and researchers from adjacent and intersecting fields (including STS, critical data studies, media studies, communications, political economy, environmental humanities, decolonial, feminist and Indigenous studies, and law), this Special Issue aims to consolidate and amplify a critical turn in Internet governance. The goal is not only to broaden the conceptual and empirical scope of the field, but also to reimagine its sense of community: who counts as an Internet governance scholar, what infrastructures and practices are considered, and which futures of the Internet are rendered thinkable.

We welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological, and positional contributions in the form of full journal articles that engage with Internet governance as a site of contestation over global digital media infrastructures and that propose alternative horizons for governing the Internet otherwise.

Please submit a 750-word extended abstract outlining your research question, theoretical framework, methodology, and contribution to the field of critical internet governance by July 1 to submission@criticalinfralab.net . We will notify you by September 1 whether your abstract has been accepted by the editors, and will inform you of the target journal as soon as possible.

References

Benjamin, Ruha. 2024. Imagination: A Manifesto ‎ W. W. Norton & Company

Bhat, R. (2020). The politics of internet infrastructure: Communication policy, governmentality and subjectivation in Chhattisgarh, India [PhD Thesis]. The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Carr, M. (2015). Power Plays in Global Internet Governance. Millennium, 43(2), 640–659. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829814562655

DeNardis, Laura. Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance. MIT Press, 2009.

Jansen, F. (2025). From growth to scarcity: Can Internet Governance meet the ecological crisis? Critical Internet Governance: From Positions to a Field, 44. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15627726 

Gunderson T. (2020). Making the Familiar Strange: Sociology Contra Reification. Routledge.

Ortiz Freuler, J. (2022). The weaponization of private corporate infrastructure: Internet fragmentation and coercive diplomacy in the 21st century. Global Media and China, doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364221139729

Radu, R. (2019). Negotiating Internet Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rosa, F. R. (2022). From community networks to shared networks: The paths of Latin-Centric Indigenous networks to a pluriversal internet. Information, Communication & Society, 26(11), 2326-2344. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2085614 

Russell, A. L. (2014). Open Standards and the Digital Age. Cambridge University Press.

Truscello, M. (2023). The Internet Shutdown and Revolutionary Politics: Defining the Infrastructural Power of the Internet. South Atlantic Quarterly, 122(4), 811–826.

Running your own communications infrastructure has obvious benefits.  We live in a world of increasing digital censorship, and are rarely completely in charge of our communications.  Even if we choose to use “better” alternatives to WhatsApp, Instagram, etc., we are still always completely reliant on the one underlying network, i.e. “The Internet”.  With the push of a button, “The Internet” may all of a sudden become unavailable.  In places with oppressive regimes, this has not been uncommon.  In the current political climate, it would not be surprising if any political system all of a sudden became repressive.

 In this workshop, we will explore the possibilities for setting up a decentralized off grid communications system using the Reticulum communication protocol stack.  We choose to focus on Reticulum because it is designed for heterogeneous networks built from various cheap devices, to be deployed in a bottom up way by small communities. 

Join us on May 9th at 16.00 for a(nother) data centre walk to the controversial Microsoft hyperscaler under construction on the Plimsollweg, near Sloterdijk station. Infrastructure walks are like guided tours of the city, or birdwatching expeditions – but instead of pointing out noteworthy architectural details of historical buildings or showing participants how to best observe particular species of birds, we will explore the digital public infrastructures that are deployed in public spaces. In this case, a piece of land undergoing an infrastructural transformation into a speculative Cloud factory.

During our previous walk on March 6th, we discussed the 10-year-long financial speculation over this piece of land, the layers of subcontracting that hide Microsoft as the tenant of the hyperscaler, the municipality’s zoning policy, and the implications of such a project on the health of the land, water, local residents, and on our ability to access electricity equitably.

We return to the same site two months later to check on the construction progress, as well as to continue our discussions on these topics. We will end at De Sering with a community dinner, followed by a collaborative session to exchange about ways of responding to the harmful effects of this and comparable Cloud infrastructure projects.

Registration is closed.

The fourth Reticulum Community Videocall to connect local communities building autonomous networks using the versatile networking stack and its rapidly expanding ecosystem of software and hardware. The featured community this month is in Montréal, Québec.

Alex Lutz and Fieke Jansen gave a talk about whose interests count in data centre expansion in Europe at the Festival Le Nuage était sous nos pieds – Déplier la tech.

https://lenuageetaitsousnospieds.org/agenda/#festival-le-nuage-etait-sous-nos-pieds-deplier-la-tech

A two-day symposium, 16-17 April, 2026, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Dmitry Kuznetsov and Alex Gekker will present on Russia’s Sovereign AI strategy.

https://www.gold.ac.uk/media-communications/research/statecraft-sovereignty-and-digital-government-

During the State of the Internet, Waag Futurelab takes the annual temperature of the internet. This edition focuses on AI and the limits of our planet. The lecture will be given by Fieke Jansen, co-founder of the Critical Infrastructure Lab.

Generative AI and other AI applications are currently being added to our technology everywhere. From search engines and social media to office software and urban infrastructure: AI is everywhere, whether we like it or not. Our digital landscape is changing significantly, but our physical landscape is perhaps changing even more dramatically. The arrival of large data centres, known as hyperscalers, is putting considerable pressure on our power grid and water supply. Local residents are seeing their energy bills rise and their water supply become less reliable.

This year, we are looking at what lies behind our screens: what impact does the growing appetite for data centres and AI computing power have on our living environment, and what are the consequences for the world outside our screens? The possibilities of AI seem limitless, but our planet’s natural resources are finite.

About Fieke Jansen

This year the keynote lecture will be given by Fieke Jansen, co-principal researcher at the Critical Infrastructure Lab at the University of Amsterdam and co-lead of the Green Screen Coalition. Jansen investigates how the infrastructure of our digital world, data centres and AI influence the environment, raw material use and climate.

About Waag Futurelab

Waag Futurelab is engaged in regenerative technology by developing research and design methods that detach technology from purely extractive models and instead make it restorative and circular. In collaboration with the Critical Infrastructure Lab, Waag investigates how technical systems can be designed in such a way that they not only extract value from natural and social resources, but also give back: think of the use of biomaterials, a focus on repair and extending lifespan, and public values that strengthen local ecosystems and social initiatives. Through practice-oriented research and participatory design processes, Waag brings together knowledge from science, art and citizen initiatives to realise technologies that contribute to long-term regeneration rather than depletion.

https://www.waag.org/en/event/state-internet-2026-fieke-jansen

It is an open secret that the hardware in our smart devices contains not only plastics but also conflict minerals such as copper and gold. Technology is not neutral!

Artists and researchers Patrícia J. Reis and Stefanie Wuschitz investigate on alternative hardware from locally sourced materials, from a feminist perspective, to develop and speculate upon renewable practices. They call it Feminist Hardware!

Through these lenses, they researched on fair-traded, ethical, biodegradable hardware for environmental justice, building circuits that use ancient community-centred crafts encouraging de-colonial thinking, market forces to be disobeyed, and future technologies to be imagined.

In this lecture, they will share their research process behind Feminist Hardware, and present artistic alternatives that aim to reconnect technology with ecology, community, and care.

Join us on March 30th for the lecture and discussion on eco-feminist decolonial hardware with Patrícia J. Reis and Stefanie Wuschitz. The lecture will take place from 17.00 at the Bushuis in room F0.01.

Please RSVP here.

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About the speakers

Patrícia J. Reis (b. 1981, Lisbon, PT) is a Vienna-based media artist and researcher whose practice explores human and more-than-human entanglements with technology through feminist hacking, sensory interaction, and embodied interfaces.

Her installations investigate touch, consent, and care, often inviting intimate, activeparticipation. Reis studied Painting (ESAD, 2004), Media Art (MA, Lusófona University, 2011), and completed a Ph.D. in Art at the University of Évora (2016). She was a fellow of the FCT of Portugal (2011–15) and Assistant Professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Beja (2006–12). From 2020–23 she was postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna within the project Feminist hacking: building circuits as an artistic
practice, and guest researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute, TU Berlin. Since 2015, she has lectured at the Digital Arts Department, University of Applied Arts Vienna, where she currently leads the FWF Elise Richter PEEK project Hacking the body as the black box.

Since 2012, she has been a board member of Mz Baltazar’s Lab*, Vienna’s feminist artist-run space. Reis has exhibited widely, received the Outstanding Artist Award in Media Art (AT, 2021), and participated in international programs and residencies, including IMPACT ART San Francisco, Banff Centre (CA), HWK Delmenhorst, and Edith-Russ-Haus (DE).

Find out more about Patricia: www.patriciajreis.com | https://www.instagram.com/patricia_j_reis/ | https://hackingthebody.org/

Stefanie Wuschitz (b. 1981, Vienna, Austria) is a data-research artist based in Vienna. Her scholarship generates data that shapes her artistic output. She investigates the entanglement of gender, technology and power. Within the young, Eurocentric field of data studies, her current projects focus on a blind spot of South East Asia: Indonesia’s position within fast shifting techno empires. Her degrowth inspired artistic method entails upcyling, salvaging sustainable, locally sourced materials to create ecofeminist interactive art installations. Her drawings and animations explore new forms of storytelling, knowledge transfer and documentary.

She graduated in the MFA program Transmedia Arts in 2006 (Brigitte Kowanz) and completed her Master’s at NYU 2008 at Tisch School of the Arts in NYC. In 2009 she founded the hacklab and collective Mz* Baltazar’s Laboratory. She completed her Doctorate on Feminist Hackerspaces at TU Vienna in 2014. Since then she has held post-doctoral positions at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, TU Vienna, Universität der Künste Berlin, and TU Berlin. She conducted several arts-based research projects as PI (titled Feminist Hacking, Salon of Open Secrets, Coded Feminisms in Indonesia). Her artwork was featured in solo exhibitions, film festivals and international venues.

Find out more about Stefanie: https://stefaniewuschitz.cargo.site/ | https://www.instagram.com/stefanie_wuschitz/

It is an open secret that the hardware in our smart devices contains not only plastics but also conflict minerals such as tungsten, tin, tantalum, silver and gold.

We are investigating alternative hardware from locally sourced materials, so-called ethical hardware, to develop and speculate upon renewable practices for the benefit of both nature and humans.
We are exploring different materials, sentient, low-impact, non-toxic, fair traded, recycled and urban mined means of production.

We aim to challenge the common PCB (printed circuit board) economies in an artistic, creative, positive and responsible way applying feminist hacking as an artistic methodology and critical framework.

https://feministhackerspaces.cargo.site/Clay-PCB-Tutorial – a workshop in partnership with the critical infrastructure lab and Waag from March 30 to April 2, 2026.

TL;DR: the March workshop is about testing the mesh network with mobile phones (over Bluetooth, WiFi, and LoRa frequencies/protocols), building infrastructure nodes, browsing and making “mu” websites, and hopefully trying out how to run the entire protocol stack on single microcontrollers (with microreticulum).

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Running your own communications infrastructure has obvious benefits.  We live in a world of increasing digital censorship, and are rarely completely in charge of our communications.  Even if we choose to use “better” alternatives to WhatsApp, Instagram, etc., we are still always completely reliant on the one underlying network, i.e. “The Internet”.  With the push of a button, “The Internet” may all of a sudden become unavailable.  In places with oppressive regimes, this has not been uncommon.  In the current political climate, it would not be surprising if any political system all of a sudden became repressive.

In this workshop, we will explore the possibilities for setting up a decentralized off grid communications system using the Reticulum communication protocol stack.  We choose to focus on Reticulum because it is designed for heterogeneous networks built from various cheap devices, to be deployed in a bottom up way by small communities.  More information is found on the Reticulum Community website.

The mesh network stack runs on various platforms.  You can run it on your desktop, your home server, your mobile phone.  In the workshop, we will focus on using Reticulum on three scales: (1) as a Bluetooth network for mobile phones messaging in small groups; (2) building some standalone nodes, based on a low power ARM board, that you we can deploy around Amsterdam to build out an autonomous communication infrastructure; (3) and we will also look into connecting cities with more long-range radio links.

Operating the network stack on various scales is possible because it can run on top of different transport layers.  It can run on normal IPv4 networks.  However, for us the interesting part is that it also runs on high latency, low bandwidth radio links.  These can be Internet of Things networks like LoRa, Bluetooth networks made of mobile phones, WiFi access points or packet radio systems using cheap handheld VHF radios.  (One such radio is the infamous programmable Baofeng UV-5R.)

We will look at some applications that were build on top of the Reticulum communication protocol stack.  There is a simple graphical chat application called Meshchat that can be run locally on your computer.  There is also a BBS style forum implementation, called NomadNet that also works over the terminal on servers.  Finally, there is a user-friendly Android mobile phone app called Columba.  The current services include text, photo, voice and video messaging – as well as audio calls and publishing website-like content called “mu sites” in the “micron format”.  No prior experience is needed, but you might benefit from looking into the Reticulum Manual.

The March workshop is hosted by Internet Archive Europe and facilitated by the critical infrastructure lab.

The next (April 2026) workshop will be in Den Haag, hosted by the Anarchist Library Opstand.

Do you want to use a local GenAI on your laptop or PC for your research? Small language models (SLM) are compact alternatives to large language models, and they are ideal for handling specific tasks on your local devices. In this hands-on workshop, Maxigas (critical infrastructure lab), Jenny Chan, Dmitry Kuznetsov (critical infrastructure lab) and Annette Markham (Media and Culture Studies) will show and teach you how to install and use SLMs for your research. 

What could you use SLM for? Some researchers want to organise and sift through years of data they’ve been collecting on their own device, maybe to link different research projects together. Other researchers might want to automate part of their workflow. Research institutes or project managers might want to standardise templates and automate research-related tasks. Still others might want to play around with AI, but want to keep the data local, to avoid sharing data through large corporate entities, or to better control what data is being processed by AI.

What to expect  

The goal of finding, installing, and effectively using a SLM is wise, if you want to use it in research, but it is massively difficult to achieve in practice. This workshop therefore provides a communal space where we share knowledge. The workshop facilitators will walk participants through some of the steps involved, discuss the benefits and challenges, and then present and demonstrate a physical SLM set-up we have developed. Participants can then connect to this SLM online or offline to test it out.

Join us on March 6th at 16.00 for a data centre walk of the to-be-built but already controversial hyperscaler on the Plimsollweg, near Sloterdijk station. Infrastructure walks are like guided tours of the city, or birdwatching expeditions – but instead of pointing out noteworthy architectural details of historical buildings or showing participants how to best observe particular species of birds, we would explore the digital public infrastructures that are deployed in public spaces. In this case, an empty piece of land.  

While it doesn’t look like much, this vacant piece of land is extremely valuable, as it holds the permits to build three data centre towers. After 10 years of financial speculation, the site was purchased by British data center developer Pure DC, with Microsoft as the intended and sole tenant of a hyperscale data center consisting of three towers. In this walk, we will learn more about this piece of land and discuss the allocation of scarce land, computing power, and electricity supplies to an American hyperscale data centre, which ends up coming at the expense of residents, nature, and local businesses. 

Registration is closed