Mesh Workshop with Christopher Dake-Outhet, Eren Ileri, Sarah Grant, Cade Diehm
Starting with a presentation by Cade Diehm on digital rights and democracy initiatives, this hands-on workshop facilitated by Chris Dake-Outhet & Eren Ileri (selfservice.studio), explores infrastructure anxiety through mesh networking practices.
ANXIETY & EXILIC: Anti-Cybernetic Threat Modelling, Response, and the Self-Determined Counterpractice Infrastructure. Who will remember us when the servers go dark? In this introductory presentation by Cade Diehm, the most pressing issues of this decade are laid bare. How did the romanticism of cyberspace and cybernetics contribute to the now weaponized US tech hegemony? What are the alternatives? Diehm presents ANXIETY & EXILIC as anti-cybernetic frameworks that critically draw on digital rights and democracy initiatives that proved ineffective against regulatory capture and authoritarian consolidation The lecture operates in dialogue with the workshop, examining conditions that produce infrastructure anxiety and the ethos of the counter-practices that follow.
Contemporary infrastructure anxiety is located where digital and material dependencies converge and are weaponized by design. Rather than treating this anxiety as pathology, we recognize its core tenants – social engineering, data control, power asymmetry and permanence – as accurate perception of actual conditions – moments where dependency becomes suddenly visible through rupture. EXILIC design poses orienting questions: What happens when the servers go dark? Can a project function in blackout conditions? Does it demand consent before it remembers? Can it forget, decay, contradict?
This workshop moves from collective threat mapping to hands-on hardware configuration, introducing mesh devices and protocols like Meshtastic while exploring what mesh networks enable or constrain. Where platform logic demands smooth paths to scale, the hobbyist counter-practice embraces friction, specificity, and deliberate amateurism – making infrastructure legible through subsequent successes and failures. This trajectory locates amateur engagement as an essential counter-practice and infrastructural awareness that carries personal experimentation into collective capacity.
Workshop Program:
Infrastructure Anxiety Response and Orientation — Collective mapping of communication dependencies and their brittleness. Introduction to Berlin's existing mesh network and global practices.
Mesh Networks — How mesh networks operate, autonomy, resilience, privacy tensions, and political implications of distributed infrastructure.
Meshtastic Device Configuration — Hands-on setup: inspection, smartphone configuration, joining the festival's public channel, first messages across the Meshtastic network.
Break
Advanced Configuration Demos — Alternative protocols and file sharing, experimental and custom firmware, bots, MQTT bridging, location and range optimization.
Installation Integration — Connection to selfservice.studio's installation: workshop themes and message integration, circulation, redistribution.
Closing — Resources for continued engagement: Berlin community contacts, documentation, hardware sources, advanced workshop details.
selfservice.studio
Initiated in 2025 by Christopher Dake-Outhet and Leïth Benkhedda at Trust in Berlin, selfservice.studio is an open platform exploring infrastructure anxiety through ongoing research, workshops, and installations – examining how communities can build, own, and design their own technological infrastructures.
Christopher Dake-Outhet is an artist, researcher, and curator based in Berlin exploring emerging technologies, economies, and protocols. His practice examines how these infrastructures can be parasitized to challenge existing power structures and facilitate acts of reclamation.
Sarah Grant is an American artist and professor of new media based in Berlin at the Weise7 studio. Her teaching and art practice engages with the electromagnetic spectrum and computer networks as artistic material, social habitat, and political landscape.
Eren Ileri is an artist and researcher born in Istanbul and currently based in Berlin. He is one half of Well Gedacht Publishing, an artists' book publishing duo and imprint that makes books, zines, pamphlets from anti-colonial, tech-critical, and diasporic perspectives.
Cade Diehm is the founder of The New Design Congress, an independent organisation researching infrastructure and power. His work covers digital power structures, privacy, information warfare, resilience, internet economies and the digitisation of cities.