Documenting carries the promise of evidence, comprehensiveness, realness, and fact; it aspires to cleave time, space and social relations, and visually, materially generates (knowledge of) the world. And yet, the ways that we are trained, and train ourselves, to observe, document, record, and analyze the world are deeply historical in character (Halpern 2014). Documenting also has a long history of obscuring, erasure, and the making of alternative facts that is baked into the technologies and media it relies on. This thread engages the media of documenting—documents, documentation, and documentaries, including photography and film as well as colonial archives, databases, and cutting-edge machine learning systems—and aims at developing aesthetic vocabularies that work with and against dominant knowledge regimes and the forms of governing they support (Bruder & Suess 2024). What are modes of documenting and types of data that expose the framing and rendering of supposedly objective representations of worlds? How to leverage absences, preserve gaps, and work around non-disclosures while simultaneously situating the documenter? How to expand the possibility of collective action through positioning the intimate, diasporic, decentralized in opposition to mainstreamed optics and colonial cartographies, with the understanding that the distant “there” is anchored in the immediate “here” (Suess 2023)?

What is hacking, exactly, and who practices it? Are hackers merely those who “enjoy the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software and/or hardware” (Wikipedia 2025), or is there something more going on here? The hacking thread invites a reclamation of hacking in times of polycrisis. From commoning, repair and debugging to making, unmaking and decomposing, the DIY and DIT (Do-It-Together) legacies of hacker practices have long encouraged public experimentation with alternative sociotechnical futures. This rich diversity of hacker cultures across the globe has too often been omitted from mainstream technomyths of digital progress, however, which orient hacking around the neoliberal innovation context of Silicon Valley tech moguls (Braybrooke & Jordan 2017; Braybrooke & Smith 2021). Hacker communities across the globe continue to build worlds, however, and it’s time to dig in.

From platforms for carbon removal to net zero proposals—infrastructure—is increasingly being positioned as essential for acting upon climate change by tech designers, governments, corporations and policy makers. However, communities transnationally are rehearsing their own proposals for—and contestations of—these infrastructural transformations. The rehearsing thread is indebted to abolitionist practices and its contributors focus on developing practices aimed at the uprooting of habits, operations and structures while interrogating the implications of their own activation (Maynard 2022). The thread focuses on researching the technical political scenes (and their design) that will inevitably emerge with climate change as it intensifies its hold on society, and on our economies. Such rehearsals take the form of grounded speculations, often involving digital media and practices that model modes of transformation through prototypes, toolkits, as well as workshops and events. Working together with organisers and translocal community groups, we generate actions and campaigns that focus on building alternatives through creating scenes to commune within and to collectively practice, learn and revise from. Through critical practice and collective action, we seek to understand how infrastructural oppression shapes lives—focusing on approaches to rehearse a different social order into being.

Publishing is the process of creating publics—an act that is not merely about distribution, but inherently social and political. It prompts us to consider: Who we publish for, and how? How do we share knowledge in ways grounded in relationship-building, reciprocity, and trust? This thread engages with artistic and activist approaches that reimagine publishing processes, protocols, and infrastructures. From design and media to technology, law, politics, and economics, we explore strategies that foster the redistribution of access and resources.

Recognizing that knowledge is deeply embedded in collective experience, we view publishing as a blend of practices, processes, and infrastructures. Drawing on intersectional feminist critiques, we examine how current dynamics shaped by tech companies and social media often prevent people from accessing the ideas they helped create. By interrogating these exclusions, we aim to develop more equitable approaches that redistribute agency.

Through fostering provisional infrastructures, we seek to nurture the publics we need—communities capable of actively creating, shaping, and maintaining the contexts in which they interact with knowledge. This involves reimagining roles such as author and reader within more collaborative and interconnected frameworks, moving away from hierarchical structures toward equitable and reciprocal practices.