868 Wearables: Bodies as Nodes

What if off-grid communication was not the last resort, but the first choice? What if it could circulate as effortlessly as any everyday accessory? 868labs invites participants to a speculative workshop that reimagines communication beyond centralized infrastructures. The session introduces a series of open-source wearable devices built on the LoRa protocol, enabling peer-to-peer messaging without the global internet, SIM cards, or any external backbone.
Developed in response to growing censorship, surveillance, and the erosion of digital autonomy, 868 Wearables functions both as a tool of infrastructural resistance and as a speculative artifact asking how communication might look if it were local, embodied, and self-sustaining.
In this session participants will unpack the political and technical contexts of network dependency, experiment hands-on with mesh communication devices, and collectively imagine new, bodily forms of connection for the realities of today.

In collaboration with Error 417 Expectation Failed Foundation.

868labs is a Berlin-based collective developing tactical tools for decentralized, off-grid communication. Initiated by new media artists Helena Nikonole, Katerina Kataeva, and collaborators remaining anonymous, the group’s first prototype, 868Wearables, is a peer-to-peer, open-source communication device enabling encrypted, long-range messaging over the 868 MHz radio band. Designed to be assembled, adapted, and shared, their work challenges commercial infrastructures and invites users to build their own resilient alternatives.

Error 417 Expectation Failed is an independent foundation supporting radically contemporary internet and net-based art practices. In 2025, it focuses on projects that challenge tech-authoritarian systems through misdirection, opting out, and pushing back, resisting in solidarity and creating spaces for technological practices that serve collective needs rather than exploit them.

Full OpenLAB  program.