Guerrilla Wearables: A LoRa-Based Toolkit For Resilient Communication. 868 Labs

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.

This conference is part of the OpenLAB of LAB 4: Weird Futures 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.