39C3 – Call for Participation

➝  deutsch ➝  Call for Art ➝  Call for Music ➝  Call for Punk

The Event

The Chaos Communication Congress is the Chaos Computer Club’s (CCC) annual symposium and hacker party.

During four days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, thousands of hackers, technology freaks, artists, and utopians get together in Hamburg to communicate, learn from each other, and party together.

The Congress is the longest running German IT security conference, the biggest European hacker gathering and grew into one of the most important conferences on digital transformation.

We focus on topics such as information technology, digital security, making, and breaking. We engage in creative, sceptical discourse on the interaction between technology and society.

Reaching out

The 39C3 is a place where attendees yearn to be challenged on outdated ideas, conventional perception of reality and yesterday's approaches to tomorrow's problems. That's why we strongly encourage individuals of underrepresented groups, as well as people from the Global South to apply. We're looking forward to your contributions on just digital futures.

Tracks

39C3 lectures are organized by tracks. Each track is curated by a team of experts in the respective field. Please choose one of the tracks below when submitting.

This year, for the first time, we launch multiple Calls for Participation at once. In addition to the Call for Presentation on the main stages, we also ask you to hand in your submissions at our Call for Performances at the Music Club and the Chill Floor, to respond to our Call for Punk issued by our Späti and our Art coordination team’s Call for Art, asking you to hand in your installations at and around the CCH. Details below.

Dates & deadlines for main stages

Art & Beauty

Something went wrong with the reboot! Art & Beauty, Art & Culture, whatever you call it, was gravely affected in the last power cycle. Blue screen of death, red ring, ████, cracked gorilla glass, this thing is totally kaput. While some glorified chatbot puts you on hold on the service center helpline (what? It’s not supposed to do that!) we want to invite you to transform that anger, to take a breath and reflect on a thoughtful talk, playful presentation, or lecture performance. We want to see how you destroy things, makeput them new together, dissect, disturb, distort, and ███████. Shit, this froze again.

Please submit for yourself and more importantly: please persuade and support your favorite artist, curator, or critic to present her/their work and the idea behind it at congress 2025. Thank you.

Nota Bene: all pure performances, DJ sets, electric wazoo concerts, baroque stage plays, etc. should apply at the Call for Music. We do the more talky artsy stuff. Or ███████.

Ethics, Society & Politics

The Ethics, Society & Politics track is looking for critical, subversive, but also hopeful perspectives on technology and society.

As crises pile up and the political, social, and ecological climate becomes harsher day by day, we need to talk: What can we do when our scope for action appears to be narrowing? How can hackerdom and civil society contribute when total surveillance powers are constantly being touted, right-wing populism dominates the discourse, and the 'AI' hype further fuels the climate catastrophe?

True to the motto 'Power Cycles – Restart Everything' we call for presentations that break down existing power dynamics and illustrate how we can effectively counteract (global) crises. Join us for a trip to our roots and let's figure out together how we might pool our strengths as a community and put them to good use. We want old and new approaches to form alliances, foster solidarity, and act with foresight. Can we turn it off and on again?

Hardware & Making

The track Hardware is all about development and creative use of things that allow the digital to make an impression on the physical.

On the one hand our focus is on the whole process from architecture, planning, creation and debugging of everything ranging from textiles, musical instruments, robots, integrated circuits, means of transportation for people and Club Mate, launching stuff into space, alternative energy supplies to medical tools, toys and smartphones — all things hands-on.

On the other hand we are interested in unintended use cases. So please tell us your stories about expansion or repair of technology and about liberation of proprietary systems—from decapped smart-cards over firmwares of your coffee machine to modified agricultural engines. How many *power cycles* did it take to get your project working? We want to hear about it.

Of course we're also up for a surprise: Please submit all the things we can't imagine!

Science

Scrutiny is at the core of science. So, we’re wondering: How do we value fact based research, if people prefer probable search results over correct ones? How does it change our understanding of correlation and causation, if we replace studies with their automated summaries? If we stop writing and start generating, how reliable is our tale of discovery? In short: How do we react to science slop?

Our answer: by giving the stage to the people who do research, understand, investigate or explain the world. Share with us your insights, your surprising conclusions and your passion for understanding the inner workings of things. We want to see your talks – on the linguistics of machines, the behavioural patterns of chatbots, the biology of red giants and the tectonics of lasagna. We want your proposals for the science track. Send us your submissions from research institutions, universities, hack spaces, living rooms and garages. If you bring new findings on exciting topics, explain complex ideas like no one else or ask the questions that nobody is asking – then you have come to the right track.

Security & Hacking

The security track showcases the influence of IT security aspects on users and machines. We welcome technical submissions covering hardware or software.

If you have developed new solutions to previously unsolved problems, or you have found new challenges which we knew nothing about and you want to share your discoveries with thousands of fellow security enthusiasts, then we invite you to present.

This includes topics from mathematics, networks, operating systems, web technologies, memory (mis)management, cryptography, programming languages, hardware design and other fields.

Online submissions only

Please submit your talk to our conference planning system at https://cfp.cccv.de/39c3/cfp. Lectures are 40 or 60 minutes by default.

Simply follow the instructions there. If you plan to submit anything other than a lecture, want to present longer than 60 minutes, or just have any questions regarding the submission, you are welcome to contact us via mail at 39c3-content(at)cccv.de.

Submission guidelines

Please send us a description of your suggested talk that is as complete as possible. The description is the main criterium for acceptance or rejection, so please ensure that it is as clear and complete as possible. Quality comes before quantity. Due to the non-commercial nature of the event, presentations which aim to market or promote commercial products or entities will be rejected without consideration.

Since most participants find (or don’t find) a lecture by its title, it’s important to keep it precise, accessible and comprehensible. Our teams will keep a keen eye on title and subtitle and make suggestions to change them if necessary, so please avoid insider jokes and stereotypes. It would be a shame if we would have to reject an otherwise excellent submission because the title does not tell much about the actual content.

As it is likely that there will be multiple submissions on the same topic, please show us exactly why your talk should be part of the conference. Remember that the teams are diversely staffed, and not every reviewer knows every submitter and their background. Please write something about yourself, your research, and your motivation. It does not matter if the talk has been held at another conference somewhere on this planet, as long as it is up to date and relevant.

Talks should be either 30 minutes long plus 10 minutes for questions and answers or 45 minutes long plus 15 minutes for questions and answers. Longer slots are possible if absolutely necessary, but should be an exception. Please take our limited amount of presentation time into consideration, check how much time you really need to bring home your points and then tell us the proposed length of your talk.

Travel, costs & visa

The Chaos Communication Congress is a non-commercial event where neither the organisers nor the speakers are being paid. As an accepted speaker for a full talk, you get free admission, though. If necessary, we are able to provide limited support for travel costs. If you need help applying for a visa, such as an official invitation to present to the German embassy, please make sure to let the content team know well in advance. Please be aware that the visa application procedure may take up to six weeks.

Chaos Computer Music Club & Chill Floor

We are calling for music nerds who want to perform for other music nerds at the 39C3.

Whether you have built your own instrument, use technology in imaginative ways to express yourself with music, are a contemporary DJ highlighting genres far outside the mainstream, a performer with a constructive political message, or anything in between, we invite you to present at 39C3, from A like Ambient to Z like Zydeco.

Please note that 39C3 is not a music event, and we cannot pay regular artist fees.

We are also calling for workshops and talks! If you have an interest in something that connects music and hacking, and you have always wanted to talk about it, we would be happy to hear from you, or – more precisely – see your submission to our pretalx.

Call for Art

Congress centers and exhibition halls tend to be rather boring and dull spaces. That’s why we are looking for you to bring color, art and culture to the convention. We hereby call on you to participate artistically in the design. There is a lot of space in the congress center and we are counting on you to design it artistically!

Do you have ideas for installations, performances, workshops or other art forms that you would like to realize? Get in touch!

We will ask you for details if we have questions. We plan to decide by beginning of November which submissions can actually be realized.

If possible, please do not wait until the last minute of the deadline but submit your entry to our Call for Art pretalx as early as possible. Any idea is more than welcomed! Don’t be perfect, just be. seen …

Call for Punk

Bring your stories, your demo(n)s, your chaos. Power cycles through Re-voltage.

Besides tobacco products and cold beer, Späti is known for its punk music. Because we don't want the bartenders to have to take care of this permanently, we are looking for your musical contributions for Späti. We have a small stage and a modest sound system. Acoustic sets by small groups or solo artists are a good fit. We would also be glad to find people who want to expand the music selection with their DJ set.

Fascism, racism, and authoritarian tendencies are not phenomena of the past. Society, culture, politics, and digital spaces are currently being increasingly taken over by the far right. As a counterpoint, we are looking for short, pointed lightning talks (max. 15 minutes) that make anti-fascist and activist work visible, inspire, and encourage people to take action.

Do you have another idea? Maybe it is a good fit for the Späti. Your submissions should be punk in some way, which for us means an attitude and not necessarily a specific type of music. Describe what you have in mind and what you need to make it happen.

We are not an official stage, so unfortunately we cannot help you get a ticket. We hope that people who are already planning to attend the congress will want to contribute to our program.

You can submit your ideas to our pretalx until November 16, and you will receive feedback by December 1.