40C3 – 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, hacker party, and platform for technology, society and civil rights.

During four days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, thousands of people get together in Hamburg to exchange ideas, listen to each other, learn from each other, build things together, and party together.

The Congress is deliberately a non-commercial, self-organized space and has by now become the longest-running German IT security conference, the biggest European hacker gathering, and one of the central places for engaging with the societal, political, and cultural implications of digitalization.

We focus on information technology, networks, and computer security as well as science, art, culture, society, and politics. At the heart of the Congress is a critical and creative approach to technology and the question of how we can shape its development and its impact on our society ourselves.

Reaching out

The attendees of the 40C3 are eager to have outdated ideas, conventional perceptions of reality, and yesterday’s approaches to tomorrow’s problems challenged. That’s why we particularly encourage people whose voices and perspectives have so far been underrepresented, and especially people from the Global South, to apply. We want the Congress to be a place where different experiences, perspectives, and forms of knowledge come together and challenge each other. We’re looking forward to your contributions to a just digital future.

Tracks and Calls

As in previous years, we are launching multiple Calls for Participation at once. In addition to the Call for Presentation on the main stages, we also invite you to submit your proposals 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 Hamburg Messe. Details can be found below.

Dates & deadlines for main stages

Art, Culture and Beauty

Model citizens should behave: be measurable, predictable, optimizable, corruptible--and best of all, they should also save democracy. The track Art, Culture and Beauty is interested in all those who want to find the cracks in the common model. We are looking for lectures, lecture performances and reports on artistic works and research that show the body as training data, as a catwalk, as a score, or that lock themselves exactly against it. That tell what rituals, practices, and systems arise when communities escape their modelling or appropriate it. Make unheard-of future models or dismantle monitoring systems and cut a good figure in the process.

Please submit your own contributions and - more importantly - convince and support your favourite artists, curators or critics to present their work and the ideas behind it at the Congress 2026. Thank you!

PS: All full-fledged performances, DJ sets, Krrrk-bsss-fiep concerts, baroque operas etc. please apply to the Call for Music/Punk/Art. We only do the things that can be realized in the lecture program of the 40C3.

Chaos Community Creations

The track Chaos Community Creations is back and of course the community is in focus once again!

Hackers have never been particularly good model citizens. We don't read manuals, we rewrite them. We don't ask what a system should do, we ask what else it might be capable of. And that's exactly what makes us, in a world that is increasingly optimised for conformity and predictability, a strange anachronism or the most important counterculture that exists right now.

Show us how you forge your reality: Present projects that show spine, report on extraordinary collaborations that no one saw coming, introduce events that may never have happened before. What moved you or what did you move in the chaos bubble? Share it with us and other Model Chaos Citizens, submit it to the CCC Track! By the community, for the community.

Entertainment

Whether it's a game show, gala, glitch battle or singing contest: We want to laugh, get excited and feel amazed together when the curtain rises. That’s why we’re looking for formats — big and small — that combine humour and seriousness at 40C3, and that will keep the popcorn warm and the mate cold.

So slip on your glitter hoodie and submit your ideas in the Entertainment track, whether it's a well-established entertainment format or a brand new idea. Don't forget to tell us what you need to bring your plans to the stage. Also, please specify how much time you will need – for an evening show, this could be more than 60 minutes!

Ethics, Society & Politics

The Ethics, Society & Politics track is seeking visions, analyses, and concrete actions.

Citizenship has become an increasingly restrictive category; we are now living in a world where tech empires rule, track, surveil and manipulate; and "Are you human?" has become an actual question rather than a running gag. Under the motto "Model Citizens", we call for presentations that break with the concept and explore what lies beyond both models and citizenship.

The collection, processing, and exploitation of data are moving a surveilled society to a repressive society. We now need to unlearn what hasn't worked in the past, practice new tactics and develop new visions. How do we build systems that allow autonomy instead of determining behavior? How do we fight excessive surveillance infrastructure? How do we act with true solidarity in increasingly hostile environments?

Join us to discuss and present brave ideas that help all of us remain autonomous, curious, and harder to classify. Let's figure out together how we can disobey and build systems that cater us, not them.

Hardware

The track Hardware is all about the 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 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 also 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 firmware of your coffee machine to modified agricultural machinery (please tell us early if you want to bring one).

Science

Things used to be a lot funnier. But still – or maybe precisely because of that – we need research and its stories. We need hope, we need knowledge, we need that moment when everything clicks. That’s why we’re asking you to submit your talks: the most exciting, surprising, funny, beautiful, or extraordinary presentations about research, from science, and from researchers of every kind.

Together with you, we want to dive into niches, turn over stones, understand models, and delight in the diversity of research topics. Show us your science-based answers to big and small problems, show us findings you never expected, and answer questions we didn’t even know we had. We want to see your talk in the Science Track and explicitly invite those to submit who otherwise see themselves underrepresented on stages.

Security & Hacking

The security track showcases the influence of IT security aspects on users, machines and society, exploring and challenging the technical boundaries of our freedom.

We welcome technical submissions covering hardware or software.

Do you want to share your discoveries with thousands of fellow security enthusiasts? Have you developed new solutions to previously unsolved problems, or uncovered new challenges we knew nothing about? Have you found ways to bypass rules, control and trust?

We invite you to present them.

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/40c3/cfp. 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 40c3-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.

All talks get, by default, a 60 minutes slot on our stages. You don't need to fill up the whole hour, though. But please note that we love to give the audience a chance for questions and answers after your presentation. 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 looking for music nerds who want to perform for their peers at the 40C3. Whether you have built your own instrument, use technology in imaginative ways to express yourself through music, are a contemporary DJ who plays genres far outside the mainstream, are in a band with a political message, or are anything in between, we invite you to perform at 40C3. We welcome all genres, from ambient to zydeco.

Bands, live acts and any other music-related performances are also very welcome to apply. We are also looking for workshops, talks, and other interactive formats. If you are interested in the intersection of music and hacking and have always wanted to talk about it, we would be happy to hear from you.

Please provide as much information as possible about yourself and your project, including any special requirements you may have, such as space or technical needs. We will do our best to accommodate these. Please note that 40C3 is not a music event and we cannot pay regular artist fees, but we can contribute towards your travel and accommodation expenses. Last but not least, please include a link to your latest work/music; otherwise, your application cannot be taken into consideration.

Thank you, LLAP, and we look forward to hearing from you!

Call for Art

The Congress is moving. New halls, new corridors, new corners. But rooms are just rooms to begin with. Halls, corridors, stairwells, the space behind the tech, a wall that hundreds of people walk past every day without ever looking at it. We'd like that to be different. So: come and make something of it.

What we're looking for: as much variety as possible:

And everything we haven't thought of. The list is a starting point, not an exhaustive selection.

Who we mean

You don't need an exhibition history and you don't need a CV. Whether you call yourself an artist is irrelevant to us — what matters is that you have an idea and want to build it. First works are expressly welcome. If you're wondering whether your idea is "big enough" or "right", it is. Submit it.

What we need

A description of your idea, as precise as necessary, as short as possible. Please do send photos or a (hand-drawn) sketch — it makes the selection much easier for us. NB: Google Sheets, Google Drive and Instagram links cannot be considered. Roughly: space required, power, setup and teardown time, whether you need help, what the materials cost, whether the work needs darkness or quiet. Whatever you don't know yet, just say so — we'll ask.

How and by when

The submission deadline for the Call for Art is 10 October. If we have questions, we'll get in touch. We'll decide at the beginning of November which submissions can actually be realised. Either way, you'll hear back from us. Please don't wait until the deadline if you can help it — submit but submit your entry to our Call for Art pretalx as early as possible. Again: every idea is more than welcome! Don’t be perfect, just be. seen …

Call for Punk

“I’m still punk as fuck” – I whisper to myself as I reach for my 7-day pill box.

Send us your musical contributions for the Späti stage!

Your submissions should be punk in some way – which, for us, means an attitude rather than necessarily a specific genre of music. Tell us what you’ve got in mind and what you’ll need to make it happen. Ideally, send us an audio clip – the quality doesn’t matter.

The Späti isn’t an official stage, so unfortunately we can’t help you get a ticket. We hope that people who are already planning to attend the congress will want to contribute here.

We won’t be recording anything.

You can submit your ideas via our Pretalx by 1 November; you’ll receive a response by 1 December at the latest.

You can submit your ideas to our pretalx until November 1, and you will receive feedback by December 1. NB: This is after the official deadline for notification on our main stages.