The jury — Chia Amisola, Olia Lialina, and Vladan Joler — selected eight projects out of over 330 applications from around the world that reflect the diversity of the applications, both in their thematic approaches and the contexts from which they emerge. The grants were awarded to Disnovation.org, Lola Odelola, Ruy Cézar Campos, Long Tran, Martha Root, Angelissa Melissa, Iz Paehr, as well as Yufeng Zhao and Richard Lewei Huang (a.k.a. Switcheristic Telecommunications).

The submissions offered thoughtful and nuanced perspectives on network conditions, online cultures, and the structures that organize life on and through the internet. It was inspiring to see so many projects challenge dominant narratives about the web past and present through investigations of protocols, platforms, archives, governance, and internet standards. Across a wide range of contexts and approaches, the proposed projects explored strategies of resistance, intervention, refusal, repair, and collective reimagination, while pointing toward technological and social infrastructures that serve shared needs rather than extract from them.

The selected projects will receive a total of €44,800 in support, mentoring sessions with the jury members, and will be presented in an online exhibition in winter 2026/27.

The internet is broken, but was it ever whole? With the open call we invited artists, curators and collectives from around the world to propose projects that critically probe inherited memories, interrogate power structures and open up new imaginaries for networked life, not as a return, but as a reconfiguration that insists on participation, responsibility, and possibility in the present.

In order to contextualise the Error 406 Netstalgia Not Acceptable open call, we comissioned an essay by curator and researcher Doreen Ríos. In her text In Search of the Cannibal Internet, Ríos argues that the internet should not be understood only as a "dead" or "zombie" space overrun by bots, AI, and corporate platforms, but also as a site of creative resistance. By reclaiming the historically racist image of the cannibal, Ríos proposes the idea of a "Cannibal Internet": one that appropriates and repurposes digital infrastructures from within rather than abandoning them.

The essay was also published through The Institute of Network Cultures.