KoLab Brings Processing Community Day to YU Festival
A four-day hackathon with ATEM Biennale, a coding jam and a real-time digital graffiti wall fill the Dortmunder U.
- When
- Oct. 22 to 25, 2026
- Where
- Dortmunder U, Leonie-Reygers-Terrasse, Dortmund
- Cost
- Free
At YU Festival in Dortmund, anyone can write on Collective Mess, an animated digital graffiti wall by Camilo Sandoval and Camilla Scholz that runs in the foyer of the Dortmunder U from Oct. 22 to 25. Built with tools written in Processing and wired to webcams and buttons, the wall redraws itself in real time as visitors add drawings, messages and moving images, and it keeps changing after they walk away.
The installation anchors the Processing Community Day programming that KoLab, Dortmund's Koproduktionslabor for digital art projects in North Rhine-Westphalia, runs inside YU Festival, a free four-day festival of digital art, workshops and talks. KoLab announced the program this week: a four-day hackathon called Connections, run with ATEM Biennale; a beginner creative-coding workshop on Oct. 22; and a coding jam on Oct. 24.
Raphael de Courville, the Processing Foundation's community lead, joins the Community Visions talk on Oct. 24 at 6 p.m. Elsewhere in the building, Sam Hopkins shows BAZE, an offline archive of videos, sounds, memes and texts kept on a local server, which visitors browse together and copy straight onto their own devices, and Darbyn Luisa Kalkuhl leads a workshop on cyberfeminist strategies. Admission is free.
Processing Community Days are locally organized gatherings built around the Processing Foundation's free creative-coding tools. The Dortmund edition was registered on the foundation's worldwide PCD map in July by its organizer, the artist Flor de Fuego, who also moderates the Community Visions talk.
For more reading, see the YU Festival program, the Processing Community Day map and KoLab's site.
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