We live in a present saturated by predefined scripts, hungry algorithms, and extractivist protocols, increasingly turning us to providers within systems we did not build. As the speed and complexity of these routines accelerate, they incapacitate our fundamental need to actually process what is happening around and within us. This procedural occupation alienates; it sacrifices agency, spontaneity, and our capacity for genuine thought. When we surrender the field to linear procedures, fixed meanings, and to fake interactivity, we lose the essential qualities needed to navigate and heal a fracturing world.

Nobody lives in outcomes alone. We exist within the doing, and what we repeatedly do shapes what we become. Therefore, the process is the message: how we do what we do – and how we design infrastructures and protocols – matters. In this spirit, experimental and undetermined processes driven by continuous feedback are a conscious opposite to the authoritarian principle of the end justifies the means, and an alternative way to cope with systemic anxiety. As an attitude and method it is a fundamental constituent of artistic work and of CTM’s own history. This is why the 2027 edition of CTM shifts its attention to what process means in its different iterations, challenging vertical, linear systems, and championing horizontal frameworks where the process itself becomes the outcome.

In music and art, this manifests in subcultures operating as adaptive organisms, in long-term research and collective practices. We find it in the vulnerability of real-time improvisation, in sonic dialogues with the concrete specificities of architecture, and in the dynamic feedback loops on egalitarian dancefloors. It appears as strategies to crack open and co-create with technological systems, and in discursive spaces of horizontal skill-sharing. In times of instability, engaging in these relational, decentralised approaches becomes an existential survival mechanism. But what are the preconditions and protocols needed to initiate and live such processes?

We are aware that the language of process has long been captured, at times becoming the vocabulary of simulated participation for the sake of dissent management and growth. The frameworks we seek make room for setbacks, glitches, slowness, and repair. They allow for what philosopher Carl Mika calls worlding the world – opening possibilities outside of prescriptive futures, cultivating a resilient ontology of becoming. We do not romanticise openness. Improvisation is not the absence of rules, but the densest form of rule-making in real time. Processes demand commitment and friction; remaining unfinished is not the same as remaining uncommitted. Nor do we forget that process can be a privilege: the license to fail is unevenly distributed.

This approach is inherently political. An open, pluralistic society is structurally incomplete by design. Like a complex musical improvisation, democracy is an ongoing, horizontal process of continuous negotiation, trial and error, and productive friction. It is a rehearsal without a premiere. Whoever declares it finished has already abandoned it. Within CTM 2027, process…ing means resisting closure and elevating the collective acts of making and sharing above the polished artifact. In a world that demands finished results, we choose to remain unfinished, in relation, and present.