2026 Theme
Resistance: hacktivism, diversions and artistic tactics in the digital age
Digital technologies have been infiltrating every aspect of our lives for 20 years now, touching everything from the intimate realm to geopolitical dynamics. Today, artists provide a necessary counter-narrative, acting as witnesses, critical observers and agents of change. For its 2026 edition, the Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques, which takes place between Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Arles, Istres and Avignon, proposes to question the modalities of artistic resistance faced with the normative, extractivist and oppressive logic of contemporary technologies.
The theme of resistance, explored from the perspective of digital cultures, creates a space for diverse reflection, at the crossroads of activism, subversion tactics, and artistic gestures of disobedience. The idea is to explore how digital practices – whether they stem from performance, installation, live performance, augmented reality, video or algorithmic writing – can become spaces for symbolic, political and aesthetic struggle.
To resist is to oppose, divert, hack, disturb.
It is also to subvert, transform the impact, cross the fault, build in the crack, and create.
But some forms of struggle do not shout, rather they dance, laugh, and sing. These approaches do not deny reality, they do not weaken it – they choose to experience it differently. They create spaces of collective power, desirable fictions, rituals of resistance based on relationship rather than confrontation.
Rather than being in opposition, these two dimensions coexist in contemporary artistic practices, offering a range of sensitive and political responses.
Metaphorically speaking, resisting is also a poetics of the obstacle, a balancing force, a capacity to slow down, redirect and filter. To resist is not to block – it is to bring another dynamic into existence within an imposed flow.
We will be able to address these issues from the perspective of several critical axes, albeit ones that remain open at this point, and to be developed based on the projects proposed.
- Hacktivism as an artistic practice
With mass surveillance, algorithmic censorship and data privatisation now a globalised reality, hacktivist artists have been devising resistance tactics, including critical intrusion into systems, hacking protocols and the re-appropriation of codes. The Biennale seeks to question these practices not only as forms of political expression, but also as aesthetic gestures that render invisible structures visible.
- Aesthetics of diversion and poetics of dissonance
Diversion is an essential mode of action for digital artists. One that allows them to subvert signs, infiltrate official channels, and blur hegemonic discourses. How can interfaces be diverted? What does to disrupt an artificial intelligence mean? How can databases be poeticised? Artists are invited to explore these tension-filled avenues by creating works that fracture the conventional use of technologies.
- Intimate resistance: vulnerability, bodies and subjectivities
Resisting also means reaffirming vulnerable subjectivities in light of the violence of technological devices. Artists are invited to reflect on how digital practices might embody the body, memory, care or dissidence. The idea is to view the digital realm as a place of friction and reinvention of sensibility, of re-territorialisation of our imaginaries.
- Aesthetics of resilience: care, memory, restoration
Beyond protest, some artists opt for restorative gestures. They address wounded memory, emotional saturation. Here, resilience here becomes a poetics of care – for bodies, territories, stories, and digital infrastructures themselves.
- Counter-mapping and technopolitical disorientation
By diverting surveillance tools, artists can also produce alternative maps, minority or invisible narratives, which put the logic of control and exploitation into question. These are the types of voluntary disorientation – in space, language, and data – that the Biennale wishes to highlight.
- Shadow aesthetics and strategies of disappearance
Lastly, in an age fixated with visibility and transparency, a number of artistic practices choose disappearance, camouflage, anonymity, or even silence. How can one create in the gaps, the unsaid, the shadows? Resistance can also be expressed in silence, in opacity, in the refusal to feed the machine.
- Technological fictions and alternative imaginaries
To resist is also to imagine. To imagine other technological futures, other digital ontologies, other types of relationships between humans, machines and living things. Speculative artworks propose alternative worlds, between makeshift utopia and critical dystopia, between political fabrication and symbolic creation.
An invitation to consider the digital realm differently
The Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques 2026 is an invitation to consider digital technology through the lens of dissidence, through artworks that disrupt the obvious, scramble signals, open breaches and offer means for emancipation in our society to reconnect with the original utopias – particularly those of the internet.