2026 Theme

Resistance: hacktivism, diversions and artistic tactics in the digital age

For the past 20 years, digital technologies have permeated every aspect of our lives – from our private lives to geopolitical dynamics – with artists acting as witnesses, critical observers, and also as agents of a much-needed counter-narrative. For its 2026 edition, the Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques, which takes place across Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Arles, Avignon, Istres and Port de Bouc, sets out to examine the forms of artistic resistance in the face of the normative, extractivist and oppressive logics of contemporary technologies.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

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.

Guest exhibition curator: Jean Paul Fourmentraux

For the 2026 edition, themed “Resistance,” CHRONIQUES has invited Jean-Paul Fourmentraux to serve as guest curator. His work on digital countercultures makes him the ideal person to explore the artistic practices of resistance and subversion at the heart of this theme.

La programmation artistique de la Biennale se construit à plusieurs mains et dans une logique de coopération entre les partenaires du territoire. Le comité artistique de la Biennale se constitue avec la direction artistique et les équipes de CHRONIQUES, les partenaires et personnalités extérieures invitées. Les choix sont faits en concertation durant de longs mois. Les projets artistiques sélectionnés et accueillis résonnent avec la thématique choisie et reflètent d’une manière ou d’une autre les valeurs et engagements de CHRONIQUES portés sur la diversité des genres, des esthétiques et des formes, les identités plurielles, le respect humain et l’attention aux enjeux environnementaux et sociétaux.