Launched in 2018 and organised by CHRONIQUES, the Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques is the highlight of digital arts and culture in the Sud region. By exploring the visual arts, sound art and the performing arts, the Biennale examines the presence and use of digital technology and new technologies in art, takes over public spaces and gives a voice to national and international artists from diverse backgrounds.
For this fifth edition, the Biennale will take place across several towns and cities in the South region — Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Avignon, Arles, Istres and Port de Bouc — with a multidisciplinary programme featuring French, Mediterranean and international contributions, running from late October 2026 to January 2027.
Resistance – hacktivism, diversions and artistic tactics in the digital age
This theme explores how digital practices – whether drawn from performance, installation, the performing arts, augmented reality, video or algorithmic writing – can become spaces for symbolic, political and aesthetic struggle.
Resistance
hacktivism, diversions and artistic tactics in the digital age
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 propose several areas of development:
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.
Guest of honour: la Saison Méditerranée 2026
Having previously welcomed Quebec, Taiwan, Belgium and Lithuania, this fifth edition forms part of a broader Mediterranean narrative, celebrating the diversity of its artists and creators engaged in a wide range of digital art forms, and will be a highlight of la Saison Méditerrannée 2026.
The curatorial programme will be structured around a central theme that will serve as the guiding thread throughout the programme, enabling the richness and diversity of digital practices in the Mediterranean, France and internationally to be explored from a variety of perspectives.