What forms of togetherness or individuality are possible when digital tech mediates interaction?

Today, solitude and connection no longer function in opposition. VDC 2026 examines this blurring of intimacy and detachment, exposure and disappearance.

In a digital world, privacy is difficult to secure. Even inner states—emotions, attention, desire—can be captured by machine-recognition systems. At the same time, technical infrastructures produce forms of togetherness that confound assumptions about aesthetic and political representation. Visibility and recognition are not equivalent. For instance, people may circulate continuously while remaining ‘invisible’ to one another. ‘Belonging’, too, may depend on conformity to algorithmic norms or repeatable patterns—rather than difference.

Such tensions persist even through crisis, death, and the apparent ‘afterlife’. During armed conflict, advantage hinges on seeing and not being seen—a one-sided togetherness. At the same time, people endure violence in physical isolation while the world watches onscreen, unable or unwilling to respond. In the final instance, when someone dies, digital traces—profiles, posts, metadata—continue to circulate, complicating the distinction between presence and absence. And what are we to make of new spiritual movements that promise eternal life in ‘the cloud’?

As these and other examples indicate, digital mediation fundamentally reorganizes the ground on which both solitude and togetherness are constituted. VDC 2026 brings together artists and thinkers working at the intersection of technology and society to examine this phenomenon. Through artworks, performance, and discussion, the festival imagines what forms of connection and solitude are possible today.

The programme includes a major exhibition featuring The DOKU Trilogy of video works (2018–2025) by the celebrated Chinese artist Lu Yang. Combining video game aesthetics, motion-capture technology, and Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy, the trilogy asks identity might reside when consciousness can be rendered, replicated, and endlessly reborn.

Peter Kutin's audio-visual installation fills the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum's Tank Hall with disorienting light and sound—stripping machines built to separate the living from the dead of their function, and asking what remains in the silence.

The programme extends with talks, in which artists and researchers explore the social, political, and philosophical dimensions of digital mediation—from algorithmic visibility to the ethics of digital afterlife. Three newly commissioned online artworks extend the festival’s reach beyond its physical venues, meeting audiences on the platforms and networks where these questions already live. Through a digital music program, the festival also opens onto the dancefloor—a space that has always negotiated the tension between individual bodies and collective movement.

VDC 2026 offers is a set of encounters that take seriously the strangeness of the present moment. In a digital world that continuously reorganises the ground on which both solitude and togetherness are constituted, the festival asks what kinds of connection, withdrawal, and presence are still possible—and what they might yet become.

Music by Peter Kutin.

Video fragments from:
Peter Kutin and MONOCOLOR, 'clusterfuck' (2020)
Lu Yang
Joaquina Salgado
Kolbeinn Hugi, 'BeastQuest' (2025), '4Xtacy' (2023), 'Earth Day' (2022)
Apex Anima & FRZNTE
Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei, 'Open World' (2025)

Courtesy the artists.