Unsecuring Infrastructures approaches AND Festival 2026 as a live research environment for thinking critically and speculatively about Barnsley’s designation as the UK’s first Tech Town, through the lens of the festival artworks.
Barnsley is a former coal and steel town now being positioned as a national testbed for AI-enabled civic transformation. In the midst of this transition, the artists featured at AND 2026 engage infrastructure in its broadest sense: industrial legacies, digital systems, public space, memory, identity, extraction, circulation and civic life. Unsecuring Infrastructures uses encounters with these works to produce unique conditions for cross-disciplinary, place-based thinking: asking what the artworks make visible about the practical and political realities of technological transformation.
Across the festival weekend, invited experts and selected participants will experience the festival together before taking part in structured interdisciplinary discussions. Their conversations will generate concepts, diagrams, scenarios and critical propositions, forming the basis of a post-festival publication: part festival reflection, part research report exploring AI, identity and infrastructure in the UK’s first Tech Town.
Unsecuring Infrastructures for AND Festival 2026 is developed by Lancaster University through Unsecurities Lab, an interdisciplinary research initiative exploring how contemporary art can function as research infrastructure, initiated by Dr Nathan Jones at Security Lancaster. This edition is presented in partnership with Liverpool John Moores University’s Institute of Art and Technology (IAT) and Experimental Technologies Lab (ETL), led by Dr Mark Wright.