Abandon Normal Devices (AND) is renowned for producing the UK’s only nomadic, site-responsive digital arts festival, commissioning works that combine creativity, technology and science. The festival platforms extraordinary art in unexpected locations, from caves and car parks to forests and ferries, from multiplayer platforms and mines to observatories and online portals. In 2021 we went on an extraordinary journey responding to the Manchester Ship Canal and River Mersey, following the flows of shipping, energy and political power structures. In 2017 we explored themes of verticality and deep time in the caves and hills of Castleton in the Peak District National Park.

Activated in Yorkshire for the first time, the festival ignites Barnsley into a temporary site to test ambitious new ideas and platform radical international and UK artists.

In our 10th festival edition, we examine infrastructure as a lived material and cultural condition, illuminating the connection between people and place. We examine the networks, historical extraction legacies, and social climates that underpin contemporary life in the North of England.

Through a programme of immersive installation, durational performance, film premieres and stimulating talks from leading experts, the festival meets Barnsley’s ambitions to be the UK’s leading tech town, and the North’s identity as a place of creativity, innovation and cultural exchange.

Across sound, simulation, and participatory systems, the festival dwells in the liminal zones of place, where connection emerges over isolation, where infrastructures reveal the uneven geographies of industry, ecology, and community, where collective imaginaries take shape through shared experience.