AND FESTIVAL 2026
FRI 25- SUN 27 SEPTEMBER 2026 \\ BARNSLEY, UK
Over one transformative weekend, AND Festival returns to deliver extraordinary art and site-responsive installations, collaborating with visionary artists and creative technologists that push the boundaries of immersive experiences.
Activating in Yorkshire for the first time, the festival ignites Barnsley into a temporary site to test ambitious new ideas and platform radical international and local artists.
From innovative XR (Extended Reality) installations, performances and screenings, to stimulating talks from leading experts, the festival meets Barnsley’s ambitions to be the UK’s leading digital town, and to the North’s identity as a place of creativity, innovation and cultural exchange where new ideas are tested and futures are imagined. Building on our legacy of adventurous and experimental festival offerings, we’ll be playfully interrogating the hidden infrastructures that shape how we live and connect, from distribution hubs, subterranean trails and tunnels, to the digital, cultural and industrial networks embedded in the landscape.
We invite you to AND26 to reimagine our collective connection to an industrial landscape that dictates, disrupts and informs our daily rhythms.
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AND Festival 2026 is hosted by Barnsley Museums and Barnsley Civic, developed in partnership with Barnsley Council, and part of a wider touring programme with partners Full of Noises, Mediale, Right Up Our Street, and Wigan Council. Supported using public funding through the National Lottery by Arts Council England.
About AND Festival
Abandon Normal Devices (AND) delivers a biennial festival of new cinema, digital culture and art. Attracting the most innovative artists from across the world and inviting them to work in collaboration with academics and anarchists from across the realms of technology, science and film.
AND Festival 2021 took us on an extraordinary journey responding to the Manchester Ship Canal and River Mersey. The programme followed the flows of shipping, energy and political power structures, from container ports on our doorsteps to the depths of the ocean floor; through ecosystems bound up with industrial chemicals, minerals and microplastics, to their effects on our planet, human and non-human bodies.
Watch the highlights from AND21
Image credit: Magna Park, Milton Keynes a2n.co.uk; Tunnel Gricer on 28dayslater.co.uk