AND FESTIVAL 2026
Over one transformative weekend, AND Festival returns to deliver extraordinary art and site-responsive installations, collaborating with visionary artists, creative technologists and collaborators that push the boundaries of immersive experiences.
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 turbulent 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.
AND Festival 2026 presents playful opportunities to encounter the in-between. Join us to reimagine relationships between humans, landscapes, and the built environments we inhabit that inform our daily rhythms.
All events are free to attend. Booking is encouraged for our festival commissions Krumville, Northern Passage: A Quest To Hopian, Acoustic Memories and durational work Intra Protocol to guarantee entry at your preferred time.
Presenting works:
Acoustic Memories (new commission for AND Festival)
MONOM
Elsecar Heritage Centre
Fri 25 – Sun 27 September \\ 11-7pm with slots on the hour – ticket booking encouraged ↗
An immersive spatial audio installation exploring the acoustic memory of extraction and the hidden infrastructures beneath Barnsley’s industrial landscape. A new commission for AND Festival 2026.
Krumville (new commission for AND Festival)
Dian Joy
Barnsley Civic
Fri 25 – Sun 27 September \\ 10-6pm with slots on the hour – ticket booking encouraged ↗
Krumville is a multi-screen film exploring memory, perception, and mediated experience through a fictional town created from remixing algorithmic image-making and personal recollections. A new commission for AND Festival 2026.
Northern Passage: A Quest To Hopian (new commission for AND Festival)
Jazmin Morris
Barnsley Market, The Glass Works
Fri 25 – Sun 27 September \\ 10-6pm with sots on the hour – ticket booking encouraged ↗
Northern Passage: A Quest To Hopian is an interactive three-level game inspired by real locations in Barnsley, gradually transforming from sparse and inert landscapes into vibrant worlds. A new commission for AND Festival 2026.
Chaos Theory
Metahaven
Elsecar Heritage Centre
Fri 25 – Sun 27 September \\ 11-7pm \\ Drop-in
An audiovisual poem structured around the dialogues and wanderings of two characters confronting the contemporary world and its puzzling flows of interconnected phenomena.
Hapi Tomorrow (World premiere)
Visuals by Chepertom (Thomas Collet) and music by ZULI
Screening as part of SERVER at Barnsley Civic
Time TBA
An audio-visual work mapping a landscape where the birth and death of human civilisation ripple across the computer screen. A world premiere.
Intra Protocol (new iteration)
Sally Golding and Matt Spendlove
Parkway Cinema
Sat 26 Sept \\ 4-7pm \\ Durational – ticket booking encouraged ↗
Intra Protocol is a site-responsive immersive audiovisual work that transforms the cinema into a living instrument.
SERVER
Going Away.tv
Barnsley Civic
Fri 25 – Sun 27 September \\ 10.30-5.30pm \\ Drop-in
SERVER is a continuous, 7-hour, artist-led festival film channel creating space for critical reflection, speculative storytelling and interdisciplinary exchange.
(W)HOLE (adapted iteration)
Clusterduck
Locations TBA
Fri 25 – Sun 27 September \\ 10-6pm \\ Public Relam
(W)HOLE uncovers hidden digital infrastructures through sculpture and AR, using manhole covers as portals to reveal interconnected systems.
Unsecuring Infrastructures
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’s core commissions.
Selected projects have been developed and presented with support from the British Council, Immersive Arts, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Liverpool John Moores University, Parkway Cinema and other project partners. See individual event pages for full commissioning and presentation credits.
The AND Festival 2026 team:
Isaiah Agoro, Festival Social Media & Digital Content Producer // Daaad, Technical Production // Rachel Down, Festival Producer (Operations), Rebecca Edwards (she/her), Festival Programme Producer and Associate Curator // Kate Fox (They/Them), Access Consultant // Lou Hargreaves (she/her), Director of Producing and Operations // Sophie Hayter (she/her), Assistant Producer // Tadeo Lopez-Sendon (he/him), Chief Executive // Sophia Luk, Digital Assistant Producer // Edwina McEachran (she/they), Marketing and Communications Manager // Victoria Yates, Finance Manager
With thanks to our collaborators:
Chris Foster Photography, Mind the Film, Studio Koseda and The Sugar Factory
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AND Festival 2026 is produced by Abandon Normal Devices. 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, Right Up Our Street, Wigan Council and Lancaster University. 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
AND26 identity design: Studio Koseda