Patchlab Festival 2026: Dream Sim

The fifteenth edition of Patchlab Digital Art Festival is a moment to look back at fifteen years of digital art and Art & Tech through the lens of technological breakthroughs and the expectations that accompanied them. Since 2012, Patchlab has introduced Polish audiences to new developments in digital art and opened up debate on how technologies transform imagination and our experience of reality. In 2026, the question of the future of technology increasingly becomes a question about the future of humanity.

For decades, technology has been a space onto which we projected our dreams. It was meant to expand freedom and creativity, democratise access to knowledge, free us from the limitations of the body, time and space, and open up new ways of understanding the world. Dream Sim confronts these promises with the reality we live in today. Which dreams have come true, which have been absorbed by the logic of markets and platforms, and which have turned into their own opposites?

Dream Sim refers both to the dream of a technological future and to its darker reflection, the moment when a fulfilled promise begins to resemble an unsettling dream, or even a nightmare. The same technologies can expand possibilities while limiting agency, opening new spaces of experience while simultaneously designing them for us. Technology extends the boundaries of what is possible, but does not necessarily deepen human experience. A world without friction, delay or limitation is becoming a world of constant optimisation. If everything can be generated, predicted and personalised, might it be precisely chance, uncertainty and limitation that give experience its meaning?

Artificial intelligence has moved beyond the experimental stage to become a general-purpose technology affecting an increasing number of areas of life. At the same time, systems that were meant to serve us increasingly act as intermediaries: they select information, make decisions, recommend, interpret, create and communicate on our behalf. We do not always know whether there is a human being on the other side of an image, text or conversation. Paradoxically, the more effectively technology simulates human creativity, presence and agency, the more urgent the question becomes of what in human experience cannot be simulated.

Dream Sim unfolds in the tension between dreaming and simulation. Technologies that were meant to help us realise imagined worlds increasingly generate those worlds themselves. AI produces images, voices, stories and memories; digital models simulate places, bodies and processes; XR allows us to experience alternative realities. Yet it is no longer only images and spaces that are being simulated, but also conversation, personality, presence and agency. The boundary is therefore becoming less clearly drawn between the real and the virtual, and increasingly between lived experience and its technological equivalent.

In this context, imagination takes on particular importance. Do generative technologies expand it, or are they beginning to replace it with ready-made simulations of what has already been thought and seen? Simulation can become a laboratory for the future, a space in which worlds that do not yet exist can be tested. The problem begins when a tool for designing possibilities starts to design our possibilities for us.

Art remains a space in which these processes can be observed and disrupted. In response to the flood of deepfakes and AI-generated imagery, something resembling Surrealism 2.0 is emerging: a turn towards subjectivity, materiality and ambiguity as forms of resistance to digital illusion. At the same time, the importance of human agency in the creative process is becoming increasingly visible: technology acquires meaning through the intention, choice and action of the artist. Hence the growing significance of phygital practices, which connect digital processes with the body, matter and physical space, where experience does not end on a screen but takes place here and now.

The title remains deliberately open. Dream can mean both aspiration and dream, including one that begins to slip out of control; Sim can be a tool for realising imagination, but also a system that increasingly begins to shape it for us. Dream Sim therefore evokes dreaming and desire, simulation and simulacrum, speculation and the design of possible futures. It also sounds like the name of a technology that could appear on the market tomorrow under the slogan Download Your Future, experience tomorrow before it arrives. Yet behind this promise lies a fundamental question: who is actually designing the future we desire? Us, or systems that are becoming increasingly effective at predicting our needs, behaviours and imaginaries?

The fifteenth edition of Patchlab does not propose a vision of the technological future. Instead, it confronts the expectations and promises we have associated with it over the years with present-day reality. What have we gained, and what have we given up in exchange for convenience, speed and automation? How can we preserve agency in the face of processes whose scale and dynamics extend beyond individual decisions? And how can we design the future while remaining conscious of the mechanisms that increasingly shape our choices, needs and imaginaries?

Perhaps the most important challenge today is not to predict which technology will come next, but to preserve our ability to imagine the future beyond the logic of prediction, optimisation and technological inevitability, and to formulate new, more conscious dreams about the role of technology in our lives.

The anniversary edition is accompanied by a publication offering an impressionistic history of fifteen years of Patchlab Digital Art Festival, woven from stories of successive editions, recurring themes, artists and their work, as well as the questions that returned alongside a changing technological reality. The book is both an archive of the festival and a map of the transformations that have shaped digital art, technology and Art & Tech culture over this period. It allows us to see the history of Patchlab not only as a record of the festival’s development, but also as a testimony to changing visions of the technological future.

The full programme of the 15th edition of Patchlab, including the complete line-up of artists and events, will be announced on 17 September.

Elwira Wojtunik-Láng
Artistic Director of Patchlab Festival