In January 2026 we launched the sixth CODE open call for participants, in collaboration with Werktank, In-Fine and PrivacySalon. The call was open to anyone from Switzerland, Belgium and The Netherlands who shared our concern about digital rights and the power of big tech companies. Participants were selected on the basis of their motivation.

The aim of the CODE 2026 programme is to influence public policy on a national and international level, by creating awareness and by defining ways in which we can improve laws and legislation that will protect us as digital citizens and consumers. For the next months, from February until July 2026, we will therefore work closely together in a co-creation process consisting of a series of events: five workshops, a three-day hackathon, various presentations at inspiring festivals, and an online exhibition. We will develop interventions and awareness campaigns to expose the power of tech companies and to activate politicians, policymakers and citizens to take action.

MEET THE PARTICIPANTS OF CODE 2026:

Anneke ter Schure

Anneke ter Schure is a biologist, water quality researcher, and artist whose research-based practice is closely related to critical making. Combining biological data, research methods, creative coding, and physical media, she explores themes of life, death, exploitation, and care, with a focus on uncovering the unseen and unheard in our entanglement with living and non-living worlds.

Bernadette Geiger

Bernadette Geiger investigates the impact of technologies on society, particularly artificial intelligence, automation, and labour. Her work explores possibilities outside current paradigms, whether aesthetic, technological, economic, or related to use. She studied in Dresden and Rotterdam, and has performed as part of Prompt Battle at conferences and media festivals including re:publica, transmediale, and Beta Festival.

David Tiemstra

David Tiemstra works as an interaction artist/designer and creative technologist, developing interactive installations for other artists as well as his own practice. His work combines code-based processes with tactile media such as paper and fabric. Using machines like thermal printers and embroidery machines, he explores philosophies of technology, permacomputing, the online, and death.

Demi van Kuijk

Demi van Kuijk (she/her) is a Dutch-Romanian interdisciplinary maker and educator. Her work invites herself and others to listen closely to collective memories, oral histories, and everyday surroundings, translating these listening exercises into radio, interactive installations, language, and image. She currently works as a teacher in technologies and as a radio maker.

Foad Alijani

Foad Alijani is a research-oriented artist whose work moves through memory, imagination, lived experience, embodied perception, and environmental reflection. His practice takes shape through imaginal maps, light, installations, and films, exploring how inner and outer worlds intersect and transform one another. Since 2018, he has led Paadmaan Projects, a curatorial initiative connecting art, science, and technology.

Gera Pronk

Gera Pronk trained as a computer scientist and works as a lecturer in Computer Science at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, teaching programming languages such as Python and C++. Alongside her experience in the private and public sectors, research projects, and EU reviewing, she explores out-of-the-box thinking through poetry, painting, graphic arts, and collage.

Julie van Essen

Julie van Essen is an intermedia artist and social designer whose immersive installations decode complex systems such as blockchain and AI. Blending fashion, technology, and performance, she creates speculative interventions that distort digital aesthetics and challenge binaries. Her work explores glitch feminism and post-capitalist design, using error as a tool of resistance against systems of extraction.

Juliette Brederode

Juliette Brederode is an artist, researcher, and creative producer whose interdisciplinary practice moves between digital and physical spaces. Often site-responsive, her work explores questions shaped by technology and shifting boundaries between human and non-human actors. She investigates poetic friction as a critical tool, blending analogue and digital processes to inhabit in-between spaces where stories emerge.

Livia Ribichini

Livia Ribichini is a media artist and performer whose work moves between programming, light, and sensation. She explores how technologies reshape our perception of time, space, and identity, often creating installations that simulate living organisms through artificial systems. Embracing error, dysfunction, repetition, and slowness, she investigates the poetic and political dimensions of technological infrastructures.

Lucas Zuidema

Lucas Zuidema is a graphic designer and creative coder whose work focuses on the relationship between design and software. He develops his own software as part of his practice, using it to showcase artistic research, add interactivity to client work, and support other creatives. He also works with sound, podcast editing, role-playing games, and collaborative storytelling.

Mădălina Zgreabăn

Mădălina Zgreabăn is a researcher interested in language and artificial intelligence. She is currently pursuing a PhD in responsible AI at Utrecht University, with previous work on robustness testing, human alignment, humour, and insults. Her interests explore how we create, relate to, and embody technologies, and how they shape memory, emotion, and language.

Marit Hoefsloot

Marit Hoefsloot is a creative researcher at Waag Futurelab, working at the intersection of technology, culture, and collective imagination. With a background in philosophy of technology, she designs workshops, public programmes, and collaborative formats exploring how technological systems shape, and can be reshaped by, social values. In CODE, she researches queer digital agency on and off big tech platforms.

Ralf Lambie

Ralf Lambie is a creative strategist and conceptual designer working at the intersection of culture and everyday life. His work explores how systems and collective ideas shape meaning and social dynamics, and how this becomes visible in everyday behaviours, interactions, and shared situations. He focuses on togetherness, identity, value, symbols, language, and collective experiences.

Aleksandra Bychkova

Aleksandra Bychkova is an emerging artist and maker exploring the relationship between technology, society, and contemporary culture. Her practice spans digital mediums such as TouchDesigner, Blender, and live coding, alongside analogue approaches through mixed-media experimentation. Interested in controversial and polarising topics, she uses provocative and unconventional artistic strategies to challenge perceptions and create spaces for reflection and dialogue.

Simon Pillaud

Simon Pillaud (he/him) is a visual artist from western France, currently based in Amsterdam. Trained in photography, he draws inspiration from mass production and popular culture, approaching entertainment overly seriously to uncover patterns in digital images. His interactive installations use low-tech systems to explore algorithms, shared narratives, collective empowerment, and the mythical dimension of technology.

Yidi Lola Wang

Yidi Lola Wang is a systems architect and curatorial artist investigating how technical and cultural infrastructures can be reimagined through collective governance. As founder of Eternal Terra Ear (ÉTÈ), she develops policy initiatives linking planetary-scale data and local sovereignty. Her work creates “Trust Layer” systems that translate environmental data into verifiable digital twins and spatialised acoustic experiences.

Emily W. Bernstein

Emily W. Bernstein is an interdisciplinary artist based in The Hague. Her work explores how memory, archives, and technological systems shape our understanding of the past and our role in narrating it. Working across installation, moving image, objects, and text, she investigates how generative techniques and archival fragments reconstruct or distort historical and cultural narratives.

Hans Lammerant

Hans Lammerant has a background in law, philosophy, statistics, peace work, and human rights activism. Inspired by investigative aesthetics, his work focuses on restoring digital agency through investigative research. In recent years, he has mapped arms trade through paper trails, digital traces, and OSINT, turning evidence into something judicial and political systems cannot ignore.

Dmytro Tentiuk

Dmytro Tentiuk is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, researcher, and designer from Kyiv, Ukraine. His video installations and audiovisual live performances explore the boundary between digital and physical realities. He completed a Tech Fellowship at the Rijksakademie, is part of PHOTINUS, co-founded _mediaklub, and collaborated on the award-winning opera Chornobyldorf.

Izadora Yamamoto

Izadora Yamamoto, also known as /Futuradora, is a meta-poet, cultural strategist, and creative working at the intersection of AI and decentralised technologies. With over 20 years of experience in cultural communication and community building, she connects emerging tech with human-centred storytelling, exploring identity, authorship, digital ownership, and transitions from Web2 to digital assets.

Chonglian Yu

Chonglian Yu is a composer and computer musician whose work focuses on computer music, multimedia installations, and networked systems. Yu is currently a doctoral researcher at the Orpheus Instituut in Ghent, developing a practice of cyber-physical composition through experimental wearable devices and shared computational infrastructures.

Félicien Goguey

Félicien Goguey is a media artist and interaction designer based in Geneva, Switzerland. He explores the creative potential of programming languages and new technologies, often using open-source tools to create interactive installations, performances, applications, and connected objects. His work investigates communication networks, their invisibility, and their political, social, and environmental consequences.

Luīze Acane

Luīze Acane is a cultural anthropologist and soon-to-be criminologist whose interests lie where society intersects with technology. She approaches digitalisation through a holistic lens, engaging with human rights in the age of big data and tech-bros, digital inclusion and exclusion, and online activism. Trained in academic research, she wants to translate her knowledge into artistic forms.

Lawrence Kudria

Lawrence Kudria (they/he) is a Ukrainian-born artist working at the intersection of immersive media, somatic interaction, and poetic minimalism. Through sensorium studio.lab, they create participatory environments shaped by biofeedback, touch, and co-creation. Their installations explore intimacy, empathy, and identity beyond language, proposing technology as a path toward connection, equality, and freedom.

Marta Revuelta

Marta Revuelta is a Geneva-based media artist and interaction designer working at the intersection of art, technology, and critical inquiry. Her practice investigates the political, ethical, and operational dimensions of AI, from algorithmic decision-making and machinic perception to synthetic media and autonomous weapons systems, making visible the power structures embedded in computational ecosystems.

Erwin Hoogerwoord

Erwin Hoogerwoord works across creative programming, generative art, live coding, and data/information visualisation. As an experimental creator, he develops curiosity-driven projects, tools, experiences, and sketches. In his role as product owner at Eindhoven University of Technology, he contributes to research data systems and research management processes supporting European science, research, and technological development.

 

CODE 2026 is the sixth edition of CODE, and is organised by IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture], Werktank (Leuven), In-Fine (Geneva) and PrivacySalon (Brussels). CODE 2026 is realised thanks to the kind support of Creative Industries Fund NL, Flemisch Authorities and ProHelvetia.