CODE Programme 2025
Reclaiming Digital Agency
Initiated in 2021, CODE was fashioned as a response to growing concerns about the loss of agency on digital platforms that have become integral components of contemporary life. Drawing its participants largely from Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, CODE brings together artists and non-artists, politicians and policy-makers, researchers, citizens, and any bright-eyed, passionate supporter of our digital autonomy to engage in critical discourse and artistic intervention.
Driven by the motivation to influence public policy at both the national and international levels, as well as raise awareness of those issues that concern our digital citizenship, CODE foregrounds interdisciplinary collaboration between diverse personal profiles to construct new perspectives and recalibrate old ones.
Each instance of CODE begins with an open-call for applicants. The selected participants then have the opportunity to work closely together over a three month long co-creation process consisting of a series of events including workshops, a hackathon, an online exhibition, and more.
During this period too, IMPAKT develops interventions and campaigns intended to expose and highlight the power of Big-Tech companies and compel politicians, policy-makers, and citizens to take action.
CODE 2025 @ ARS ELECTRONICA
From September 3 to 7, 2025, Linz will once again become a hotspot for the international media art scene. Exhibitions, performances, concerts and conferences will be held at festival locations throughout the city, most of them at POSTCITY, the festival’s central venue.
Every year CODE brings together artists and non-artists in a five-month process of inspiration, discussion, collaboration and co-creation. They work together in groups to produce digital art installations, interactive media, performances, immersive experiences and artistic interventions. All the works, each in their own way, address questions that are central to the CODE project: How can we improve the agency we have over our digital lives? How can we become less dependent on Big Tech? How can governments better protect our digital rights, and how can we convey the urgency to act? What steps can we, as concerned citizens, users, researchers and artists, take to support the critical process? This year’s exhibition presents two of the projects, Technosferatu and V.I.B.E. and a workshop Canary in the Coal Mine, produced by the groups that participated in CODE 2025. We will also present the CODE Fortune Cookies.
Read more about the projects, the workshop and the fortune cookies
CODE 2025 @ CPDP BRUSSELS
For three days, CODE participants made the CPDP conference in Brussels their basecamp — immersing themselves in discussions, insights and connections! Some groups from the 2025 edition had the opportunity to display their work in progress, inviting valuable feedback and engagement. Three projects from the 2024 edition, Espresso Exposé, Toyboi, and Dual Narratives, were also showcased, exploring digital culture, surveillance, and technological resistance. CPDP provided a unique space where the participants could engage with policymakers, researchers, politicians, industry professionals, and many more, fostering critical dialogue. CODE participants Susannah Montgomery, Gema FB Martín , Ayoon Roo, Freyja van den Boom, Antoine Begon, Minka de Regt and the mentor Ahnjili Zhupparris, also organised a panel in the Culture Club on “Reclaiming Digital Agency: Art, Research & Resistance in the Age of Platform Power.” exploring how creative, critical, and research-based practices can help us push back against the dominance of digital platforms.
CODE FORTUNE COOKIES
In 1994, web pioneer Lou Montulli invented the browser software cookies. Nowadays, we all accept cookies every day when we visit a website for the first time. The name of these internet cookies is derived from the tradition of fortune cookies, the Chinese custom of hiding a message in the cookies that you sometimes get in a restaurant or café.
CODE’s Fortune Cookies give a twist to this well-known tradition with special one-liners and good wishes for our digital future. The texts hidden in the CODE Fortune Cookies contain advice, wishes and future perspectives about digital rights, a society in which technology is used fairly and a better digital future. In this way, they offer a moment of pause and reflection, and connect the playful ritual of opening a cookie with deeper questions about autonomy, platform power and our relationship with digital systems.
Workshop 6: 21 June
The sixth and final workshop will take place in Utrecht and provide the last opportunity for the groups of participants to analyse and assess each other’s work, make those final finishing touches, and prepare to move forward into the next stage of CODE 2025: presenting their works at festivals and conferences, as well as an online exhibition.
Workshop 5: 7 June
The fifth workshop will take place again in Utrecht. By this point, participants should have moved fully on from idea-generation into the physical construction or otherwise development of the project’s final product.
The groups will engage in creative artistic exchange with one another to help each participant actualise their potential.
Workshop 4: 10 May
The fourth workshop will take place in Utrecht just a few weeks after the third, giving the groups enough time to implement those revisions, amendments, or new ideas suggested by other participants or the mentors themselves.
Additionally, the three weeks between this workshop and the next will ideally allow the groups ample time to assess the development of their project and begin–if not already–the physical assembly of their artwork.
Workshop 3: 25 April
The third workshop will take place in Utrecht and provide the participants another opportunity to consult with the other groups, provide and receive feedback, and further refine their project ideas.
Workshop 2: 12 April
The second CODE workshop will be held in Utrecht and aimed at providing the participants’ groups with feedback on the status of their project.
In between dedicated collaborative sessions, a number of mentors will be available to provide assistance, such as Dasha Ilina, Benjamin Gaulon, and Ahnjili Zhuparris.
Hackathon: 28-30 March
Just over a month after the online kick-off meeting, the three-day Hackathon will take place in the Belgian city Mechelen and serve as the first opportunity for the participants to meet each other in person, get to know one another, and begin to formulate the central issues they hope to address during this co-creation process.
During the Hackathon, participants will take part in a number of dialogues, small workshops, and group projects in order to stimulate debate and discourse. The Hackathon helps build a foundation of collaboration over which the participants can continue to develop and discuss ideas throughout the duration of the programme.
Workshop 1: 15 March
Following the kick-off meeting in February, the first workshop will take place online on 15 March. This first workshop provides the opportunity for participants to further develop a concrete project proposal within a discursive space.
Kick-Off Meeting: 22 February
Taking place online towards the end of February, the kick-off meeting will bring all the participants together in dialogue and officially set the CODE 2025 programme in motion.
CODE 2025 Participants Announced
Just after our last festival, we put out an open call for participants in the fifth instance of CODE: Reclaiming Digital Agency and received a number of applications from artists, researchers, and concerned citizens alike. We were looking for candidates residing in Germany, Belgium, or the Netherlands and concerned with digital rights and the power of Big-Tech corporations, and we are now happy to announce those who we hope to engage in critical dialogue about our digital autonomy.
These thirty participants were selected on the basis of their motivation with the express aim to produce an exhibition intended to influence public policy, raise awareness, and outline actionable, legislative steps we can take to protect ourselves as digital citizens and online consumers.
Meet them here! CODE 2025 participants
CODE 2025 Open Call
The open call is closed, but if you’d like to read more, you can follow this link:
CODE 2025 is the fifth edition of CODE, and is organised by IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture], Werktank (Leuven), NØ SCHOOL (Nevers), PrivacySalon (Brussels) and Kunsthal Mechelen. CODE 2025 is realised thanks to the kind support of Creative Industries Fund NL and laureate of the programme IF Export 2024 from the Institut Français.