art, tech & fun
Media Art Festival with Expo during Dutch Design Week from 17-25 October 2026 and longer @Veem Eindhoven.
With projects operating at the intersection of art and technology, Manifestations asks you how far technology defines your world, thinking and acting.
Curious about Virtual Worlds? Visit them here.
Bursting with young talent and stimulating projects, the exhibition promises to be the most talked-about part of Dutch Design Week once again.
This year, in person and online.
Scroll to under on this website, and watch the videos.
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programme
Theme 2026
All artists, designers and projects specially selected for Manifestations.
This page is updated weekly.
1. Censorship & Taboo
Digital technology is increasingly determining which information becomes visible, which voices are amplified and which quietly disappear.
This programme line investigates how political systems, algorithms, AI and platforms influence freedom of expression and public perception.
Surveillance Exclusion Mask
At the centre is a transparent mask that distorts biometric landmarks and disrupts AI-based facial recognition from various angles, whilst preserving facial expressions and human contact. The design responds to the growth of mega-databases, high-resolution cameras and commercial parties deploying real-time personal data for profiling and advertising.
The work shows that facial recognition is no longer merely a security tool, but has also become part of economic and societal power structures. Van Leeuwenstein raises fundamental questions about privacy, autonomy and the ability to maintain control over your own identity.
As an anchor piece, this opens the exhibition with an immediately recognisable experience. It demonstrates that censorship today does not just consist of banning words, but also of technology that determines who is seen, tracked or analysed.
This Is How You Take Away Freedom
The visitor enters a dark space with a dilapidated street wall, an ATM and three old telephone boxes. What begins as an innocuous action – withdrawing money – turns into an interactive theatrical experience in which an anonymous source tells of a secret handbook, manipulation techniques, mass surveillance and mechanisms of power.
With her background in performance, Boonstra builds an installation in which the visitor is not merely a spectator, but becomes part of the system themselves. The work demonstrates how freedom can be imperceptibly restricted by seemingly small choices and subtle forms of influence.
Where Van Leeuwenstein exposes the technical infrastructure of surveillance, Boonstra makes its societal consequences tangible. Together, both works form a powerful introduction to the central question of MUTE: who decides what may be said and done?
Trapped By Design – Labubu
AI and Autonomous Weapons
Thijmen Schep investigates how technology affects our freedom, privacy and societal relations. In his work, he makes the often invisible impact of data, algorithms and artificial intelligence visible and open to discussion. He is known for the concept of Social Cooling, which describes how people adapt their behaviour when they are continuously tracked, judged or monitored.
For Manifestations, Schep is developing new work focusing on artificial intelligence and autonomous weapon systems. The project investigates the ethical and societal consequences of technologies capable of independently selecting targets based on characteristics of specific population groups. As a result, the work raises urgent questions regarding power, control, discrimination and the role of algorithms in future conflicts.
Alongside his artistic practice, Schep advises organisations and governments on technology and privacy. He is the author of the book Design My Privacy, co-founder of SETUP, and received a Dutch Privacy Award for the Candle project.
I love a good war | mass surveillance is good actually
Diana creates digital worlds in which artificial intelligence, internet culture and contemporary power structures converge. Her work moves at the intersection of fascination and unease. Using AI, she constructs alienating universes that are simultaneously alluring, absurd and confronting.
At Manifestations, Diana exhibits work inspired by the aesthetics of AI culture and online imagery. In a visual style reminiscent of the hyperrealistic and seemingly innocent visual language of artists such as Pınar Yoldaş, she explores themes such as mass surveillance, digital control and the blurring boundary between the individual and the collective.
Her work raises questions about a future in which observation becomes the norm and privacy increasingly gives way to transparency. Is being constantly watched a threat to freedom, or does it actually give rise to a new form of connectedness? By wrapping these ideas in seductive and sometimes humorous imagery, Diana invites visitors to re-examine their own relationship with technology, surveillance and autonomy.
mass surveillance is good actually… if you understand its true nature… it is simply society experiencing itself… when the state watches you, you are one in unity with the universe… when we can see the actions of all.. the illusion of privacy lifted.. the shroud of doubt removed
Cyberaware
Our digital world is changing faster than our consciousness can keep up. We know there are cameras in public spaces and adapt our behaviour accordingly, but online we voluntarily give away our data without realising it. That is the paradox: Why are you alert offline, but naive online?
Gaza Strips
Series of narrow satellite images from Google Maps of Gaza. Where life once was, mainly rubble, sand and bulldozer tracks are now visible. In one of the images, the review of a kindergarten is still present: “A distinctive and creative kindergarten.” A painful reminder of a place that has since vanished.
Together, both works expose the distance between the development of weapons and their consequences. How far removed are we actually from war when it becomes part of our economy, technology and daily reality?
Would Not Recommend
A virtual bot wanders through the city and complains about it. During its wanderings, the bot collects negative Google Maps reviews and then reads out people's angriest comments.
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Take a seat behind a screen that resembles a slot machine. You scroll, click and just keep going. The endless scroll of social media works like a fruit machine: every new swipe promises a next reward.
From her personal struggle with phone addiction, Maria Mombers explores the relationship between human and machine. The installation shows how dopamine, algorithms and reward mechanisms keep making you come back. The endless stream of recommendations forms a feedback loop that imperceptibly exerts more and more influence on your daily life.
If algorithms increasingly determine what we look at, how we spend our time and what we consider important... how much of our voice is then truly our own? And how much is imperceptibly decided for us?
2. Unspoken
Not everything that is meaningful is spoken aloud. Shame, trauma, care and vulnerability often remain outside the public conversation.
Unspoken focuses on the space between speech and silence, showing that precisely the unspoken reveals a great deal about our society.
In 36,000 Ways
For 36,000 Ways, Karim Ben Khelifa collected fragments of rockets on the front line in Ukraine. Visitors are invited to hold one of these fragments in their hand. While holding the fragment, their heart rate is played back via a low, subterranean loudspeaker. The vibrations resonate through the body, creating an intense physical experience. The work connects a tangible remnant of war with the immediate reaction of one's own body.
A confronting experience for people who do not live in a war zone. By holding a fragment of a missile and feeling their own body's reaction, visitors are briefly connected to a reality that is daily life for millions of people.
Karim Ben Khelifa is a Belgian-Tunisian artist who explores how people relate to armed conflict. Drawing on his background as a war correspondent, he creates work about the way war is experienced, remembered and imagined.
title hipsick
Hipsick is known for her raw Rotterdam techno beats, combined with media art, theatre and stories about systemic failure, social norms and emotional struggles. Her work moves between performance, music and art installation, consciously seeking out the tension between the personal and the societal.
Normally, Hipsick presents her work in the form of live performances. For Manifestations, she is developing a new presentation by special request that will be present throughout the entire festival. This allows visitors to experience her work at any time, without being dependent on a specific performance or time.
With her signature blend of sound, vision and emotion, Hipsick brings themes such as alienation, the pressure of social systems and human vulnerability to life in a direct and physical way.
The Dance
La Danse is reminiscent of Picasso's sad harlequin, but also displays similarities to a medieval skeleton attempting to ward off and banish the plague through dance. The work is representative of the unsettling, at times sinister and even gruesome themes that are characteristic of Folkert de Jong's oeuvre.
Folkert de Jong is a sculptor and draughtsman. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, both in Amsterdam. During his studies he became fascinated by ‘people who completely lose their minds’. That fascination led to a dark, absurdist and morbid universe populated by zombies, mutants, maniacs, skulls and skeletons, with which he simultaneously seduces and confronts his audience.
De Jong’s sculptures refer both to history and the sculptural tradition and to themes from popular culture, such as horror, comics and fantasy. He does not work with classical materials like bronze or marble, but with everyday materials such as polystyrene and polyurethane foam. These materials strongly determine his characteristic use of colour, with shades such as baby blue and dirty yellow.
Initially, De Jong mainly created ‘environments’: installations of sculptures that form their own world and in which visitors can wander around. For instance, in 2000 he realised the project The Ilemauzer for the Vleeshal in Middelburg, named after a character from a seventeenth-century story about witch-hunting.
title KATRIJN WESTLAND
When you sit down and hold it gently, this soft, moving textile form comes to life. Air chambers within the textile respond to your touch, creating subtle movements. The more carefully you handle it, the more it seems to give back.
Katrijn Westland researches how people can build a relationship with materials. Instead of seeing textiles as a utility, she invites visitors to approach them as something that requires attention, care and closeness. Almost as if you are holding a baby or a vulnerable animal.
The work asks a simple yet poignant question: how do we communicate without words? Can touch, attention and care be a form of language? And what happens when we do not speak, but listen to the subtle responses of something that has no voice?
Inspired by Bart Hess, among others, whom we paired with Katrijn Westland (then an ArtEZ graduate) in 2021 for Manifestations. Katrijn has since been invited during DDW for Textile Innovation Labs in the Klokgebouw and from her Master's programme at the Kazerne.
Spoiled Milk
A human being or a cow?
Imagine yourself as a dairy cow in a dairy farm. Her body is being abused because we want to drink her milk.
She is involuntarily inseminated, her calf is removed after birth and then the cycle begins again until she is completely destroyed.
Why do we take that for granted, while we would find the same situation unacceptable in humans?
By blurring the line between human and cow, this work shows how the female body is exploited in the livestock industry.
Both human women and cow women are reduced to a body that serves others: as a sex object or a milking machine.
The Slime Behind Your Eyes
Warm liquid is dripping from my entrails.
The sun shines so brightly in the morning.
I spit out my sense of self,
to become part of the water in the sink.
In this long-duration performance, a trans performer embraces a giant snail. The damaged skin, covered in hundreds of small scratches, remains visible. The body becomes vulnerable, tangible and part of another form of communication.
Inspired by the way snails and slugs communicate with each other via mucus, Nik Esmeijer is researching how humans too can make connection in different ways. Snails use chemoreceptors to ‘taste’ where they are and who they are with. Furthermore, they can be both male and female at the same time.
The Slime Behind Your Eyes questions ideas on gender, heteronormativity and reproduction, and explores queer and asexual forms of intimacy, connection and commu – nication.
What if nature shows that our ideas about masculinity, femininity and intimacy are not at all that self-evident? What forms of living together are still hardly seen or heard?
Detailed Talks Conversation Cabinet
“I feel seen by this work.” That is a reaction Amber hears regularly. As a social designer with autism and ADHD, she developed a space where people who feel alone in their way of being can meet each other and understand one another better. The installation consists of a collection of conversation starters and a workshop space where hand-drawn association cards, images, metaphors and objects get the conversation going. By using not only words, but also senses and imagination, space is created for a different way of communicating. The work invites visitors to slow down, truly listen and be curious about the other person's perspective. You discover that two people can look at the exact same thing, yet experience it completely differently. And that those different perspectives do not have to oppose one another, but can actually exist side by side. And perhaps that makes you feel just a little bit more seen yourself.
Breathing: Inside/Out
Breathe out into the installation and become part of a living experiment. The micro-organisms and fungal spores that you exhale with every breath become part of a growing ecosystem.
Air is more than just empty space. It is a shared living environment in which humans, fungi and other micro-organisms move around. Via our skin, clothing and breath they travel with us and cross the boundaries of what we consider ‘ourselves’.
The bio-art installation poses a simple yet confronting question: do we actually exist as completely separate individuals? Or do we share our bodies with millions of other life forms? And what does that mean for our idea of clean, dirty, self and other?
Undercurrent
Lie down on the platform and close your eyes. Through infrasonic vibrations, you experience sound not via your ears, but through your body. The composition only reveals itself once you make physical contact with the work.
By working below the threshold of audibility, Wouter van den Elzen shifts the focus from looking and listening to feeling. You are no longer a distant spectator, but become part of the installation. Your body is simultaneously listener, instrument and receiver.
Subgrade originated from research into works of art that cannot be captured or documented. What remains afterwards is not a recording or an image, but a memory that continues to resonate through your body for a long time. What happens when you can only experience something by feeling it?
My Room Is Our Room <3
For centuries, the bedroom was the place where girls spent most of their time. Whilst boys were encouraged to explore the world, for many girls the bedroom became a place of identity formation, but also of seclusion. It was precisely there that friendships, stories and experiences were born that rarely found a place outside the four walls of the bedroom.
Met My Room is Our Room <3 Benedetta Faccani gives that space a new meaning. The bedroom is no longer a private place, but a place where knowledge, experiences and stories are shared. For Benedetta, ‘the girl’ does not stand for age or biology, but for anyone who dares to question existing norms and makes room for gentleness, playfulness and a different way of living together.
The installation consists of two connected spaces. In the first space, a video essay takes you into Benedetta’s research. Beyond that, you step into a partitioned bedroom. Behind the curtains is a single bed that has been extended to make room for others. Outside hang house rules, inspired by the rules of girls' bedrooms and queer communities alike. Not to restrict people, but to create the conditions for a different kind of encounter.
During Manifestations, the bedroom is activated by conversations with visitors. Thus, a living archive of voices and experiences that long remained behind closed doors grows.
Temple of Saj’tal
Step into a fictional world that has been worked out down to the smallest detail. Maps, objects, sound and light together form a complete civilisation reminiscent of fantasy worlds like Dungeons & Dragons. Yet this installation is not about escaping reality.
For Harrison Holland, fictional worlds are a way to better understand our very own society. Precisely because everything is strange and unfamiliar, it makes you think about the rules, systems and beliefs that we have come to take for granted.
Instead of watching a story on a screen, you step right into the middle of it. Thus you are invited to draw connections between fiction and reality. How do you actually know what is real? And how much of what we take for granted is ultimately just a story that we have come to believe in together?
3. Erased Voices
Not all voices disappear through overt censorship. Many stories get snowed under by historical selection, dominant framing or digital systems.
Erased Voices explores how art can make forgotten perspectives visible once again.
The Third Place
Where do you feel at home when the place you come from has changed? After many years, Mohamad Haj Kasem returned to Syria, expecting to feel at home there again. That feeling never materialised. That experience formed the starting point for *De Derde Plek*.
In this architectural installation, Mohamad explores what ’home’ actually means. Is it a country, a building or a memory? Or does home arise precisely in a place in between, where different cultures, experiences and identities come together?
Move around the artwork and discover the different spaces. The Third Place invites you to reflect on the question of where you truly feel at home and how that feeling can change through time, war, migration and personal experiences.
Writing History
Robot arm that is making history.
Special version of Writing History, developed in collaboration with the Museum aan de A in Groningen. Central to the piece is an industrial robot arm that independently writes, erases and rewrites texts and images on a glass surface.
For this edition, the work focuses on the theme MUTE.
The robot generates texts about censorship, silence, power and voices that have been suppressed, forgotten or deliberately erased throughout history. Which stories continue to be told? Who decides what is recorded? And which voices disappear from the collective memory?
The installation combines historical sources with current data, thus creating a constantly changing picture of past and present. By constantly rewriting and erasing texts, Writing History makes visible that history is not a fixed given, but a process that is continuously shaped by perspective, interpretation and power.
Mash & Nutmeg
What if Dutch colonial history is rewritten and represented through the chaos of today's internet landscape? In Stamppot, public YouTube material is used as the relevant historical source. From a Moluccan-Dutch perspective, associative images are placed asynchronously side by side: documentary archival footage, Prinsjesdag fanfare bands, stamppot tutorials and street interviews. The ‘quintessentially Dutch’ casual nationalism is questioned and placed alongside the generational pain of Moluccan history.
In Nootmuskaat, the Moluccan KNIL soldier is placed in an absurd contemporary context. The uniform, made for violent purposes, is now used to play music together. Merel examines the perception of Moluccan culture, and the colonial remnants that can be found in everyday life.
A modern interpretation of this complex and often overlooked history.
Thales "Martlet" Lightweight Multirole Missile
Thales “Martlet” Lightweight Multirole Missile.
Replica of the recently developed Thales ‘Martlet’ missile.
Thales, a defence company, has been closely involved in the Dutch public transport infrastructure for nearly twenty years. With every public transport check-in, millions of travellers unknowingly contributed to the military-industrial complex. Offered for sale at the publicly reported estimated unit price of the missiles: approx. €35,000 each.
The Blue Waves Award 2026
kajetanoniszk.com
Mythical Communications
A huge flower slowly opens and closes before your eyes. Daan brings the
subtle movements of plants to life. The translucent petals show
colours that insects can perceive, but remain invisible to humans.
The work is inspired by the way flowers and plants communicate
with insects. By combining robotics, mechanics and electronics with his
His fascination with nature makes Daan visible the processes that normally take place outside.
playing out our field of vision.
The installation invites us to look with wonder at nature.
How many forms of communication take place around us without our noticing them?
And how much remains hidden, simply because we are unable to make it real?
take?
Skin Potions
Imagine the feeling of a bath in the sea. Silk is dipped in gel, becomes slippery, adheres to the skin and moisturizes it.
Clothing is more than just what you wear here: body and material come together. Gestures and touch tell this story without words.
The mostly naked female body is not a sexual image here, but a living body that perceives, feels and changes.
What happens when you experience the world with your whole body?
The Dance in Flow
In a dark room, water drops slowly fall down. Through a combination of light, sound, and movement, the drops seem to stop, change direction, or disappear.
dancing through space.
Wild growth
Wildgroei is a collective textile work that grows step by step, without a fixed plan or end goal. During the creation process, it’s not about perfection, but about experimenting and daring to create. Without certainty, you discover that exactly there something arises that you could never have imagined beforehand. Each maker adds something, resulting in an organic flower piece that constantly changes.
It started at the root, tough and crooked, sometimes rigid and rough. From there grew a ball, a core full of promise. Branches followed. Thick to thin, whimsical and quirky. With knots, branches, and unexpected directions. Then came the leaves: pale, brown, and jagged. Fragile yet present. And finally the flowers. Colorful. Open. Some still in bud.
During Manifestations, Wildgroei continues to grow. On different days, residents of Vitalis work on the art piece and engage in conversations with visitors. Which flower, branch, or memory would you add? Discover what happens when different generations meet and work together to create the same story.
Crazy Mina: Activism = Social Design (Burning Social Problems since 1970)
Pink coffin at the Tweede Kamer, tampons, a mouth taped shut against femicide and more!
Experience how 7000 Dolle Mina’s activism shapes Manifestations: handmade-DIY punk, playful, fiery in protest, together. With the patriarchy silenced.
My Little Tragedy karaoke
Plastic is moving with surprising success through oceans, houses, and bodies. Toypony calls this progress, because these are our choices. Should we admire this achievement, or raise questions about the world that made it possible?
Bio Art Fashion
Nature is a superior force, full of ingenious solutions. Every plant, every animal has a role. Anyone who intervenes in them upsets the balance. Yet nature keeps adapting, but for how long?
Still connected
The invisible connection between presence and absence, inspired by the theme of only-born twins.
In layered lines and skin-like forms, traces of connection remain visible, as if two bodies or memories are still resonating with each other. Silence here is not a void, but a space in which the unspoken remains intact.
The Architecture of Flow
The TU Delft student team Emergence reveals the technology behind the flow of water and data infrastructure that keeps the Netherlands running. With immersive installations, they show how dependent we are on these vulnerable and invisible systems.
World of Feliz
What happens when you don’t have to choose between different identities, but you can embrace all of them?
Glitters, transparent fabrics and sculptures together form a colorful world. Colombian and indigenous roots, family memories, spirituality and R&B from the 1990s blend together.
Join a personal journey of discovery into identity.
From darkness and pain grew a story of resilience, pride, and healing. The body is a source of feeling. Clothing is an extension: a way to express oneself and be seen.
The Measure of Man - about the Manosphere
The Mannequin is a speculative installation about the performance pressure of the looksmaxxing culture. Visitors undergo a clinical “aesthetic audit” — with a guiding AI voice (ElevenLabs) and an AI-generated ideal image (ComfyUI) — that lets them feel how a system converts uncertainty into social pressure.
The Entity
“The Entity” depicts the religious and ritual relationship of humans with new technology. Scrolling has become a form of meditation; algorithms drag us into a trance; we make sacrifices in the form of time and energy, and yet we continue to participate.
Stamping T-shirts with XR, also for KIDS
Come stamp your own T-shirts at Manifestations, or bring whatever cotton you have: bring your own bag, dress, and T-shirt. All the help is appreciated 🐝
Art canteen
An art platform and cultural space from Groningen that offers space for emerging artists and makers. Through exhibitions, pop-ups and collaborations, we bring art, design and food together, with plenty of room for experimentation. During Dutch Design Week, we create a temporary canteen where you can discover new art, have a bite to eat and relax – because where is there a better way to experience art together than in a canteen?
The Sustainable Huts of the Future
Wood burning ban: There is a growing discussion about measures to limit or even ban wood burning due to air pollution, fine dust and other harmful substances that make people ill.
Wood burning is really no longer of this era, now that we all know how much damage we cause with it.
Fortunately, there are alternatives that can be just as atmospheric.
The Wood comes to life once again.
luxuryfires.com/houtstook-verbod-officieel-van-start/
Climate contribution
Watch project videos below!
quotes
This is what our visitors thought
“Manifestations manages to show what happens every year when art and technology come together with strong curation and surprising works. The event does so in a way that is unique to the Netherlands and shows what we do with technology and what technology does with us.”
Erwin van de Zande Bright
“With Manifestations you see things at the edge of developments that you don’t often see anywhere else; it’s edgy and requires few words to convey.”
Eric van Eerdenburg Lowlands
“I have been attending the DDW for years, but the best tour I’ve had was at Manifestations.”
Daan De Kort Member of Parliament
“Valuable press articles, invitations to follow-up exhibitions.
Manifestations has strengthened my position in the art and design world.”
Nicole Spit Studio Over There
“I am impressed by the qualities of Manifestations. Technology is growing at a furious pace; let us, as Eindhoven, be a leader in the world in how we deal with it; we have that power and those people. Eindhoven365 believes in the concept of Manifestations and its potential.”
Peter Kentie Director Citymarketing Eindhoven365
“I found Manifestions to be one of the highlights of the Dutch Design Week!
One reason for that is the diversity you manage to bring together in a story!
Balance in the broadest sense of the word.”
Ronald Ramakers Glow