Tipping Point Yiannis Kranidiotis Exhibition Finished | 15th Patchlab Digital Art Festival

What is left of the dream of technology when the tools that were supposed to help us create the future begin to shape it for us? 15th edition of Patchlab Festival: Dream Sim

How to maintain the ability to consciously imagine the future beyond the logic of prediction and optimization? This question becomes the starting point of this year's Patchlab Digital Art Festival, which will take place in Krakow from 15 to 18 October.

The jubilee edition of the festival will be an opportunity to look at fifteen years of transformation of digital art and Art & Tech culture through the prism of technological breakthroughs, promises and disappointments. Since 2012, Patchlab presents new phenomena at the intersection of art, science and technology and looks at how new innovations are changing our experience of reality, imagination and relationships with the world.

MOCAK will present the kinetic installation “Tipping Point” by Yiannis Kranidiotis showing how models and predictions can transform the invisible future into a physical experience here and now.

Practical information about the exhibition:

Date: 15-18.10. 2026Opening hours: 11:00-19:00 Tickets: 10 zł, available at the museum ticket officeFinish: 18.10, 6 p.m.

About PatchLab Festival

How can we remain proactive in the face of processes whose scale and dynamics go beyond individual decisions?

This year's slogan “Dream Sim” remains deliberately open. Dream is a dream of a technological future, a dream as an area of imagination and the possibility of imagining something that the system has not yet foreseen. Sim — a tool to realize the imagination, but also a simulation system that begins to design possible futures for us. “Dream Sim” looks at the moment when technology ceases to be merely a tool for the realization of human imaginations, and more and more often participates in their creation. The line between what is real, imagined and simulated is becoming less and less clear, as is the line between experience and its technological counterpart.

“Technologies that were supposed to help us realize imagined futures are increasingly designing them themselves. Artificial intelligence generates images, voices and stories, digital models recreate places, bodies and processes, and XR allows you to experience alternate realities. However, not only images and spaces are simulated, but also conversation, personality, presence or agency. Dream Sim raises the question of what we have gained and what we have given in return for convenience, speed and automation,” says Elwira Wojtunik-Láng, Artistic Director of Patchlab Festival.

Polish premieres and audiovisual performances

Patchlab's four days will be filled with exhibitions, audiovisual performances, VR and XR experiences, AI projects, Artists' Talks, and animation demonstrations. The program offers many works presented for the first time in Poland.

The premiere at the Potocki Palace will be “Dark Rooms” — an immersive VR experience for adults, leading through intimate stories related to sexuality, identity, trauma and transformation.

One of the most important events will be “nD” by Ryoichi Kurokawa, a Japanese artist based in Berlin, who will present the latest installment of the audiovisual series developed since 2005 at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology during AVnight 1. His earlier versions were presented, among others, at the Tate Modern.

As part of the next two AVNights at Hevre+1, the Polish audience will also see the interactive performance “Waluigi's Purgatory” by the British duo dmstfctn with the participation of Polish saxophonist and artist Nathan Kryszek and Greek artist Evita Manji. This is a simulation of a world in which artificial intelligence goes to the purgatory for “cheating” systems during training, and the audience with the help of phones can influence the course of events.

The Polish premiere will also be “LES EMPIRES” by the Canadian duo Guillaume Coutu Dumont and Line Katcho — a retrofuturistic audiovisual odyssey from the borderline of science fiction, mythology and analog electronics, presented in cooperation with MUTEK.

One of the events most closely corresponding to the slogan of this year's edition will be presented in the Cricoteca “Onirica” of the Italian studio fus* — a live dance performens distinguished in the final of the Lumen Prize 2025. The project, which during the previous edition of Patchlab could be seen as an installation, returns this time as a performance combining dance, an image generated in real time with the use of AI. The starting point is more than 28 thousand records of real dreams, which artificial intelligence transforms into a fluid, evolving live visual reality.

Digital art exhibitions in three locations

At the main exhibition “Dream Sim” we will see, among others, “Scent. Witnessing Without Power” by Alan Kwan — a cinematic game in which the player travels through war-torn space, being deprived of the opportunity to really influence the course of events. Gáspár Battha in the interactive installation “Percipio” explores whether digital simulation can produce the impression of physical touch, while Birk Schmithüsen in the project “Speculative AI” observes the audiovisual “dialogue” of two machines eliminating human participation, raising the question of where communication ends and its convincing imitation begins.

The exhibition “Dream Sim” will lead from the dream and technological promise through simulation, loss of agency and prediction to the attempt to regain the imagination. The works develop different variants of the same question: what happens when the simulation ceases to be a representation of the world and begins to participate in its production?

Paula Gaetano Adi's “Guanaquerx”, winner of the Ars Electronica 2025 Grand Prix, combines contemporary robotics with Andean knowledge, materials and symbolism, proposing an alternative scenario of the technological future. The work will be presented in the exhibition hall of Pharmacy Design.

15 years of Patchlab Festival

“The fifteenth edition of Patchlab does not spread a vision of the technological future, but confronts the ideas and promises that we have associated over the years with the development of digital tools and systems,” explains Elwira Wojtunik-Láng. “15 years ago we asked what we can do with new technologies. Today we ask what they are doing with our plans and whether we can still imagine the future beyond what they can generate and predict.”

The anniversary is accompanied by the book “THE BOOK. Patchlab Digital Art Festival 2012—2026” — a story about fifteen editions of the festival, their themes, artists and transformations that accompanied the development of digital art. The publication connects the Patchlab archive with a broader history of technological, social and cultural change. It includes talks, manifestos and essays by renowned artists, curators and experts, including Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Tale of Tales, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Irini Papadimitriou and Piotr Krajewski. The book also goes beyond print by incorporating digital elements in augmented reality (AR).

Patchlab Digital Art Festival will take place in Krakow from October 15 to 18, 2026. Festival events will be presented in the Potocki Palace, Manggha, Cricoteka, MOCAK, Design Pharmacy and Hevre+1, among others.

Full program and tickets available at: https://patchlab.pl/