This year, the Sónar+D Exhibition programme extends throughout Llotja de Mar, filling different spaces within the gothic, neoclassical building with playful technology, innovative designs, and futuristic research projects.
This year we’ve divided the programme into two sections. Expo+D is where you’ll find interactive exhibits, live demos and creative prototypes that you can get hands on with, while Installations features large-scale artworks that span digital creativity, visual arts and kinetic sculpture.
Head to the Exhibition page or the dedicated Expo+D microsite (where you can filter by category) for more information, or read on for a full breakdown of the 38 different creations you’ll find at Sónar+D 2026 this year...
Installations: digital creativity in a gothic, neoclassical setting
The Installations programme brings digital creativity to Llotja de Mar, with four different works that reshape and redefine the space around them.
The first thing the audience will see as they enter Sónar+D 2026 is a giant screen, featuring robotic arm painting the air: in collaboration with OFFF, we’ve brought Brooklyn studio Volvox Labs’ Astral Twin to the courtyard of Llotja de Mar. Located in a separate room, Belgian studio Superbe’s interactive installation From0 uses sound and motion to reflect on the versatility of language.
Also located on the ground floor is Qs Ventures 2147: A Voice from the Future, an apparently abandoned phone booth covered in moss and vegetation. Step inside to converse with an AI that represents the living superorganism of Earth. Upstairs at the new Àgora+D, Berlin creative studio AUSGANG bring a touch of cybernetic futurism to Sónar+D 2026, with tentacle-like cables climbing up the walls, and a deactivated signal jammer in protest of laws that forbid us to block mobile phone coverage.
Expo+D: where technology comes alive
Organised under seven categories and spread throughout various different spaces, Expo+D continues the spirit of Project Area, focusing on interactive and thought-provoking creations. This year, there’s a special emphasis on joyful, playful exhibits that invite us to question our relationship with technology, each other, and the world around us.
One of the three key themes of Sónar+D this year, the pieces found in Digital Gardens and Dark Forests show the most private and esoteric corners of the internet, far from the gaze of corporate interests and state surveillance. The creators exhibiting here don’t just criticise big tech; they’re building hand-made, personal corners of cyberspace as an act of rebellion.
Korean-born artist Yehwan Song lays bare the fantasy of the internet as a ‘free space’, introducing frictions and distortions into user interfaces. Fountain uses a stream of water to illustrate the repetitive nature of our interactions with our phones, while Cry Don’t Cry masks user’s tears with a barrage of pop-ups. Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne's Cabinet of Refusals (presented by NewArtFoundation) collects four digital pieces spiked with absurd humour that probe at corporate greed, the cult of productivity and AI slop. RECEIPTS by Eliza Struthers-Jobin & Araya Wongwan shows what we’re really signing up to when we click ‘Accept’ on the Terms & Conditions of a page, while Park Sunmi’s PPP I: Post-Physical Protocol – presented by Arts Korea Lab – illustrates the exploitation of delivery couriers.
We’ve sourced a vintage iMac to exhibit Richard Lewei Huang & Yufeng Zhao’s work in historically accurate conditions. Banner Depot 2000 is an archive of over 22,000 online advertising banners from the late-1990s that also lets users generate their own, poetic banners. Look Up by Wei-Fang Chang explores memory, projecting videos of the artist’s previous homes, generated using Google Maps, above the user’s head. Going even further back, Exercitia Spiritualia Animae's 𐌘𐌄𐌓𐌔𐌖 - phersu.net is a labyrinthine, dream-like website written partially in Etruscan. Sara Gallego-Alarcón - an alumni of La Salle Campus Barcelona’s Master of Science in Digital Arts and Creative Technologies – flips the script, imagining what our digital present would look like after thousands of years of decay and degradation in Linaje Recursivo.
Technology has opened up new ways of storytelling, from speculative futures to quantum narratives. Under Plot Twist, three – very different – works show how the way we tell stories in the digital age has changed.
As part of the Arts Korea Lab showcase, Yaloo’s Project Shininho is a multimedia worldbuilding experience that reimagines an 86-year-old grandmother as a K-pop idol and pirate: let’s just say you need see it to believe it. A behind-the-scenes documentary explores the making of ‘The Talk’, a concept performance that TV talk show with live music, co-curated by TIMES. Barcelona Supercomputing Center’s Quantum Compass uses quantum technology as a metaphor to explore how we construct meaning and interpret information.
The mysterious, the unexplained and the eerie meet the digital and algorithmical in Digital Occultism, with works that merge the divine and spirituality with modern technology.
Lola Liñán Fernández invites us to confess our sins to either Yung Beef or Rosalía with Divine Device: she’s even constructed a confessional booth to accompany her digital rosary. Liz Melchor's Fortune Robot writes absurd and poetic prophesies in beautiful script, using mechanical technology that’s simpler than your wristwatch; Witness Node, developed by Marta Minguell Colomé, reveals the the ancient computational wisdom behind divination. And a pair of projects presented as part of the Arts Korea Lab showcase explore digital spirituality: Bardo by Jihyo Eom contrasts the infinite scroll of social media with the intermediate state between death and rebirth in Buddhist philosphy; and Lee Hyunmin’s Personal Pantheon: Oracle reimagines the tabletop altar in for the modern age.
What if – instead of gluing us to our screens – technology could help us connect to ourselves and the world around us? That’s the question posed by the exhibits grouped under Sense and sensitivity.
Experimental composer and artist Leon Eckard has created a wearable headset that attempts to recreate how a bat experiences the world, answering a question first posed by philosopher Thomas Nagel back in 1974. HOMEOSTATIC ATMOSPHERE, an interactive installation by Barcelona studio ODD SPACES, shows how moss responds to changes in light by generating sound.
From Arts Korea Lab come two exhibits that react to their surroundings. Gyomyung Shin’s ‘Machina Sapiens’ sense electromagnetic fluctuations around them and turn them into sound and movement, while Joongmin Lee’s Heliotropic Dwelling responds to light, inspired by the behaviour of barnacles.
In a similar line, Internet2’s Curiosity: Learning out of boredom – co-curated with TIMES – features two cameras that constantly scan the room in search of new information, showing how boredom and curiosity are just two sides of the same coin.
And love is in the air at Sónar+D this year, thanks to Flira by Maxima Walthes, Felix Henke, and Melissa Heim. Users respond silently to questions while wearing an EEG headset, which scans their brainwaves and then shows them their ‘matches’.
The next generation of instruments don’t have strings, and some of them don’t even have buttons. Weird Gear features three pieces that reimagine the process of making music.
Italian experimental musicians Passepartout Duo have worked with Berlin company KOMA ELECTRONIK to develop Haloplane, an intuitive microloop sampler - similar to a theremin - that lets musicians ‘draw’ sound. brainwave research center’s brc cube is a touch and movement-sensitive MIDI-controller that seamlessly plugs into a eurorack setup, while Pol Olivares Ceniceros from La Salle Campus Barcelona’s Master of Science in Digital Arts and Creative Technologies has crafted an instrument that scans stones, plants and moss and convert them into sound.
Our fascination with patterns is echoed by their presence in nature – both visibly or invisibly. Using creative coding, algorithms and computational art, the artists exhibiting under Patterns, please have created works that speak to humanity’s love of motif, repetition and structure.
Start your collection of generative art with Niklas Roy’s Generative Art 1€. Insert a coin, watch the on-screen plotter and hit the button when you’re ready to print. Presented by Arts Korea Lab, Dance Gacha Machine requires a little more interaction. 6DOFAMINE’s AI-based generative choreography system creates a dance routine based on prompts from the user, and then scores them on their performance of that routine.
L1NK by Agoston Nagy is an algorithmically-powered installation that generates repetitive-yet-dynamic patterns using light and sound, while SHIO’s HIDDEN ORDERS_Microstructural Machine makes the hidden patterns of the natural world visible to the naked eye.
For the third consecutive year, AI & Music powered by S+T+ARTS brings the most cutting-edge AI and Music technology around, with hardware and software that truly make the most of Artificial Intelligence.
Keigo Yoshida’s liberated frequencies seeks to free us from ‘pleasurable’ listening, using EEG sensors to monitor our response to pleasant sounds, and then warping them into increasingly discomforting soundscapes.
Google DeepMind return to Sónar+D with a suite of AI-powered tools for music, including Magenta RealTime, Lyria 3 and ProducerAI. Paris-based creative community IRCAM Forum also return, this time with a focus on spectral sound composition tool ASAP, as well as their industry-standard RAVE tool.
ANIMA, developed by David Dalmazzo, lets producers play with microtonal composition without plugins: all you need is an internet browser. And DataMind Audio’s Refractalizer lets you chop up sound and reassemble it into new forms: the audio equivalent of kintsugi.
Sónar+D 2026 – tickets now available from €15
The Exhibition programme will be on display at Sónar+D 2026 at Llotja de Mar, from 10am to 9pm each day on Thursday 18 and Friday 19 June.
The only way to see all of these pieces and creations – plus two full days of talks, panels, performances and networking activities – is with a standaloneSónar+D ticket or a SonarPass+D. Grab yours now over at our tickets page.