Responsive Dreams 2026: Barcelona's code-first digital arts festival returns Sep 25-27
Responsive Dreams, described by its organiser The Generative Art Museum as the first digital art festival in Barcelona devoted entirely to art created with code, returns for a fourth edition on 25-27 September 2026. The festival runs across three days at Nau Dents de Serra, part of the Roca Umbert Fàbrica de les Arts complex in Granollers, just north of Barcelona. Registration is open now on the Creative Coding Barcelona site.
The 2026 programme brings together around twenty artists who build their work directly from software, signal and live code. The announced lineup includes Agoston Nagy, Alba G Corral, Alicia Champlin, Anna Carreras, Anna Lucia, Bruce Yoder, fingacode, Ioana Vreme Moser, Lev Manovich, Licia He, Lukas Truniger, Marc Vilanova, Marta Verde, Mayte Gómez Molina, Mónica Rikić, Myriam Bleau, Roxanne Harris, rudxane, Spongenuity, Stefano Contiero and Takk Iori. Several of those names work at the intersection of generative visuals and real-time audiovisual performance — Alba G Corral and Anna Carreras are long-time figures in the live-coding and TouchDesigner scene, while Lev Manovich is better known as a theorist and historian of new media than as an exhibiting artist, which gives the roster a notably research-heavy edge.
The festival's own history reflects how this community has grown. Responsive Dreams began as a smaller showcase and has since been recognised with a special mention at the 2024 Premis Ciutat de Barcelona awards, the city's annual ceremony for cultural work. Past editions run in the festival's archive include Responsive Dreams 2025, 2024 and 2023, alongside event partnerships with MIRA, Sónar and the Plug & Play series in earlier years. That trajectory — from local creative-coding meetup to a named, award-adjacent festival — is a useful reference point for anyone watching the field of generative art mature from individual experiment into a recognised cultural form.
For someone working in generative art, live coding or audiovisual code, the concrete value is simple: it is a real, current, local event to attend, show work at or simply measure the scene against. The festival's stated subjects — what generative art is, what live coding is — are addressed openly on its own site, and the event is explicitly built around code as both instrument and canvas rather than code as a production tool hiding in the background.
Practical details matter here. The dates are fixed for 25-27 September 2026, the venue is Nau Dents de Serra at Roca Umbert in Granollers, and advance registration runs through Creative Coding Barcelona's event page. Because it is still six weeks out, there is room in the schedule to plan a visit or coordinate a trip with the festival's workshops and artist talks. It is the kind of opportunity that rewards acting on it early rather than discovering it after it has passed.