At a moment when digital systems increasingly shape how we communicate, remember, organize, and govern, questions of scale become urgent. Who are these systems built for? What do they make visible, and what do they leave out? For its 16th edition, HTMlles, produced by Ada X, takes up On a Human Scale as both a theme and a position.

HTMlles 2026 brings together artists, curators, researchers, and cultural workers whose practices attend to the everyday realities of living with technology. Rather than focusing on innovation for its own sake, the festival foregrounds practices rooted in lived experience, care, and collective agency. Across exhibitions, performances, screenings, workshops, residencies, and public gatherings, the program explores how technologies intersect with memory, bodies, environments, and forms of belonging.

On a Human Scale resists the idea of technology as neutral, inevitable, or universal. Instead, it considers the social, political, and material conditions through which digital infrastructures are produced, maintained, and contested. The works presented explore slowness, proximity, and participation as ways of countering extractive models and efficiency-driven systems. Attention is given to forms of knowledge that are sensory, embodied, and shared, as well as to practices that reclaim agency through low-tech, community-based, and experimental approaches.

Rooted in feminist histories of media activism, HTMlles continues to function as a space for dialogue, experimentation, and learning together. On a Human Scale invites us to pause, to listen, and to imagine ways of living with technology that are more attentive, accountable, and grounded in collective responsibility.

HTMlles 2026 challenges the idea that technology is neutral or inevitable by approaching digital systems as political, ethical, environmental, and social choices. The festival foregrounds artistic practices that intervene in artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems, questioning how they are designed, deployed, and experienced, while naming the material costs of digital life, including labour, surveillance, extraction, and energy consumption. Emphasizing collective agency, HTMlles highlights community-led digital infrastructures, practices of digital self-determination, and forms of resistance that range from reappropriation to refusal. It advocates for slow, human-scale approaches to technology that prioritize care, attention, accessibility, and sustainability over speed, efficiency, and performance. By revisiting past and speculative futures of the web, the festival also confronts monopolization and opacity, supporting artistic experimentation that reclaims, reimagines, and reshapes digital environments. Together, these orientations reflect Ada X’s commitment to feminist media arts and to community-centered technological practices grounded in lived experience, care, and shared responsibility.