Call for projects: HTMlles 2026 – On a Human Scale
HTMlles 2026: On a Human Scale
16th Edition, May-June 2026, Montréal
Deadline: Monday, May 5th 2025, before 23h59 (Montreal, EST)
Before submitting a proposal, candidates are strongly encouraged to consult Ada X’s mandate and past festival programming.
HTMlles 2026 marks the 16th edition of the festival and Ada X’s 30th anniversary, an opportunity to celebrate our commitment to building digital spaces on a human scale while imagining new possibilities for collaboration and accessibility. Since its founding, Ada X has played a key role in fostering community-centered, open-source, and decentralized approaches to digital arts, exploring the intersections of technology, accessibility, and collective agency.
Today, we navigate a digital world shaped by corporate interests, surveillance capitalism, and algorithmic bias. The early internet’s utopian promise of free knowledge exchange and collective self-determination has given way to monopolized platforms, opaque decision-making, and extractive economies. These systems prioritize commercial interests, leading to disparities in access and participation.
HTMlles 2026 asks:
• How can we create digital spaces that prioritize care, agency, and collective responsibility over profit and control?
• How can artists, activists, and technologists intervene in the digital infrastructures that shape our daily lives?
• How can we reclaim agency in online spaces, resist extractive models, and imagine technological futures based on shared governance?
HTMlles 2026 explores these questions through four key themes:
Political, Ethical, and Technological Reflections
AI is often positioned as either an inevitable advancement or a dystopian threat. What are the stakes of AI integration? What critical, ethical, and environmental choices do we have?
Community, Mobilization, and Digital Space
What does it mean to “opt out”? What are the real costs of our digital lives in terms of labor, energy, and surveillance? What tools and spaces allow for digital self-determination?
Slow Tech & Human-Scale Digitality
How do we resist the acceleration of digital systems? Can we return to slower, more intentional technologies such as RSS feeds, solar-powered servers, and handcrafted digital infrastructures?
Imagining and Rethinking the Web
From the early days of the web as a borderless zone to today’s increased energy consumption and digital waste, how do artists and activists navigate, reclaim, and reshape digital landscapes?
By blending artistic intervention, critical discourse, and hands-on experimentation, HTMlles 2026 is about actively shaping the digital world. Framed by our 2024-2028 programming theme, On a Human Scale, the festival envisions a future where digital innovation contributes to a sustainable, interconnected, and equitable society; supporting works and practices that strengthen relationships among individuals, communities, and the environment while grounding technological advances in values of inclusivity, equity, and shared responsibility.
As Ada X enters its fourth decade, we reaffirm our commitment to technology that serves communities, working together to shape digital spaces that center people and collective agency. We invite you to take part in this collective process, shaping the future of digital spaces on a human scale.
In celebration of Ada X’s 30th anniversary and 16th edition of the HTMlles festival, we would like to invite local and national artists performers, researchers, hackers, designers, facilitators, technologists, collectives, and organizers to propose projects that engage with:
• AI and algorithmic interventions
• Archiving and memory in online and offline worlds
• Digital activism, slacktivism, mischief, and disruption as methods for critique and play
• Digital autonomy and creative resistance
• Digital spaces on a human scale: Community-centered, open-source and decentralised technology
• Privacy and ethical tech
• Slow tech, alternative digital infrastructures, and low-tech solutions
• The material impact of digital technologies
• The role of artists in visualizing and intervening in technological systems
SELECTION CRITERIA
• Be a woman, queer, trans, or non-binary artist living in the Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal area.
• Quality of the candidate’s work
• Relevance of the project in the context of media arts
• Coherence of the project with the feminist mandate of Ada X and the HTMlles festival
• Connection to the proposed theme
WHAT WE OFFER
The HTMlles is a non-profit festival that relies on the support of a community of artists, cultural workers, friends and volunteers and its aim is to remain accessible (with no or low entrance fees). We cannot financially contribute to production costs of artworks but can offer in-kind support, access to some equipment, and letters for participants who apply for funding.
The HTMlles offer artist fees based on CARFAC/RAAV and IMAA recommendations.
The HTMlles is a great opportunity to meet like-minded people through a unique series of events and a diverse set of co-presentations. Partners of The HTMlles currently include: Articule, Cyber Love Garden, Eastern Bloc, Feminist Media Studio, Groupe intervention vidéo (GIV) , La Centrale galerie Powerhouse, Moving Image Research Laboratory, OBORO, World Creation Studio, More to come!
APPLICATION FILE
*** PLEASE FILL THIS FORM REGARDING YOUR PERSONAL DETAILS. ***
*NON-COMPLIANT FILES WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED*
In ONE PDF FILE (5MB), provide the following information:
Files can be written in French or English.
1- Project
• Title
• Type of media (e.g. virtual reality, 3D printing, video mapping, video, etc.)
• Project format (e.g. one-time event, workshop, individual work, etc.).
• Current phase of the proposed project (design, production, dissemination)
• Number of artists and/or partners involved
• Proposal (500 words maximum)
• Consistency with the proposed theme (100 words maximum)
• Connection to the feminist mandate of Ada X and the HTMlles festival (100 words maximum)
• Technical requirements (equipment and space requirements)
• Equipment provided and resources deployed by the artist
2- Support material
• CV (3 pages maximum)
• Artistic approach (250 words maximum)
3- Visual/audio documentation
• Images: 10 maximum URL links to audio and/ or video files: up to 5 excerpts of a maximum duration of 3 minutes. Please provide passwords if applicable.
• Descriptive list of visual/audio documentation: name, title, media, context of distribution, year.
PLEASE SEND YOUR APPLICATION IN ONE PDF (5MB MAXIMUM) TO APPEL@ADA-X.ORG
Subject of the email: Proposal | HTMlles 2026
Deadline: Monday, May 5th 2025, 23:59 Montreal time (EST)
Only selected candidates will be contacted.