Welcome to the 10th year of the Art & Tech Days 2026, a unique annual festival of media arts, technology, and digital culture.

We are living at a CROSSROADS — and we are not the first to notice. What is different about this one is that several of them have arrived at the same time.

Long-held assumptions about how the world works are being openly questioned. Generative AI and planetary-scale computation are rewriting what it means to know, to work, to make and to govern. The ecological choices of this decade will define the habitability of the planet for those that come next. Identity, attention and the public sphere itself are being remade under conditions of polarisation, platform capitalism and accelerating climate stress. These are not separate stories. They are the same moment seen from different angles.

Art & Tech Days is a festival built for exactly this kind of moment — when the assumptions that organised the last thirty years are no longer quite holding, and the next set is still being written.

This year we mark our tenth edition. A decade of bringing art, design, science and technology into the same room has taught us that the most interesting answers rarely come from the centre of any one discipline — they come from the edges, where fields meet and people are willing to think out loud across them. The festival has grown alongside the questions it asks, and 2026 feels like the right moment to take stock and look forward at once.

For a week each November, Košice becomes a meeting point for artists, designers, technologists, scientists, researchers, policymakers and curious minds from across Europe and beyond. The city itself is well placed for the conversation: at the meeting line of Central Europe, the Balkans and the wider East, Košice is a crossroads in a literal sense — a place where the questions we want to ask are not abstract, but lived.

The 2026 edition takes Crossroads as its guiding theme. We see it across four registers:

Social. Identity, trust, attention and the public sphere are being rewritten in front of us — by platforms, by polarisation, by the simple speed of change. The crossroads is also inside us, and inside the communities we belong to.

Technological. AI, synthetic biology and planetary computation are reshaping knowledge, labour, creativity and the basic terms of decision-making. The questions of who shapes these technologies, with what purpose and under whose accountability are no longer abstract — they are immediate.

Cultural. The role of art, science and design in collective life is shifting. What culture is for, who it speaks to, and how it travels across borders and disciplines are open questions again — and more interesting for it.

Ecological. Microplastics, soil, water, atmosphere, the Arctic — the choices made in this decade will set the terms of habitability and justice within and across species. This is the crossroads seen at planetary scale.

We are not looking for a single answer. Crossroads is an invitation to bring honest diagnoses of this moment from the place where each of us actually stands — a lab, a studio, a city, a classroom, a field — and to think together about which directions are still worth choosing.

Art & Tech Days is organised by Creative Industry Košice (CIKE) in partnership with EIT Culture & Creativity, the European network advancing the cultural and creative industries across the continent.