A huge success

The HTMlles 12, a festival of feminist media arts, ended in style on November 6, after 4 days of activities.

The festival featured work by more than sixty artists and researchers from five continents, presenting nearly 40 performances, installations, projections, workshops and roundtables.

This edition was a resounding success. The HTMlles attracted more than 900 visitors, across almost a dozen locations throughout Montreal, engaging a diverse, intergenerational public, with a resonant theme :  “Terms of Privacy”.

The festival’s theme was picked up by the media, interested in the topical issues of confidentiality and surveillance in the journalistic milieu.

The team at Studio XX warmly thanks all the artists,our  funding partners, programming collaborators : articule, La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, Eastern Bloc, FemHack, Feminist Media Studio, GIV, IGSF (Institut Genre, sexualité et féminisme de l’Université McGill), OBORO, TAG (Technoculture, Art and Games), media partners and sponsors who all contributed to the impact of this edition of The HTMlles.

Check out the photos and the video recap.

Read the recap

PRESS REVIEW

Terms of privacy

Current discussions around privacy are shaped by the role new technologies play in enabling modern forms of individual, corporate, and state surveillance. In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) operates numerous global surveillance programs targeting governments, corporations, and civilians in the United States and abroad, and thus what everyone suspected became official: that we—tech consumers—are watched, listened to, traced, and monitored in real time via our gadgets and personal computers. 

As we speak or type, programs of mass surveillance gather our personal data and mega-data. Further, Snowden's leaked classified information revealed that the problem goes beyond the NSA, linking Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom in an intelligence alliance known as the "five-eyes".

Snowden’s revelations opened the lid on a broad range of concerns regarding privacy in the 21st century, at the state level certainly, but also within the more intimate spheres of everyday life. In this 12th edition The HTMlles invites artists, scholars, and technologists to creatively engage with the concept of privacy and to image and imagine the "terms" of individual and collective privacy necessary to resist old and new forms of marginalization and oppression.

Mandate / history

Taking place in Montreal, The HTMlles is an international biennial festival that brings together local and international artists, scholars, and activists who are passionate about critical engagement with new technologies from a feminist perspective. Based on a specific theme, each edition explores urgent socio-political questions through a series of exhibitions, conferences, performances and workshops.

The HTMlles is produced by Studio XX, a bilingual, feminist artist-run centre for technological exploration, creation, and critique, founded in 1996. The 12th edition of the festival coincides with the 20th anniversary of Studio XX!

Initiated in 1997, the festival began as an international platform for introducing women’s web art. Collaborating closely with partner organizations, The HTMlles has become a multi-site festival dedicated to the presentation of women’s, trans, and gender non-conforming artists’ independent media artworks in a transdisciplinary environment that strives for anti-oppression.

The theme of the 12th edition of the festival is "Terms of Privacy", and will be hosted in Montreal from November 3rd to 6th 2016. The festival presents creative and critical projects exploring how the notion of privacy has been reformulated in the last decades in the realm of politics but also in the most intimate areas of daily life. The HTMlles take place in different galleries, artist-run centers and universities across the city.