About – HTMlles Festival

Taking place in Montreal, HTMlles is a festival in media arts and digital culture that brings together local, national and international artists, scholars, and activists who are passionate about critical engagement with new technologies from feminist perspectives. Each edition explores urgent socio-political questions through a series of exhibitions, round tables, conferences, performances and workshops.

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. To know more about past editions of HTMlles, click here.

HTMlles is produced by Ada X, a bilingual, feminist artist-run centre for technological exploration, creation, and critique, founded in 1996.

" An attempt to interrupt the ceaseless cycle of updates, activity reports and new devices.
Trying, unsucessfully, to find a moment of repose; arriving at an impasse.
Looking up, seeing the sky, and being caught by a passing cloud in blue emptiness.
Then another cloud, white, vaporous, which clings to it.
Is that where we are?

The posture of Slow Tech emerged at Ada X in 2018 as a response to an overflow; to unsustainable overreach and overconsumption in the midst of a climate emergency. How could this unbridled and incessant quest for always higher-performance, more omniscient devices, ever have been justified? They were attractive, and efficient. But can we retain the vital (if invasive) tools of digital culture, and also our habits of rapid gratification, while taking a necessary step back? Is it possible to see both the potential and its abuses ?

With the three-year Slow Tech cycle, we tried to escape from a timeline of hyper-production, and instead invested resources in artists whose practices explore environments, alternative temporalities, and networks of interaction.

Then a virus spread.
It engulfed us.
A generalized, experimental techno-slowdown.

So in 2020, with its ambivalent thematics, HTMlles festival will be broadcast online, in an involuntary return to its early days as a digital gathering. In the fog of the present, we offer you intermittent projects, visible at a distance by the glow of the screen, absorbent materials. From November 6 to December 2, this first series of cloud content will unfold.

Then, if an opening appears - hopefully at the end of spring 2021 - a second series of projects will take place IRL 🤞🏽. In a strange weather system, the contours of an HTMlles program are taking shape.

Since in the current context any medium or long-term forecast seems impossible and our vision of the future is particularly obscured, we can only invite you to approach this month of November at a wandering pace. Stroll with us through the fog, considering what is possible and getting closer to the voices that reach us as an echo.

Composed of speculative discussions, interactive workshops, and a selection of contemplative video and Web works (which can also be understood as passages), the online programming of the festival is multiform. It proposes encounters that allow us to take new paths together, at a distance, in a fluid space where we have yet to determine what we will bring along with us."

Team