Resistance is not a singular gesture but a constellation of practices that are often fleeting, adaptive, or improvised. It emerges from the gaps between surveillance and the refusal to be optimized. It manifests as the reclamation of time from productivity’s relentless grip and as the assertion of embodied presence against disembodied data flows. It blossoms through the cultivation of alternative practices in the ruins of extraction. Cultural resistance operates through the forces of artistic action: performances that refuse to be captured or sounds that circulate beyond control and gatherings that create temporary sanctuaries. These are tactics that do not seek to mirror power’s strategies but instead seek to exploit the very conditions power creates, by turning precarity into possibility, fragmentation into networked solidarities, and ephemerality into radical presence.
Last year’s Rites of Decay explored how ritual practices are being eroded in our technologized present. Collectively, we contemplated how contemporary society is becoming more hostile to ritual forms by replacing symbolic perception and sacred dwelling with fragmented attention and endless optimization. We examined how traditional techniques for creating meaning and community are being displaced by systems that resist closure and completion. Throughout the festival we investigated how ritual’s capacity to bridge symbolic and embodied experience might interface with technological systems and what is lost when stabilizing structures disappear.
This erosion is not merely a side effect of technological development; it is in fact a tactic of power. The disappearance of ritual, the fragmentation of time, and the dissolution of shared symbolic frameworks, these serve the interests of surveillance capitalism, algorithmic governance, and our pervasive systems of extraction. If Rites of Decay explored what is being lost, Tactics for Cultural Resistance asks how we fight back. How do we move from diagnosis to action? What methods can artists deploy to resist the disappearance of shared experience and the forces orchestrating that disappearance?
Tactics for Cultural Resistance examines the practices, protocols, and actions that constitute counter-hegemonic forces in the contemporary moment. As technological systems reshape consciousness, as climate collapse and ecological devastation accelerate, as biotechnology redefines the boundaries of life itself, and as space becomes the next frontier of extraction and militarization, artists respond with cultural interventions that contest these transformations. From digital rights activism to urban interventions, from speculative world-building to poetic performance, Conflux Festival 2026 investigates how creative practitioners mobilize tools, networks, and aesthetic strategies to resist technological determinism, environmental catastrophe, biological control, and cosmic colonization.
Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategies (deployed by those in power) and tactics (employed by those subjected to power), Conflux explores how cultural practitioners operate within, and against, existing structures across these contested domains. How do artists weaponize precarity? How do communities build resilience networks in the face of planetary crisis? How does aesthetic practice become a site of refusal or radical reimagining against the forces reshaping our technological futures?
Through performances, installations, screenings, and critical discourse, Conflux invites artists, thinkers, and activists to enact resistance, to materialize alternative futures, and to render suppressed cultural movements visible. In doing so, the festival itself becomes a laboratory for investigating tactical interventions and testing new vocabularies for cultural resistance in uncertain times.
Theme text written by Eric Parren, Associate Arts Professor of Interactive Media Arts @ NYU Shanghai.