Le Hublot - 109

Festival Artifice Numérique #09 – Humanité

For its ninth and penultimate stopover at Le Hublot in Nice, the Artifice Numérique 2026 festival steps away from the circuits of robots to dissect the human animal. Co-organised with Les Fées d’Hiver, this edition poses a blunt question: what remains of us once the technological prosthetics are stripped away?

The starting point is unsparing. If humanity is no longer the most intelligent force in the room — outpaced by the machine — it remains the most ferocious of predators, a world champion of war and identity-driven massacre. And yet, against this drive toward destruction and competition, the festival chooses to hold up what it sees as the true pillars of our species: solidarity, universalism, and consciousness.

Rather than surrendering to a dehumanisation by means of the tool, the digital artists taking part — among them Filipe Vilas-Boas, associate artist of the OVNi Biennale 2026, whose work Re:public is presented in partnership with the festival — seize upon technical complexity as a way back to the carnal. Through performative installations and debates on post-humanism, the event celebrates the body in all its states — sonic, dancing, agile — to reaffirm that humanity resides, above all, in dialogue and collective balance.