FESTIVAL PROGRAM 2026
Performances, exhibitions, and events for Puncture The Screen 2026
This year's festival has a vibrant mixture of immersive theatre, interactive experiences, visual art, sculpture,
and web-based artwork for you all to enjoy.
As always with Puncture The Screen, each artwork has been created using data derived from public sources, the artist's personal life, or from you as you interact with the experience.
All exhibited work and events take place in and around Broadway Cinema, Nottingham, with most events also taking place online. One or two require moving around the local area to fully experience.
Exhibited Work
Workshop Series
Our digital producer, Joe Strickland, is running a series of their most popular workshops for the festival this year, including:
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Introduction to Digital Dramaturgy
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How to centre Sustainability in your practice
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Everything you need to know to either use or avoid AI as an artist
Sweat, Tears and The Sea
by Ellie Harrison
As a disabled theatre performer I can no longer tour. How can I adapt my skills to digital performance, that is accessible to disabled performers and audience alike? Sweat, Tears and The Sea uses archive footage shot by my grandpa to explore intergenerational trauma and how it can lay the foundations for Innovation.
Sweat, Tears and The Sea will be available online and in person for the duration of the festival.
The Lonely Garden
by Lauren Brady
The planet is dying, and so are we. The Lonely Garden sets you on a path of restoration for yourself and your garden. Tailored to your space and capacity, the website will help you create a garden through a city-wide, where you will meet like-minded people along the way.
The Lonely Garden will be available online and in person for the duration of the festival.
Handworked
by Laurie Owen
Imagine a world of computers without Microsoft, Google and Apple. That world has quietly existed, since the 1970s. So what’s stopping us living there today? Handworked is an interactive installation that opens a door into the life of a character, who lives in the parallel world of decentralised technology.
Handworked will be available in person for the duration of the festival.
Ghosts of Our Mothers
by Lizzy Tan & Lois Liao
In a time we are increasingly asking what can be automated and what shouldn't, what happens when care work becomes data? By choreographically extracting and, in parallel, algorithmically recreating movement from cinematic portrayals of motherhood, Ghosts of Our Mothers is a film installation that probes the line between the performance and reality of intangible care work. We ask what care is when it can be measured, and what it reveals about desire, automation and what is truly human.
Ghosts of Our Mothers will be available in person for the duration of the festival
D.I.A Protocol
by But Why?
An alternate reality game where audiences uncover competing futures shaped by disability storytelling, corporate extraction, and collective care. Through puzzles, staged institutions, and participatory fiction, players must decide how stories are used, owned, and protected in a collapsing quantum “future communication” system. Played both from home and live with intertwining narratives.
D.I.A Protocol will be available online and in person for the duration of the festival.
Semblance Portrait
by Maisie Shiplee
Semblance Portraits is a series of participatory digital portraits created from personal questionnaires. Through texture, collage, typography and abstraction, each artwork reflects the participant’s relationship with identity, consumption, contradiction and the systems they inhabit, inviting reflection on the often invisible forces that shape everyday life.
Semblance Portraits will be available online and in person for the duration of the festival.
Sharika Law
by Noor Sobka
A film project created by collating data/the plot from social media comments. The premise of the film Sharika Law will be that Sharika global, latin superstar has decided to pivot into politics but has realised the only way break through the algorithm and go viral is to go down the "Pink Pill" route.
Sharika Law will be available online and in person for the duration of the festival
MALPER
by Rachel Parry
Weird and wonky web-based, interactive clickable experience, using the artists’ personal data from their project “MALFUNCTIONING PERFECTLY” Rachel Parry and Creative Technologist Rachel Smith have been teaching the A.I bots about liveness from a Neurodivergent/disabled point-of-view. Resulting in a playful but often disastrous choice-driven uncanny experience that devolves into chaos.
MALPER will be available online and in person for the duration of the festival.
Next Door's Telly Has Games On
by Amy Godliman
In this miniature living room set in Britain in 1982, two Atari style games are housed in a vintage dolls house television. You play tennis and fishing against your unseen neighbour in an unfamiliar but comfortable setting, your feet digging into the carpet and eyes drifting to the scattered magazines and décor.
Next Door's Telly Has Games On will be available in person for the duration of the festival.
Milk Teeth
by Hannah Raymond-Cox
This linear interactive poem is about losing front teeth and innocence, and gaining the children's book Heidi and queerness. I hope you find it bittersweet.
Milk Teeth will be available online and in person for the duration of the festival.
Cultural sTorIES
by Chronic Insanity
This video/spoken word series, inspired by a collection of ties designed by famous modern artists, looks at the found poetry that can emanate from the flowery words written about, and by, different visual art forms.
Cultural sTorIES will be available online and in person for the duration of the festival.
Paint By Numbers
by Joe Strickland
This series of paintings encodes benign everyday activities, observed without participant awareness, into an abstract series of colours and shapes that, on close and careful inspection, can be used to divine the events observed in spite of their seemingly ambiguous recording. An artwork that examines how anonymised our personal data can possibly be in a modern data driven society.
Paint By Numbers will be available online and in person for the duration of the festival.
All Roads Lead To Roe
by RoeMan
This street art intervention uses stylised micro-sculptures of invertebrate eggs, clutching to abandoned buildings that once provided public services, in order to comment on vanishing third spaces and the lack of public infrastructure in modern cities.
All Roads Lead To Roe will be available in person for the duration of the festival.