Festival

About

The NEXT LEVEL Festival in Dortmund is a place for anyone who wants to experience games and digital arts from a new perspective. Games are a creative expression, set ideas in motion, and open up spaces for conversation.

In the dense program of exhibitions, performances, talks and workshops, visitors meet international artists alongside regional positions and local initiatives. Instead of providing ready-made answers, the festival invites you to ask questions, change perspectives and make digital culture come alive together. For a few days, Dortmund transforms into a meeting place for all those who want to be inspired by the energy of playfulness.

TRANSmission is the festival theme of NEXT LEVEL in Dortmund. It directs the view to the transitions that make digital games visible and tangible. Transmission means translation, transfer, transformation, all processes that shape our digital present. The festival asks how games as a medium reflect and reinterpret these processes: as an interface between body and avatar, as a bridge between cultures, or as an engine of technological innovation. Artistic works, installations and discussion formats take up the theme and open up access to pressing questions of our time. How are perception, communication and community changing in digital space? What new possibilities arise when we understand playfulness as a tool of exchange? With TRANSmission, the festival sets a framework in which digital games become tangible as a cultural practice that not only describes transitions, but also shapes them.

Supported by Theater Dortmund and its Academy for Theater and Digitality, the festival offers a highly networked, technically savvy, and interdisciplinary environment. In addition, numerous other pioneering institutions in the field of digital arts and innovation are involved as venues, including the Digitale Werkbank, the Dortmunder U, and the Künstler*innenhaus Dortmund.

The project is funded by the Neue Künste Ruhr program of the Ministry of Art and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the NRW KULTURsekretariat, and the City of Dortmund.

Formats

wall flower janne schimmel photo credits adriaan hauwaerts 02 — © Adriaan Hauwaerts

Exhibition

Amidst VR worlds, interactive interfaces, and experimental games, a vibrant panorama of contemporary digital art unfolds at Künstler*innenhaus Dortmund. The media exhibition, the centerpiece of the NEXT LEVEL Festival 2025, invites visitors to immerse themselves, explore, and co-create. Here, the boundaries between play and art, between observing and participating, blur.

To the Exhibition

Games Parcours

PCs, glowing screens, and controllers create an open gaming landscape here, inviting both curious newcomers and experienced gamers. Between 8-bit aesthetics and cinematic indie highlights, a space emerges that showcases the artistic breadth of digital (indie) games. Here, unreleased gameplays and prototypes can be tested, artistically legendary worlds explored, independent studios discovered, and experiences shared.

To the Games

Enjoy Community

Enjoy Community is NEXT LEVEL's central networking and discourse format. Here, professionals, artists, curators, and partner institutions from art, games, theater, and research come together. Keynotes, panels, and open discussion formats address current developments and challenges in digital arts – from artistic practice and technological innovation to questions of collaborative production. Participants who are themselves featured in the festival program discuss working methods, cooperation strategies, and forms of digital collaboration. Enjoy Community sees itself less as a classic conference and more as an open resonance field that equally values exchange, listening, and spontaneous encounters.

To the Format

Mediation

The mediation program explores the spaces between city, digitality, and shared reality. It focuses on non-places – those overlooked spots of everyday life that are transformed through attention, movement, and action. From these, architectural, narrative, and virtual spaces of possibility emerge, re-examining the relationship between humans, space, and technology.

During the festival, the Theater Dortmund's Tiny Music House becomes a mobile experience space; not an exhibition venue, but a wandering laboratory where collecting, drawing, building, scanning, and projecting take place. In the mornings, its doors open to school classes, in the afternoons and on weekends to everyone: a place for exchange, observation, and transformation.

The program is designed for various age groups. In addition to the cooperation program for school classes, the events also include workshops for our young festival guests.

The material package for schools can be found here.