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.
