NEWART Centre has participated in the production of Cabinet of Refusals, an installation by artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne presented at Sónar+D 2026, one of the main international spaces dedicated to digital culture, art, technology and innovation.
The piece is part of the Sónar+D 2026 programme, held at Llotja de Mar in Barcelona on 18 and 19 June, in the exhibition area Expo+D. With this participation, NEWART Centre reinforces its line of work linked to the production, research and dissemination of digital and technological art.
Cabinet of Refusals is an installation that brings together various digital works in the form of websites, browser extensions and email services. The project explores rejection as a political, technical and aesthetic practice against the logics of surveillance, data extraction, hyperproductivity and institutional capture that cross the contemporary digital ecosystem.
Presented as a kind of absurd technology fair, the installation turns apparently useful tools into small devices of resistance. Works that may form part of the project include Slop Evader, which filters the Internet to show content predating ChatGPT’s public emergence; Zoom Escaper, which sabotages the user’s audio during video calls; Slow Hot Computer, which slows down and heats up the computer to reduce productivity; and The Good Life, a subscription that sends Enron’s internal emails in chronological order.
Through humour, friction and the critical use of software, Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne propose other ways of inhabiting technology. Their work questions digital platforms’ promise of permanent efficiency and opens a space to consider the right to slowness, opacity and disconnection as forms of cultural resistance.
For NEWART Centre, participation in Sónar+D 2026 is an opportunity to place its activity in a leading international context and support artistic practices that take a critical view of contemporary technologies. The project connects with the centre’s work on digital art, the conservation of technological practices and the production of works exploring the social, political and cultural tensions of the digital present.
Tega Brain is an environmental artist and engineer. Her practice crosses art, ecology, software and digital infrastructures, and has been presented at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian, ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica and Pioneer Works. She is currently a professor of creative technologies at New York University.
Sam Lavigne is an artist and teacher. His practice focuses on data, surveillance, automation, natural language processing and forms of power linked to computer systems. He is a professor of Synthetic Media and Algorithmic Justice at Parsons School of Design and has been a collaborative practice with Tega Brain for years.
With Cabinet of Refusals, NEWART Centre continues to promote projects that place digital art as a space for production, critical thinking and experimentation in the face of the technological challenges of our time.
