Theme – Imagine Expanded: The New Flesh

Welcome to Ghost in the Feed’s 5th Frequency! 

We are growing a second body out of screens and code and asking it to carry the life our current body cannot. Would we ever hand ourselves over to it completely— and haven’t we already begun doing so?

In The Matrix, Cypher cuts into a steak he knows is a lie. He no longer cares: ‘Ignorance is bliss’, he says, choosing the dream. Two decades on, Ready Player One turned that choice into a mass movement, its hero shrugging that reality ‘is a bummer’ as everyone seeks a way out. What we’re fleeing from is a world , inequality and injustice. The virtual promises change, frictionless, on tap. Karl Marx foresaw this dilemma in 1848, in the opening pages of his Communist Manifesto: ‘All that is solid melts into air … and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.’

Our lives and our minds (which are flesh too) are drawn into the screen. Donna Haraway called us cyborgs forty years ago, arguing that technology causes us to blend into one, creating human-machine interfaces. VR, AR glasses and AI are the latest stage, bringing with them an ancient dread: that virtual flesh will replace the living kind and dissolve the social tissue of our society. But the same tools can do the exact opposite. Embodiment is an artist’s sharpest instrument, and AI can be a companion just as much as an usurper.

Anime classic Ghost in the Shell, which is presented at Imagine 2026 in a gloriously restored version, was already exploring similar themes in the mid-1990s. Its heroine, the Major, dives from a skyscraper and blends into the net weightlessly – half-machine, wholly herself. The new flesh is just that: a reality, sliding between the virtual and the physical. The question is whether we can surf that merger with grace, without losing ourselves. Our theme programme Ghost in the Feed begins with Cronenberg’s new flesh, Videodrome; it ends here, with the bodies we are becoming.

Imagine Expanded – The New Flesh slots into this year’s Ghost in the Feed theme programme as its final, fifth frequency. This frequency consists of:

• Our yearly immersive exhibition. A full run of themed VR, AR, Mixed Reality, games and installations. Full line-up still to follow, but sure to include The Great Orator, Daniel Ernst’s AI-driven story world reborn in a new CRT version. All VHS haze and early-console idling, where a dead TV medium returns as an AI.
• Focus on DARKFIELD. A rare retrospective of the innovative sound illusionists’ three skin-crawling DARKFIELD Radio pieces, immersive audio works that take you to a place no screen can reach, plus a masterclass and a hands-on workshop on their craft.
• POSTMORTEM – a live Mixed Reality performance for an audience of 200. A five-act autopsy of a dead earth that pulls the headset away just as it promises to save you. From Funilab (Simone Fougnier), the acclaimed XR artist and Quill master behind Venice’s Tales from Soda Island, with a live score by Droeloe (Vincent Rooijers), the genre-defying electronic musician who’s played Coachella and Tomorrowland.
• Ghosts in the Archive, a special collaboration between artists from the Netherlands Film Academy’s Master of Film and media archive Beeld & Geluid. A hunt for the ghosts of Beeld & Geluid’s collection, then a re-shaping of the hauntings into short found-footage films under the guidance of the finest Dutch found-footage makers. Ghosts in the Archive will be presented at Imagine exclusively, paired with a conversation with the ghostbusters themselves.
• In Conversation: Payal Arora. Riffing off the restored version of Ghost in the Shell, Payal Arora, Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University, digital anthropologist and author of The Next Billion Users and From Pessimism to Promise, speaks on how the Global South receives and integrates AI on its own terms.