Signal Festival 2026: Dream on! – Dreams and Visions

Signal Festival was founded in 2013 to present contemporary light and digital art in the historic backdrop of Prague. It takes place every year in mid-October and lasts for four evenings. Signal is a festival of digital and creative culture. In more than 12 years, it has welcomed over 4.5 million visitors to Prague. It combines contemporary visual art, urban space, and modern technology. It has become the most visited cultural event in the Czech Republic.

The program features renowned foreign and Czech artists from the fields of light design, visual and digital art, artificial intelligence, and conceptual art. The festival enjoys educating both itself and its visitors. Signal Festival is one of the largest producers of contemporary art in the Czech Republic. It supports the youngest Czech artists and has been involved in the creation of more than seventy original installations created especially for the festival. It organizes accompanying programs for children, professionals, and students. It cooperates with a number of foreign festivals and cultural institutions.

"Dream on! – Dreams and Visions" presents a world in which reality dissolves and the boundaries between reality and dreams blur. The festival program connects digital, light, and kinetic art with public space, with installations entering the living organism of the city, forgotten and new places, galleries, and public buildings. Between history and everyday life, a space is created for a different kind of perception – immersion in dreams, in visions that transcend and shape us. It invites visitors on a journey into the depths of the human imagination – to places where logic gives way to intuition, light comes to life in motion, and technology becomes a tool of emotion.

Through digital installations, light objects, kinetic sculptures, and performances, artists from around the world explore themes of dreaming, inner visions, and personal and collective ideas about the future. Each work is a gateway to a different state of consciousness—sometimes calm, sometimes chaotic, dreamlike, or prophetic.

The artists work not only with images, but also with time, environment, sound, movement, and viewer response. They create a multisensory experience that not only enchants, but also encourages reflection: What do our dreams tell us about ourselves? And what visions shape the world we live in—and the one that is yet to come?

The Dream on! – Dreams and Visions project builds on the legacy of surrealism not only in its poetics, but also in its critical potential. Like the surrealists, today's artists draw on the depths of the human imagination – their inspiration comes from dreams, visions, the subconscious, and borderline states of perception. They thus follow in the footsteps of surrealism, which found uniquely fertile ground in Prague as early as the 1930s. Like the surrealists of that time, today's artists strive to connect reality and dreams, the rational and the intuitive, the conscious and the unconscious.

However, they use contemporary means to do so – light, algorithms, sensors, movement, sound, data, and interactivity. In doing so, they often question what we take for granted, while revealing what we may have lost on the path to success. At the same time, they remind us that every dream – whether personal, political, or technological – is also a statement about our time.

Within the festival program, we therefore address the multifaceted and inexhaustible theme of dreams and visions, particularly from the perspective of the individual, society, and technology.

Dream on! – "Dreams and Visions" is not just the theme of the exhibition, but an invitation to change your perspective on the city, on art, and on yourself. Each installation is a gateway to another world – a world where technology becomes poetry, light becomes emotion, and movement becomes a silent narrative.