EVENT: OCTOBRE NUMÉRIQUE — FAIRE MONDE 2025: ‘TALES FROM THE REAL WORLD’ (OCTOBER 11—NOVEMBER 8 2025, ARLES, FRANCE)
Octobre Numérique — Faire Monde
11 October – 9 November 2025
Curated by Vincent Moncho
Chapelle des Trinitaires, Arles, France
From 11 October to 9 November 2025, Arles hosts a new edition of Octobre Numérique — Faire Monde, with a pronounced emphasis on artistic videogames, experimental practices, and a technology-critical ethos. The centrepiece is the duo exhibition Tales from the Real World by Mélanie Courtinat and Pascal Greco, staged at the Chapelle des Trinitaires with free admission.
Curated by Vincent Moncho, Tales from the Real World brings together two internationally recognised artists who examine how digital technologies modulate perception and narrative. Greco presents in-game photographs that approach virtual environments as urban and landscape studies; he also screens the new film Places/Spaces, extending his enquiry into hybrid territories where documentation, simulation, and affect intersect. Courtinat contributes The Siren, an art game that subverts heroic quest structures, and All Unsaved Progress Will Be Lost, a VR work inspired by testimonies of catastrophe that suspends the viewer in a slow, reflective temporality. The exhibition’s title signals a concern with how the “real” is continuously reconfigured by technical images, interactive systems, and contemporary storytelling.
As part of the opening weekend, Greco will also appear for a public encounter linked to his publishing activity (Librairie Actes Sud, Saturday 11 October, 15:30).
By pairing Greco’s in-game photography and film with Courtinat’s playable and immersive works, Tales from the Real World treats game engines as image-making systems and narrative frameworks. The exhibition articulates how procedural spaces reorganise documentary claims and spectatorship: photographs sourced from simulated terrains challenge indexicality, while an art game and a VR environment redistribute attention and agency without defaulting to spectacle. In the broader festival context—residency for experimental games, a dedicated online platform, and a sustainability-minded technical regime—Octobre Numérique consolidates Arles as a site where videogames are engaged as contemporary art, not merchandise
Octobre Numérique positions itself at the intersection of contemporary creation and new technologies—exhibitions, talks, performances, screenings, a game jam—with an explicit focus on game art. New in 2025 are EXTRA, the first residency dedicated to experimental videogames (the laureates are Mathilde Reynaud and Sohel Bourgeau), and ON:LIVE, a virtual curatorial platform presenting an international artist’s work online for the duration of the festival. The organisers reaffirm a commitment to permacomputing: partially offsetting the carbon footprint and limiting new hardware purchases, an institutional stance that aligns the programme with debates on sustainable infrastructures.
The festival is supported by DRAC Provence–Alpes–Côte d’Azur, Région Sud, and local partners; media partners include Mouvement, Usbek & Rica, and Fisheye Immersive. This year, VRAL – Milan Machinima Festival joins as a programme partner, indicating a clear through-line to game-based moving-image practices.
Programme highlights (October–November)
- Opening Night — Twerkistan (Live) (Sat 11 Oct)
- Artist talk — Pascal Greco: Landscapes, photography, videogame (Sat 11 Oct)
- Seminar — No Tech, Low Tech, High Tech (Sat 18 Oct)
- Performance series — Mirages collatéraux (Thu 16, 23, 30 Oct)
- Launch — Supervisions (Fri 17 Oct)
- Launch — Permacomputing (Sun 19 Oct)
- Workshop — Teen workshop with Laure Neria (Wed 22 Oct)
- Playtest & talk — Mathilde Reynaud and Sohel Bourgeau (Sat 25 Oct)
- Cinema — Ari Folman, The Congress (Tue 28 Oct)
- Vernissage — Metalabel (Mon 3 Nov)
- Closing Night — Frédéric D. Oberland (Live) (Sat 8 Nov)
- Masterclass — Meet “migu” (Sun 9 Nov)