According to the CBC Arts Trend Forecast 2026, one theme cuts across disciplines: a collective desire to step away from algorithm-driven life and return to human-scale experience. Fifty-two Canadian artists – spanning film, music, literature, visual art, and performance – describe a cultural moment defined by screen fatigue, subscription exhaustion, and growing distrust in recommendation systems that endlessly repeat what already “works.” This is not a rejection of technology, but a rejection of being shaped by it.
Print, analog tools, and tactile media are resurging, not as nostalgia but as practical responses to digital “enshittification.” Zines, flyers, handwritten notes, film photography, and physical books reappear because they resist optimization and preserve trace – evidence of time, labour, and human decision-making. In a world saturated with generative content, materiality becomes a signal of intent.
image: freepik
The forecast also frames 2026 as the “year of the mutant,” capturing anxieties around AI’s influence on visual culture and imagination. Artists point to a growing awareness that AI does not merely generate images; it alters how humans see, desire, and even think. The response is a renewed interest in imperfection, messiness, and biological textures – skin, fibre, clay, and natural materials that assert embodiment over abstraction.
Across art, science, and culture, the same correction is underway. Communities seek third spaces, human curation, and shared rituals. Knowledge, like art, is being pulled back toward context, complexity, and lived experience. 2026 does not promise escape from technology – it signals a demand for technologies, cultures, and systems that remember the human at their centre.
Read more:
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