The Digital Rain Festival in St. Petersburg has become the epicenter of global media art

From September 25 to 28, 2025, St. Petersburg became the epicenter of global media art for the first time, with the large-scale Digital Rain festival held here. The events of the festival took place at 15 key venues of the city and were attended by over 80,000 people. The festival, focused on the theme "Streams", became the main cultural event in September, presenting the latest art forms at the intersection of technology, science and creative industries.

The Digital Rain program covered the city's iconic locations, including the Alexandrinsky Theater and its New Stage.Meyerhold University, Sevkabel Port, Multimedia Center of the Russian Museum (Western Pavilion of Mikhailovsky Castle), library named afterMayakovsky Central Museum of Communications named afterPopova, Brusnitsyn Cultural Quarter, Vasilyevsky Island Arrow, PBX and SENO spaces, and many others. Most of the main program's events were open to the public for free.

The central media objects of the festival are:

· Installation "ANTIFRAGILITY 3.D" (LYM ART / LYM Robotics x T-Bank / Zakharova-Masaidov) in the space of the UKT Sevkabel Port

· Audio-visual work "Espectrees" by the Spanish Playmodes collective in the SENO space.

· Light installation "Lighthouse" by the Talking Birds & Flying Fish team at the Nevsky 20 site of the Mayakovsky Library.

· ROW audio-visual installation by legendary St. Petersburg-based media artists, the TUNDRA creative team

· Special exhibition "Streams. Water" at the Multimedia Center of the Russian Museum

The new stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater has become the main discussion and performative platform. As part of the educational program for professionals and amateurs of media art, leading experts in the field of art and multimedia spoke: Dmitry Bulatov, Aristarkh Chernyshev, Lisa Savina, Dmitry Masaidov, Evgeny Timashchuk, Rashid Osmanov, Andrey Mikhailovsky and others.

The real artistic discovery of the festival were two premieres presented on the New Stage: the choreographic performance "Synthetic Morphology" by Anastasia Alyokhina using hand-held tentacle prostheses and the poetic play "Lacuna" by Dmitry Masaidov x LYM ART with the main character, a robot poet.

As part of the music program of the festival, prepared jointly with the creators of the GAMMA festival by m_division, a unique event "Tanzpol" took place on September 26. 12 artists performed on two stages, culminating in the legendary Derrick May, one of the founders of the Detroit techno genre, who performed for the first time in St. Petersburg.

"Digital Rain has created a unique space for a dialogue between technology and culture, where light, sound and digital codes transform into modern media art. As organizers, we tried our best to make our first festival the main event of autumn," Gleb Matyushin, founder of the Digital Rain Festival, head of SmartLight Company.

The end of the festival was a large-scale mapping show, which was attended by over 5,000 people, in which the Smartlight team, using video mapping and lighting solutions, revived the architectural appearance of the theater. The show was accompanied by a musical performance by Zventa Sventana (Tina Kuznetsova and Yuri Usachev) from the balcony of the Alexandrinsky Theater, combining Russian traditions and modern electronics.

The Digital Rain Festival is organized by Smartlight and the New Media Laboratory of the New Stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater with the support of the Government of St. Petersburg.