Ho Chi Minh City is getting a five-week burst of digital creativity this autumn. The French Institute in Vietnam is staging its first Digital November in the country, an interdisciplinary programme mixing art, science and technology under the theme 'Entre les lignes' (Between the Lines), running from October 23 to November 29, 2026.
The opening act is one of the more unusual installations you'll see anywhere: ORYMI, which turns the biological signals of living plants into sound and images. French electronic artists Baptiste Pierre (known as Ctrl Alt Supp) and Leslie Morrier created it with Vietnam Media Lab, and it runs October 23-25 at Galerie Quỳnh on Nguyễn Văn Thủ Street. The same duo performs a live electronic set, 'Encore & Encor', at Bến Thành Theatre at 8pm on October 24.
Dance gets a look in too. Naagré, a cross-cultural collective pairing the French band Shplax with Burkina Faso troupe Badema, leads a masterclass at Dancenter in An Khánh Ward on October 29 ahead of their performance 'L'Avers et le Revers', a work built around dualities — masculine and feminine, tradition and modernity, composition and improvisation — also staged at Bến Thành Theatre.
From November 9-22, the 'Escape' exhibition at the University of Economics HCM City gathers roughly 20 works spanning digital art, video games and virtual reality, with animated film screenings, VR works and character design workshops led by digital artists Rosa Doan and Tom Le. On November 19, digital culture specialist Valentin Schmite, co-founder of Ask Mona, joins discussions on AI, culture and education at the same venue.
The finale is fittingly local: a digital installation on natural water filtration by CARE (Centre of Asian Research on Water) at the Hàng Bàng Canal from November 27-29 — a piece that doubles as a reason to walk a canal you'd otherwise ignore.
Digital November has been run by the French Institute and its global cultural network since 2017, and reached more than 70 countries and 160 cities in 2025. For travellers, this is a rare chance to catch a European-scale digital arts festival without leaving Southeast Asia — and most events are either free or low-cost, spaced across venues in the city centre, so it slots neatly into a broader Saigon itinerary of street food, coffee and colonial-era architecture.
