SIGGRAPH 2026 Explores the Convergence of Art, Science, and Technology

The 53rd annual conference Art Gallery and Art Papers programs spotlight groundbreaking work at the intersection of digital art, research, interactive media, and emerging technologies.

LOS ANGELES, May 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Academic and industry experts will gather in Los Angeles from 19–23 July 2026 at the Los Angeles Convention Center for SIGGRAPH 2026, where attendees will have direct access to leaders in innovation, digital art, visual effects, new realities, AI, research, and more. Rooted in a legacy stretching back 45 years, the Art Gallery and Art Papers programs remain central to the SIGGRAPH conference experience, spotlighting the evolving intersection of art, science, and technology.

"We opened the call to creative projects that address large-scale questions and humanitarian concerns," said Everardo Reyes, SIGGRAPH 2026 Art Gallery Chair. "We investigate foundational components such as algorithmic methods and computing hardware, while pushing how we perceive an increasingly interconnected world and re-examining our place within the layered infrastructures of contemporary technology."

The SIGGRAPH 2026 Art Gallery, themed In-Betweens, received nearly 200 submissions this year and features works that explore relationships across systems, materials, time, and publics through interactive and technologically mediated art. This program allows creators to express themselves using CGI and interactive techniques as their primary language and materials to provoke emotional, sensory, and conceptual experiences. Creators have long pushed technology to convey artistic visions that go beyond artifacts or devices, creating a world in which interactive techniques often function as languages and symbolic systems within networked ecosystems spanning space, time, and generations.

Selected works span impressive installations, projections, performances, sculptures, bio art, robotics, data visualization, wearable art, kinetic installations, and more, with featured projects including:

Simulacra Naturae - Entangled Biomes: Generative Ecosystems driven by Brain Organoid Intelligence: A multisensory infrastructure investigating how aesthetic experience emerges when biological activity, generative algorithms, and embodied agents interact.

The Long Fall: A descent into the ocean's living memory: An interactive installation tracing the microscopic labor of plankton, the silent architects of Earth's climate that sequester 40% of our carbon emissions, across scales. The work utilizes Gravity Machine data across 18 expeditions to track plankton in their natural vertical world. The installation features a "plankton instrument," where each touch triggers the fall and sound of a species. Narration is provided by the AI-revived voice of Rachel Carson, revealing plankton's hidden role in shaping planetary climate.

in-between: home, belonging, and the Asian diaspora: A modular installation about the immigrant experience and the difficulty of defining home. Drawing on the creator's migration history across the Philippines, China, Japan, and the United States, as well as seven interviews with Asian diaspora who relocated to Tokyo, the work translates personal journeys into fragile material and participatory data portraiture across three components: "deportation", a two-hour performance where water drips onto washi paper printed with a life journey at a cadence driven by real-time worldwide searches for "deportation"; "home:1–8", silkscreened interview portraits mounted throughout the space; and "home:collective", where visitors contribute their own journeys and are paired with a stranger whose definition of home resonates.

Diffusion TV: An interactive interface that aims to demystify the inner workings of AI diffusion models through a nostalgic CRT TV. By manipulating the TV's knobs and antenna, viewers explore AI-generated images and sounds, experiencing the transformation of chaotic data into recognizable forms. Through its blend of artistic interpretation and experiential AI, "Diffusion TV" invites audiences to consider what is preserved and what is lost in the pursuit of technological advancement.

Sternwerk: An interactive installation creating meaning through the constellation of a meteorite (deep time), a simulation (Conway's Game of Life), and human presence. The meteorite, acting as a heat sink for the computation, becomes a condenser for human breath. As each drop falls, amplified by sound, it resets the cellular automata simulation, perpetually restarting a fragile universe. Together, the juried exhibition highlights how artists are expanding the boundaries of creative technology while engaging pressing social, ecological, and philosophical questions.

Beyond the Art Gallery, the SIGGRAPH 2026 Art Papers program serves as a premier forum where art meets inquiry. This year's theme, The Creative Complexities of Translation: Practices, Artifacts, and Stories, explores how translation across cultures, media, disciplines, and time shapes creative practice and the emergence of new forms of knowledge.

The Art Papers program spotlights critical research at the convergence of art, science, and technology, all while championing deep inquiry, creative experimentation, and critical perspectives that reshape how we understand media, culture, and computation. Accepted Art Papers are published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (PACMCGIT) special issue on SIGGRAPH 2026 Art Papers.

"I'm excited about the range and breadth of the papers that we have that span from the nanoscale to the architectural scale. They span experiences at the scale of the body, at the scale of the city, and artifacts that range from digital to material," said Vernelle A. A. Noel, SIGGRAPH 2026 Art Papers Chair. "This year's theme challenges us to rethink translation as a creative and critical act," she added.

This year's featured Art Papers include:

Resonance: Meditative Neural Rhythms as Collective Spatial Experience transforms a traditionally solitary meditative practice into a shared spatial experience by externalizing a meditator's neural rhythms as architectural-scale light and motion. Rather than treating neurofeedback as private data, the work situates cognition within an immersive environment that can be collectively sensed and inhabited.

Electrospun Fields: 3D Nano-Fiber Material Computation as Design Method advances SIGGRAPH's interest in material computation by framing electric fields as programmable boundary conditions and fiber deposition as a material rendering of invisible forces. By linking conductive scaffold topologies to material behaviors using bio-compatible polymers, this framework opens novel pathways for emergent and expressive computational art and fabrication.

Gesture Flux: Unveiling Budaixi Hand Gestures through Mixed Reality Performance is an immersive performance system integrating mixed-reality gesture recognition, Budaixi (traditional Taiwanese glove puppetry), and contemporary dance.

Large-Scale Photogrammetric Documentation of St. John's Co-Cathedral: A Workflow for Cultural Heritage Preservation presents how digital documentation has become a preservation necessity, as demonstrated by the 2019 fire at Notre-Dame. As cultural heritage sites face threats from climate change, conflict, and degradation, this project demonstrates that architectural digitization is achievable using commercial tools. Computer graphics techniques can directly serve the preservation of cultural heritage.

Light Architecture: Translating the AI Black Box into Immersive Experience shows how, as AI becomes an opaque "Black Box," Light Architecture physically "translates" invisible algorithmic structures instead of merely exploiting generative outputs. Synthesizing kinetic light and spatial audio into a Gesamtkunstwerk, this "Experiential AI" offers a sensory alternative to traditional Explainable AI (XAI), providing a critical framework for demystifying the "Hyperobject" of modern computation.

Together, the Art Gallery and Art Papers demonstrate how SIGGRAPH continues to foster dialogue across disciplines while advancing the future of computer graphics and interactive techniques. To read more about this year's conference and offerings, visit the website to see how innovation meets artistic imagination, and register now to discover all the art programs have to offer at SIGGRAPH 2026.

About ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, and SIGGRAPH 2026
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field's challenges. ACM SIGGRAPH is a special interest group within ACM that serves as an interdisciplinary community for members in research, technology, and applications in computer graphics and interactive techniques. The SIGGRAPH conference is the world's leading annual interdisciplinary educational experience showcasing the latest in computer graphics and interactive techniques. SIGGRAPH 2026, the 53rd annual conference hosted by ACM SIGGRAPH, will take place live 19–23 July at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

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