Media Arts and Technology End of Year Show 2026
This data visualization is a collection of over 100 headlines, over the last year, featuring the use and development of AI and data centers from publishers such as the NY Times, FT Times, Wall Street Journal, The Intercept and more.
Jonathan Crescenzo
https://github.com/jonpenn-crez
String State is a handwoven work, designed through code and reincarnated in the digital, exploring the interconnectivity of the loom and the computer. As each row was manually woven, the loom state was recorded to be fed back in to a real time digital recreation of the process, exposing the time intensive labor of weaving. Alpaca wool and Tencel fiber. 18x38in.
Devon Frost
https://www.instagram.com/devnfrost
Interference is an interactive plotter system that generates animated moiré patterns in real time. Moiré arises when similar repetitive patterns overlap and shift, producing the illusion of movement from pure geometry. Visitors design their own patterns including lines, grids, radial or concentric forms, adjusting spacing, density, rotation and scale through an intuitive interface. Rather than rendering the result on screen, a CNC plotter translates each parameter into physical marks on transparent film. As layers accumulate on the movable platform, the moiré effect is not computed but drawn, emerging gradually through ink, material, and motion, making visible a process that digital displays typically collapse into an instant.
Zhifan Guo
https://www.instagram.com/insulindian_phasmid
Jintong Yang
https://jintongyang.wixsite.com/home
https://www.instagram.com/inkheart.jt
This installation explores video feedback as both a technical system and a metaphor for human agency. Using a live camera feed projected back onto itself, the work creates recursive visual patterns that continuously evolve through the presence and movement of participants. Small gestures become amplified, destabilized, and transformed by the system, revealing the tension between individual action and automated response. The piece draws from early experimental video art and analog feedback systems while reflecting contemporary concerns around surveillance, algorithmic mediation, and machine perception. In an environment increasingly shaped by systems designed to predict and influence behavior, the installation asks what it means to intervene within a loop that is already reacting to us. Rather than positioning technology as autonomous or inevitable, the work treats it as collaborative and something shaped through interaction, disruption, and participation. The feedback loop becomes a site of negotiation between human intention and system behavior, where agency emerges not from total control, but from active engagement with unstable and responsive systems.
Eric Rennie
https://erennie97.wixsite.com/website
https://github.com/ericmrennie
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericmrennie
The question of agency goes back to how we lets computers create. The computational platforms we use to create art shapes the art that we make. This work is a primitive form of how artist let go of the outcome itself, and focuses on the emergent behavior of different the parameters generate the art work. this work explores what aspects I want to control and which aspect i want to let go.
Yeonsuk Jung
https://www.instagram.com/yeonsuk_and_composition
Plastic persists long after it is discarded. Along many coastlines, heat and abrasion fuse it with sand, rock, and organic matter into plastiglomerates, hybrid formations that register human activity at geological timescales. PlaSphere is an immersive installation. It combines a spatialized multichannel sound field with Pepper’s Ghost “holograms” of AI-generated coastal organisms, displayed alongside specimens collected on the island the recordings come from. Field recordings from Haklim-do, South Korea are segmented into short grains, organized by timbral similarity, and fused in the frequency domain. Photographs of collected specimens are used to fine-tune a LoRA that generates organisms modeled on local species. Across sound and image, the work follows the same operations (fragmentation, fusion, and accumulation), treating composite matter as both material and method. The contribution is methodological: the technical operations that produce the work are the same operations that produce its subject, and the resulting speculative organisms make a future ecology shaped by industrial debris perceptible at the scale of a single body.
Sabina Hyoju Ahn
https://www.instagram.com/sabina_ahn
Ryan Millett
https://rmillett.myportfolio.com
Seyeon Park
https://www.instagram.com/seyparc_artwork
Audio/Video installation
Jazer Giles
https://www.instagram.com/jazer-giles
Interactive video installation
Jazer Giles
https://www.instagram.com/jazer-giles
Tesserae is an application of low-complexity art built from simple bitwise operations. A computer stores numbers as binary digits (bits), and bitwise operations act on those bits directly. Common ones, such as XOR, AND, OR, and bit shifts, take two numbers and combine them digit by digit to produce a new number. For every cell of the terminal grid, a formula takes three variables (the cell’s x-coordinate, its y-coordinate, and the current time) and combines them with bitwise operations. The value the formula returns determines the color and the character that appear in that cell. While the underlying operations are simple, their combinations create surprisingly intricate patterns with discernible structure at multiple scales simultaneously. As time progresses, the patterns shift and evolve.
Ryan Millett
Karl Yerkes
https://www.instagram.com/metacookie
Consumer Augmented Reality (AR) devices rely on third-party cloud infrastructure to collect sensitive camera and sensor data from users, posing risks to personal agency and security. We challenge the status quo of centralized AR through an experimental shared-AR experience that uses local-first software principles on an independent hardware and software platform, enabling users to maintain complete ownership of their spatial data. Instead of relying on a cloud-based or proprietary shared-AR platform, this project uses fully local computer vision in a camera and microcontroller module, along with peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange mechanisms to support a simple shared-AR experience.
Ana Cardenas Gasca
https://anacardenas.com/portfolio/ar
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ana-cardenas-gasca
Xue Gao
A pen plotter is programmed to go through the motions of a never-ending set of lines and curves through space. By letting this machine hold a brush pen, its motion leaves a visible trace on a piece of paper. That is, if it has ink. Audience members participate by instructing the machine to go dip its brush in ink, whenever they feel like the brush gets too dry. The machine does not know about its brush or the dryness of it. The machine continues on regardless. Through this unusual painting method, human intervention mitigates inherent limitations of automated computer-controlled machines. Rather than increasingly complex technology, sometimes all a little machine needs is a helping hand. Computer program, custom electronics, pen-plotter, inks.
Emilie Yu
PosTalk is an open-source audio plugin that invites performers to reclaim physical expressiveness in digital music-making. In a landscape where electronic performance has been reduced to button-pressing and mouse-clicking, this work proposes the hands — and the body — as primary instruments of control. By embedding a live camera feed directly inside a DAW plugin, the system tracks hand gestures in real time using computer vision, translating movement into parameter automation. A raised palm, an open hand, a slow descent — each becomes a musical gesture with sonic consequence. The performer is no longer separated from the music by an interface; the interface disappears into the body. Built as a VST3/AU plugin using the JUCE framework, with a WebView UI powered by MediaPipe for hand landmark detection, the tool is DAW-agnostic and freely available. It requires no specialized hardware — only a camera and the desire to move.
Italo Rojas
https://www.italorojas-portfolio.cl
“Heading Your Way” is an interactive performance that reimagines platform delivery as a system entangling game mechanics, labor, remote operation, and bodily collaboration. One participant uses a game controller to move a physical drone and its virtual counterpart, while another participant’s breathing allows or pauses their movement. The drones move in synchronization as participants are asked to deliver a package to a designated destination. Here, breathing is not simply a biometric signal; it becomes an operational condition that enables movement and determines when the package is held or released. A simple delivery process becomes an unstable performance entangling two bodies, a sensor, and drone systems. Borrowing the familiar language of delivery apps, the work asks: who is actually acting? Is it the person with the controller, the breathing participant, the system, or the platform that assigns the task? The ordinary notification “Heading Your Way” becomes both a promise of convenience and a sign of automated action in which responsibility is distributed. In response to “Re:agency”, the work understands agency not as individual choice, but as a condition distributed, delegated, and obscured within technological systems. Breathing becomes command, participation becomes compliance, and delivery returns as a question of responsibility.
Hyun Cho
https://www.instagram.com/dothedotheg
This is a demonstration of a CNC embossing machine that we have developed using the Stepdance library for Arduino. We reconfigured a Prusa i3 MK3S 3D printer, creating new connectors so that the printer is compatible with the Stepdance board. Custom caster wheel mechanism and rod and embossing wheels are all CAD modeled in Fusion and 3D printed. The wooden frame is custom modeled and laser cut. The frontend interface, using p5.js with WebSocket connection enables users to design an embossing pattern.
Fiona Irving-Beck
https://sites.google.com/view/fionairving-beck
Eric Rennie
https://github.com/ericmrennie
https://erennie97.wixsite.com/website
Echofract: A Chamber for Human–Machine Conversations is an interactive installation that examines the vulnerability of private data in the age of AI. Visitors speak to a conversational AI system where their words are captured, transformed, and reduced to fragmented traces that persist beyond the moment of interaction. These fragments appear as shifting visuals and indistinct whispers, accumulating into a collective field.
Yiran Shaw Xiao
https://www.instagram.com/shaw_yiran
Chongyang Rao
https://www.instagram.com/chongyang_rao
Stochastic Jué (觉) is an immersive experience that reveals the hidden dynamics of generative models through attention and perception. By combining machine attention with human gaze and physiological signals, the system introduces divergence as a form of intervention, allowing viewers to probe and reshape the generative process. The work frames perception not as observation, but as an active window through which stochastic structures become visible. 觉 [the Chinese character for perception, awareness, awakening] frames this exchange as irreducibly bilateral. Stochastic Jué asks what happens at the boundary between these two black boxes when human attention becomes a probe, and the structure of generation becomes, briefly, visible.
Yiran Shaw Xiao
https://www.instagram.com/shaw_yiran
Nefeli Manoudaki
https://www.instagram.com/nefeliman
Iason Paterakis
https://www.iasonpaterakis.com
https://www.instagram.com/deejay_tekton
Chongyang Rao
https://www.instagram.com/chongyang_rao
Our hearts are constantly drawing an invisible self-portrait; VitaLines brings this drawing to the light. The tool does not take instructions, but rather listens to its operator’s natural internal rhythm. A pulse sensor reads the raw voltage signal of the heartbeat and feeds it directly into the plotter. The AxiDraw then draws a waveform in a zigzag motion across the page, with its horizontal amplitude mapped to the analog signal in real time. We created this work in response to a question about liveness and control: who, or what, determines the behavior of a machine? VitaLines refuses to provide a clean answer. The heartbeat cannot be overridden, only scaled, and the operator cannot fully control the outcome, only shape the conditions under which it unfolds. What remains on the page is a record that you were here, alive and unreplicable.
Taneesha Panda
https://github.com/taneeshapanda21
Benjamin Ancho
Spectral Map is a movement based texture adventure with rpg elements. The visuals explore plasticine clay in a video game setting through traditional stop motion, stratacut techniques, and 3d scanning. Audio adapts to player navigation and circumstance with cellular compositions, along with a real-time granular effect driven by speed. These design pillars make Spectral Map one of the only games to implement reactive granularity in the music, and one of the only games in the first person shooter genre to be made entirely out of clay.
Noah Thompson
https://www.instagram.com/123g0bln
“Live from LA!” was an immersive youth-theater production co-created with LA-based high school students and youth arts organizations, blending dance, poetry, music, and augmented reality. The play unfolded against the backdrop of a Latinx community endangered by racial, economic, and political violence, foregrounding generational conflicts over how best to protect each other. To support youth-led personal and political storytelling, we co-created projection mapping animations using tools built with p5.js. Students used these browser-based tools to manipulate visual parameters without needing extensive prior coding experience.
Payton Croskey
https://www.instagram.com/paytoncroskey
https://www.linkedin.com/in/payton-croskey
Ana Cardenas Gasca
https://anacardenas.com/portfolio/ar
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ana-cardenas-gasca
Jiwon Ham
afterworkham@gmail.com
https://www.instagram.com/jiwonhaam
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jiwonham
Driven by a live EEG signal, this project visualizes and sonify brain signal into an immersive, real-time audio-visual piece with a colorful ribbon band and multiple tonalities of granular music, allowing participants to view their current flow intensity by the intensity of the bright, watery blue on the ribbon band.
Yuehao Gao
https://gaoyueh8.wixsite.com/home
https://www.instagram.com/kevingao0809
Attention Is All You Need is an interactive media art installation that explores attention as an embodied and environmentally mediated cognitive process. Using a network of sensors—including EmotiBit, Muse 2, Leap Motion, and webcam-based computer vision—the work transforms the exhibition environment into a living laboratory for sensing participants’ presence, movement, activity, and physiological states. In response, the visual environment shifts between a digital twin of TransLAB and a virtual tree originally located in front of the UCSB Library. Through this transformation, the project reveals attention not as a private mental event, but as a dynamic relation among body, technology, perception, and environment.
Anna Borou Yu
https://www.instagram.com/annaborouyu
https://www.linkedin.com/in/annaborouyu
There’s no substantial reason stopping human from understanding and perceiving a world with 4 spatial dimensions, and a nautilus will guide us through the journey.
Felix Yuan
https://www.instagram.com/bbbbboint
Mutation places the viewer inside a living strand of DNA. The double helix surrounds them—pulsing with light, dissolving into fields of signals, and reforming in an endless cycle of change. Through interaction, viewers influence the evolving structure, shifting colors, fragmenting strands, and reshaping the visual genome in real time. In biology, mutation is often described as error, yet every species, trait, and individual emerges through variation. This work reframes mutation as a creative force rather than a flaw. Mutation asks where agency resides within biological systems: in the molecule, the organism, the observer, or chance itself. Distributed across multiple machines so that no single perspective is complete, the work presents agency as collective, emergent, and continuously becoming.
Tyler Kaufman (Visceral Design)
visceraldesignmusic.com
https://www.instagram.com/visceraldesign
Susan Zhong
https://www.instagram.com/gwichanist0v0
The Quantum Global Organoid Orchestra (qGOO) is an experimental art–science collaboration that brings together living neural tissue, generative media, and networked human participation to explore new forms of emergent, cross-species creativity. The project centers on brain organoids—lab-grown clusters of neural cells cultivated in partnered neurobiology labs—which produce spontaneous electrical activity.
Nefeli Manoudaki
https://www.instagram.com/nefeliman
Iason Paterakis
https://www.iasonpaterakis.com
https://www.instagram.com/deejay_tekton
Mert Toka
https://www.instagram.com/viscousvoid
Diarmid Flatley
https://www.instagram.com/nulltools
https://www.diarmidflatley.com
Kavi [Ilze Briede]
https://www.instagram.com/art_by_kavi
Marcos Novak
https://www.translab.mat.ucsb.edu
https://www.instagram.com/alien90291
Mark-David Hosale
https://www.instagram.com/mdhosale
Simulacra Naturae - Biomes Studies operates as a multisensory infrastructure investigating how aesthetic experience emerges when biological activity, generative algorithms, and embodied agents interact. We position organoid electrophysiology as a coordinating force that mediates relationships across heterogeneous subsystems, spanning visual, sonic, material, and haptic domains. By integrating agent-based simulations with haptic feedback and computational fabrication, the work positions data as a catalyst for emergence. The result is a cyberphysical ecology where distributed neural dynamics and human interaction co-evolve across varying temporal and material scales.
Metaesthetica
https://www.instagram.com/metaesthetica
A wearable music synthesizer and instrument for dancers. The user can produces music while performing physically such dance or an act. The idea is to make the music production more intuitive with respect to performance from the performer point of view. Actions like tapping, snapping, rubbing and sliding two fingers are mapped to various synthesizing techniques. Agency is redistributed across movement, material, and system, allowing music to emerge directly from physical expression.
Shashank S
https://shashankssham.wixsite.com/my-site-1
Digital art, virtual photography, micropoetry
Stemming from my lifelong interest in exploring virtual worlds and investigating the myriad forms of creativity that they inspire, Layerings is a series of experimental images (and accompanying text) in which I combine and edit multiple “snapshots” of various Second Life scenes, often taken from the exact same camera angle but with different graphical settings, in order to paint a picture that goes beyond mere representation. The scene itself becomes both raw material and canvas, transformed to elicit a sense that, somewhere betwixt the pixels, there might be yet another world waiting to be imagined.
Erik A. Mondrian
https://bsky.app/profile/rainstormsky.com
https://fosstodon.org/@erikMondrian
https://www.primfeed.com/erik.mondrian
https://www.youtube.com/erikMondrian
This audiovisual work is an excerpt from my recent electroacoustic piece, Behind the Invisible Doors. The full composition uses an ordinary object sound, a door to unlock sonic worlds featuring elements such as metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. This specific excerpt features a door that opens into a mysterious underwater world, creating an immersive experience that invites you to submerge yourself deep into the ocean and discover unusual creatures.
Sum Yee Lee
https://www.sumyeeleemusic@gmail.com
A browser-native visual node editor for real-time audio AND visuals. Patches authored in the editor compile to plain Gamma C++ — and, with the optional local compile daemon run as live WebAssembly. inside the editor 375+ nodes, an in-page AI assistant, voice + handwriting input, full touch / iPad support, and end-to-end live performance from a Mac, iPad, or Chromebook on the same network.
Luc Freiburg
