2026 Experiential Innovation
Award Finalists
For works that prioritize experience, whether subtle or immersive, engaging audiences through participation, presence, sensation, or environment, including live coding, performance, interactive installations, experiential VR/AR, and cross-modal practices across physical, digital, or hybrid forms. This category focuses on how a work is encountered or activated, rather than the specific technologies or formats used. Any artist whose work evokes presence, engagement, or interaction is eligible.
Zeitgeist: Decolonising AI
Dr Shama Rahman and Dr Oliver Gingrich
Zeitgeist is an interactive AI-based XR experience of Flow mental states presented as 360 participatory performance. The artwork interrogates issues around the need to 'Decolonise AI' due to inherent structural bias affecting marginalised groups
AFTERLIFE the exhibition
ONLY SLIME
AFTERLIFE by ONLY SLIME (Tobi Pfeil and Claudia Cox) transforms their 2023 computer-game opera into an ambitious new installation. Conceived after a real Near-Death-Experience, the installation invites you to step inside a world between life and death, past, present and future.
Implausible rainbows: an exercise in skyscaping
Lukas Truniger & Bruce Yoder
The installation recreates naturally occurring optical atmospheric phenomena like rainbows by artificial means, raising questions on how we interact with our environment and explores the inherently human desire to imitate as well as to eventually control nature.
People Concerto
STUDIO F.A.C.E.
A 63-cell fabric installation turns any space into a musical instrument. Infrared cameras and AI Crowd Dynamic Analytics track every step and pause, translating collective movement into live spatial music, making each participant both soloist and orchestra, performer and observer
Proteus 3.5: Contemplating in the Cloud
Maria Smigielska, CompMonks
When neurotechnology serves introspection instead of extraction, Proteus steers brain signals into living matter. A chapel-like chamber summons visitor’s attention without harvesting it but to transcend and return it as a contemplative, generative force
CONTROL NEGATIVE
Monika Masłoń
CONTROL NEGATIVE is an immersive 6DoF VR installation that transforms disruption into method. Through unstable interaction, shifting agency, and intentional dysfunction, it turns loss of control into an embodied emotional experience.
Constantinopoliad
Sister Sylvester
Constantinopoliad is a collective reading experience and audio work. A response to the archive of the poet Constantine Cavafy, the story is inspired by lost and missing queer archives through time; and by the ghosts, both erotic and historical, that visit Cavafy in his poems.
In 36,000 Ways
Karim Ben Khelifa
In this intimate, site-specific variation of his ongoing project, Karim Ben Khelifa shifts the experience of war from cognition to embodiment, confronting audiences with its physical and emotional weight.
ON AIR
Peter van Haaften, Michael Montanaro, Garnet Willis
ON AIR is an interactive sound art installation that transforms voice with a series of whimsical kinetic sculptures. The work culminates in a choral harmony of mirrors, building into a cacophonous performance of sound, rhythm and light.
Da Vinci’s Robot — A Will Dwelling in Shadow
Suguru Goto
Da Vinci’s Robot — A Will Dwelling in Shadow explores interaction as an embodied and spatial experience. Inside a giant robotic exoskeleton, the performer’s movements are amplified through laser and sound, transforming bodily motion into an immersive environmental force.
Dualities
Simone Wierød and Carl Emil Carlsen
Dualities is a techno-poetic dance performance where body and simulation merge in a meeting with the digital self. Through stereoscopic projection and volumetric capture, physical and virtual worlds overlap as bodies and their digital doubles transform in visual music.
Aquatic Score for a Performing Goldfish
Sumio Kobayashi
Aquatic Score for a Performing Goldfish is a short piano work in which a goldfish becomes the performer. In this work, a musical score is placed beneath the image of water. A computer program detects the movement of a goldfish, and when the fish touches specific notes there.
Mechanical Mirrors (Performative Version)
DANIEL ROZIN
The performative version of Mechanical Mirrors extends Daniel Rozin’s celebrated series of interactive sculptures into live performance, where the mirrors join the orchestra as both visual and musical instruments, generating sound through performer movement and mechanical behavior.
ARRAY
Eric Cheung
ARRAY is an interactive laser movement installation and dance piece that explores dimensionality as a means to contemplate the layers of our existence, revealing the abstraction between our physical and non-physical realities through movement data, light, sound and structure.
UN/VEIL
TRANS VOICES, ILĀ & MONOM
UN/BOUND is an interactive choral holographic sound installation created for Feel The Sound, Barbican. Shaped by cutting-edge quantum technology, TRANS VOICES choir evolves around you. Transform your own voice by making sound into specially trained ethical AI models of the choir
Fragmentations of Unity
So Kanno × Takuro Yonezawa × Yutaro Kyono
Swarm robotic light installation. Suspended tubes—each minimal, each oriented—breathe as a flock, synchronising, drifting apart, turning toward visitors who enter. An intimate microcosm of the one and the many: a non-verbal dialogue on being social, and being alive.
Antonín Kindl - OKO (Signal Calling 2025: PrusaLab & Signal Festival)
Antonín Kindl
OKO by Czech artist Antonín Kindl, winning project of Signal Calling 2025 (Signal Festival & PrusaLab), is an interactive electronic organism that explores the boundary between machine and human perception, influencing its environment through projected image and sound.
Baroque Bodies (Sway)
Laura Splan
Baroque Bodies (Sway)' creates an embodied immersive experience of epigenetic entanglement across micro and macro scales. The installation incorporates a 3D gaming environment, sound, and AI imagery that are controlled by intuitive movements and emergent social interactions.
A LIVING POEM
Sasha Stiles
An immersive generative language environment that advances poetry as a defining medium of the 21st century, and explores “poetic intelligence” (the intertwining of emotion and algorithm to make meaning) as a model for how technology can deepen, rather than diminish, our humanity.