2026 Legacy Futures Award Finalists
For works that sit at the intersection of reflection and anticipation — engaging past, present, and future in ways that examine our relationship to technology, culture, and time. This category is defined not by medium, but by how a work engages with time, memory, and future possibility.
Repeat as necessary: Performance Operating System
Operator
Repeat as necessary's Performance Operating System is an open on-chain architecture for regenerating live performance, without the artists, institutions, or permission. Where documentation preserves past performances, this is an engine for future ones. The system is the work.
风喉 Throat of the Wind
Aiwen Ding and Zhi Geng
Throat of the Wind' is a site-specific sound installation based on long-term field research. It converges the energies of history, wind, and electromagnetism into a discarded turbine blade, transforming it into an earth instrument—a 'throat' for the land's memory.
RITES
Alida Sun
RITES reclaims women’s erased computational heritage through code, ritual, embroidery, and care. Integrating custom software, light, sound, and traditional mirror work, each tapestry is an abstract human–machine portrait and encrypted sigil re-imagining technology as resistance.
Macrame Finger: Memory Capsules
Amor Muñoz
Five sculptures of knotted fingers where, through augmented reality, body movement modulates sounds in spatial audio generated from hand-woven data (motion capture gloves). A reflection on craftsmanship in times of digital automation.
In The Wild
Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou
In The Wild is a living,visual poem about queer sensing, care, and refusal beyond techno-capitalist logics. Across wetland time, robots, archives, and analogue/digital glitches, it critiques the fantasies of automation and explores intelligence as relational, embodied, and shared
Memory of Brittany No.2
Benjamin Bardou
Memory of Brittany No.2 is a work of reminiscence, recalling a place through volumetric video and point clouds. Made shortly before my son’s birth, it gives form to memory while turning towards the future, as a quiet wish for him to encounter the beauty of the world.
Reflections of Little Red Dot
Chloé Lee
Mixed-reality installation that reactivates a 2015 archive of Singaporean voices as a walkable film. Switching physical slides on a retro projector shifts holographic neighborhoods while AI renders future landscapes — granting viewers the narrative agency urban renewal denies.
Entropy of Belonging
Constance Lu Tianying Lei
A web-based continuation infrastructure responding to visa-forced displacement. Three temporal layers — real journals, GPU-reconstructed objects, and AI-generated diary entries dated to the current day — examine how generative systems construct futures on behalf of the absent.
The Anemoia Device
Cyrus Clarke
The Anemoia Device is a scent-memory machine that uses generative AI to distill archival photographs into bespoke fragrances. Each image is transformed into a scent that evokes anemoia: nostalgia for a time one has never lived.
Shoran project
daisy* | Masato Inagaki
Reconstructed through realtime 3DCG and autonomous simulation systems, the simulated Edo city reinterprets Kidai Shoran as a computational microcosm shaped by emergent social behaviors, where cultural memory evolves between history, artificial life, and cosmic order.
Fluid Anatomy
Ioana Vreme Moser
Fluid Anatomy unveils an analogue water & air computer that guides flows in a dynamic interplay of movement, pressure, and resonance. The installation highlights the resilience of fluidics, an alternative computational model to question the present-day technological narratives.
IF NOT NOW
Kordae Jatafa Henry
IF NOT NOW is a speculative short set on the brink of extinction, where a father and son use ancestral technology to transcend space and time. Blending ritual, science fiction, and ecology, the film explores memory, survival, and rebirth.
Replacement Character plotter-scanner
Luke Shannon
The plotter-scanner is an interactive kinetic sculpture that combines a modified document scanner and custom 4'x6' plotter to create a life-sized scanner capable of scanning people: a tool of simultaneous surveillance and witness, both expansive and fragmenting—like the internet.
Pattern Language
Matt DesLauriers, Kjetil Golid and Andreas Rau
Pattern Language engages with the textile history of Western Norway in a contemporary context. In an interactive installation, audiences playfully explore a generative system building on traditional Åkle weaving patterns. Selected outputs are presented as jacquard-woven textiles.
Ground Truths
Mimi Ọnụọha
Ground Truths follows Mimi Ọnụọha after 95 bodies are discovered in her Texas hometown. Shaken, she builds a machine learning model to predict where other such graves lie and discovers what happens when the tools we build to find truth rely on systems designed on forgetting.
Department Press Briefings
Mo H. Zareei
Department Press Briefings dissects U.S. State Department press briefings using concrete poetry and electronic music. Through digital intervention, the work responds to the engineered vocabulary of bureaucratic speech, and its ability to sound definitive while revealing little.
Built By Sound
No Ghost and Dialled In
A multiplayer, mixed-reality experience that explores the history of British South Asian youth culture and the 1970-80s Daytimers club scene. The project blends archival footage, oral histories, hand crafted animation and cutting-edge tech to celebrate resistance through music.
Dear David, A Surveillance Love Story
OONA
Dear David is a performance and video series built from my own London Underground CCTV footage and institutional correspondence. Framed as surveillance love letters, it turns surveillance, bureaucracy, and anonymity into a meditation on intimacy, visibility, and connection.
PARADE
PARADE Collective
PARADE is a participatory web-based artwork enacting an endless procession of voices through spatial audio and WebXR. Open to the global public, it invites all to co-create a living sonic commons celebrating human complexity, dissonance, and resilience amid global fracture.