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.
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 and 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.
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.
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.
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.
Alternative Computations — Worlds Otherwise Calculated
Ryuta Aoki
Quantum noise becomes rain in a universe inspired by vernacular cultures of computation. Rods trace the 28 Lunar Mansions; tatami and reeds ground sky, earth and human. Embodied ritual gestures attune the installation. Every 28 minutes, a sonic ecology is reborn.
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.