Press Release: 2026 Lumen Prize Awards Ceremony

Press Release:

The Lumen Prize announces 2026 winners, recognizing artists shaping how we understand our technological world.

**Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler receive the Gold Award for Calculating Empires, alongside winners spanning history and memory, ecological systems, automation, language, and human experience.**

Kristiansand, Norway, November 14, 2026 — The Lumen Prize today announced the winners of its 2026 awards at Kunstsilo in Kristiansand, Norway, recognizing artists whose work brings new perspectives to some of the defining questions of our technological age.

Selected from more than 2,200 submissions across 82 countries, this year's winners explore questions of memory, knowledge, agency, and our relationship to technology and the natural world.

The 2026 Gold Award is presented to Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler for Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Power and Technology Since 1500, a monumental installation and interactive work tracing five centuries of technology and power. Spanning more than 24 meters in its physical form, the work maps the evolution of communication, computation, classification, and social control, placing today's artificial intelligence within a much longer history of imperial systems.

Fifteen years of discovering and supporting artists.

The 2026 Prize marks fifteen years since Lumen was founded with a belief in the importance of artists working with technology and a commitment to giving their work greater recognition.

Since 2012, Lumen has grown into an international community of more than 35,000 artists and cultural leaders, recognizing artists from around the world and connecting their work with museums, cultural institutions, collectors, collaborators, and international audiences.

Past winners and alumni include Refik Anadol, Sougwen Chung, Mario Klingemann, Casey Reas, Operator, and Entangled Others.

Today, the Prize sits at the center of a wider year-round program spanning exhibitions, commissions, institutional partnerships, and public programming, creating opportunities for artists and strengthening the relationships that allow their practice to grow.

2026 Gold Award Winners: Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler,
Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Power and Technology Since 1500

"This year's winners ask us to think about what we remember and what we allow to disappear, who holds power, where we place our trust, and how we relate to one another and the natural world. That understanding matters now more than ever.”

Gillian Leitten,
Executive Director, The Lumen Prize

Meet The 2026 Lumen Prize Award Winners

(L-R: Mimi Ọnụọha: Ground Truths, Theo Triantafyllidis: Drift Lattice, Lauren Lee McCarthy: AUTO, Luke Shannon: Replacement Character, Sasha Stiles: A LIVING POEM, Matt DesLauriers, Kjetil Golid & Andreas Rau: Pattern Language, Robin Kane: 1864, Aiwen Ding and Zhi Geng: Throat of the Wind.)

2026 Winners

Ground Truths

2026 Legacy Futures Award Winner

Mimi Ọnụọha
New York, USA

After learning that 95 bodies had been discovered in a mass grave minutes from where she grew up in Sugar Land, Texas, Mimi Ọnụọha spent four years developing a machine-learning model to identify where other convict-leasing graves might remain hidden. The resulting docufiction film turns that process into a powerful meditation on historical erasure and the systems we rely on to understand the past.

A LIVING POEM

2026 Special Commendation Award Winner

Sasha Stiles
Milford, USA

First presented at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, A LIVING POEM is an immersive generative language environment bringing poetry, voice, visuals, code, and AI together in a work that continuously rewrites and performs itself. Created in collaboration with Stiles' AI alter ego, Technelegy, the work advances her idea of “poetic intelligence,” the intertwining of emotion and algorithm to make meaning, as a way of considering how technology might deepen rather than diminish our humanity.

Replacement Character plotter-scanner

2026 Onassis ONX Award Winner

Luke Shannon

Replacement Character plotter-scanner is an interactive kinetic sculpture that combines a modified document scanner with a custom-built plotter to create life-sized scans of its participants. Drawing on the history of mechanical reproduction, Shannon considers what it means to be seen in an age of fragmented online identities, surveillance, and increasingly intelligent machines. The work turns the familiar act of scanning into a reflection on how technologies capture, interpret, and reconstruct our image.

1864

2026 Carla Rapoport Award

Robin Kane
Tel Aviv, Israel

1864 reflects on the Circassian Genocide and forced exile of the 1860s, approaching this history not as a closed event but as a memory carried across generations. Through still and moving images created with an AI-assisted process, Kane considers displacement, inherited grief, cultural survival, and the enduring connection to a lost homeland. Rather than reconstructing historical violence, the work focuses on what remains after exile: silence, repetition, longing, and the persistence of identity.

Throat of the Wind

2026 Student Award Winners

Aiwen Ding and Zhi Geng
Beijing, China

Throat of the Wind transforms a decommissioned wind turbine blade into a site-specific sound installation carrying the environmental and historical memory of Anguli Nao in northern China. Using wind, electromagnetic signals, cowhide, and the abandoned blade itself, the artists turn a remnant of energy infrastructure into an instrument through which the landscape and its histories can be heard.

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Power and Technology Since 1500

2026 Gold Award Winner

Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler
New York, USA

Calculating Empires maps five centuries of technology and power, tracing connections between the systems we use to communicate, compute, classify, and govern. Across a vast physical installation and interactive website, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler bring thousands of histories and relationships into view, revealing how today's technologies are rooted in much older structures of power. The work challenges the idea that AI represents a complete break with the past, instead asking us to consider the histories that continue to shape our technological present.

Drift Lattice

2026 Systems & Structures Winner

Theo Triantafyllidis
Athens, Greece

Drift Lattice places viewers inside a simulated marine ecosystem where aquatic life, synthetic debris, and autonomous cleanup drones coexist. Continuously influenced by real-time climate and ocean data, the work makes the precarious health of real-world marine ecosystems visible while considering the interdependence of human, artificial, and natural forms of intelligence.

AUTO

2026 Experiential Innovation Award Winner

Lauren Lee McCarthy
Los Angeles, USA

AUTO is an autonomous vehicle driven by collective singing. Passengers learn the words only as they leave their lips, gradually realizing that they aren't simply riding in AUTO, but becoming part of it. Developed through collaboration with local communities, the work turns questions around AI, automation, surveillance, infrastructure, and control into a playful and provocative collective experience.

Pattern Language

2026 Nordic Award Winner

Matt DesLauriers, Kjetil Golid & Andreas Rau
Oslo, Norway

Pattern Language brings the textile traditions of Western Norway into conversation with contemporary computational culture. Drawing on historic Åkle weaving patterns alongside visual language inspired by early computer interfaces, the interactive installation invites audiences to manipulate a generative system and create their own virtual tapestries. Selected patterns are then translated into jacquard-woven textiles, connecting centuries-old systems of pattern-making with the logic of code.