2026 Systems & Structures
Award Finalists
For works that examine, construct, or critically engage with systems, including cultural, ecological, technological, and social systems. These may be expressed through code, data, networks, biological or environmental processes, institutional frameworks, or social structures, and may address issues such as misinformation, machine vision, or human–machine relations.
Sea Oasis - Survival Architecture
Dotdotdot
Sea Oasis is a research-based project presented at the 2025 Venice Biennale. It explores how Generative AI can support regenerative design strategies in marine environments by analyzing scientific data and predicting the ecological impact of restoration interventions
The Breath of Mother India
MindPalace
An agent-based simulation maps eleven years of PM2.5 data onto a living India. The organism feeds on the pollution, brightening as the air worsens, while the institutions measuring that air cap and conceal it. A generative work on air, measurement, and who controls the numbers.
Parallaxe
Chantal Pisarzowski - forward stud.io
Parallaxe is an AI-mediated dialogue installation: people with opposing political views are algorithmically matched and brought to the same table - an AI mediation layer translates in real time, de-escalates charged language, and fact-checks live against independent sources.
Red
SIOUMING WU
Red transforms Taiwan’s real-time radiation data into an immersive sensory environment of sound and light. By turning invisible monitoring infrastructure into a living warning system, the work exposes how technological systems shape collective perception of environmental risk.
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.
Occupied with Traffic
Irini Kalaitzidi
A performance that explores movement undergoing classification. While structured like a playful experiment, the work looks at how classification may seem harmless in closed systems, but begins to falter and eventually crash when applied to the complexity and messiness of life.
In Satiation
X. A. Li
In Satiation is a multi-channel, site-responsive installation that disorients our entrenched defaults of appraising the continuous world as discrete, productive units. A machine learning pipeline processes desert land into real estate copy. The viewer chooses how to look.
Blind Men Listening to the Sea
Chi Zhang
A physical signal translation system transforming pulsar data into optical trajectories through a visible and traceable “transparent algorithm.”
Qapariq: From Awasqa Kanchik to Awasqa Kayku
Paola Torres Núñez del Prado
A drone surveils a textile painting, transforming the targeted latent landscape into alarming sound. As each symbol becomes audible, a shift from inclusive to exclusive 'we' occurs, dismantling the fiction of inclusion. Qapariq: a cry that makes visible those outside the weave.
THE DELUSION
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
THE DELUSION is a multiplayer immersive experience that combines cooperative gaming and participatory theatre to explore themes of polarisation, censorship and social connection, archiving Black Trans histories while expanding the civic potential of video games.
Hypertopographics
Edward Burtynsky & Alkan Avcıoğlu
This work is a part of Hypertopographics, a collaborative series examining large-scale industrial systems where human imprint on earth has expanded beyond our ability to comprehend the structures we have built and their impact on the environment.
Light Architecture
Yiyun Kang (YIYUN KANG STUDIO)
Light Architecture reimagines AI’s complex neural systems through massive kinetic structures. Orchestrating light, spatial sound, and motion, it transforms the venue into a visceral environment, provoking critical engagement with the paradoxes of AI progress and anxiety.
Phase Transition
Sarah Meyohas
Phase Transition is a kinetic sculpture in which a black, rubbery form houses a tank of ferrofluid, a liquid containing magnetic nanoparticles, in motion. The piece draws influence from neuroscience research and the increasing blur between biological and technological processes.
Logico-Fantastic Machine
Stavros Didakis
The 'Logico-Fantastic Machine' is a cybernetic ecology of machine agents that continuously produce divergent audiovisual narratives. Through feedback and self-evaluation, it learns and evolves, balancing computation and imagination as an open-ended autonomous entity.
Drift Lattice
Theo Triantafyllidis
A living marine ecosystem falters on the edge of collapse, its vitality subtly driven by real-time data from global climate monitoring networks and oceanic research programs.
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.