Digital Art Screening:
The 2026 Lumen Prize
Explore the 2026 Lumen Prize finalists asking pivotal questions shaping digital culture.
Friday, 18 September 2026 - Sunday, 20 September 2026
V&A South Kensington, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 2RL
Experience a curated selection of works from 2026 Lumen Prize finalists that reflect a defining shift in art created with technology.
Rather than simply celebrating technological possibility, these artists examine responsibility, stewardship and the evolving relationship between technology, society, and culture.
The screening will run on a continuous loop throughout the weekend, offering visitors multiple opportunities to experience the full programme.
Event Program
The Age of Responsibility:
Rethinking Digital Futures
Hear how artists are shaping creative technology through care, stewardship and accountability.
The Age of Responsibility explores a defining shift in contemporary digital art. Rather than asking what technology can do, artists are increasingly asking what it should do, and who it should serve. Through works that critically engage AI, memory, ecology and digital systems, artists are using technology not simply as a medium, but as a way to question responsibility, care and the futures we are building.
Panelists
Melanie Lenz
Curator of Digital Art,
V&A Museum
Gillian Leitten
Executive Director,
The Lumen Prize
Anab Jain & Jon Arden
Co-Founders and Directors, Superflux
Ana María Caballero
Multidisciplinary
literary artist
Shaheer Tarar
Media artist
and geographer
Meet the Artists
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.
Parallaxe
Chantal Pisarzowski
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.
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.
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.
Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Power and Technology Since 1500
Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler
Calculating Empires is a large-scale installation and interactive web site mapping five centuries of technology and power. It traces how empires have used communication and computation to classify populations and centralize control, placing today's AI in that imperial lineage.
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.
Mirror Into Auntieverse
Niceaunties
An interactive Napoleon III mirror that replaces your reflection with a speaking auntie from the Auntieverse, using motion capture and real-time rendering to transform vanity into an encounter with ageing, identity and “auntie love language”.
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.
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.
1864
Robin Kane
Through ritual, stillness, and motion, the series traces the Circassian exile across past, present, and future. Bodies and landscapes become carriers of inherited memory - holding grief, survival, displacement, and the persistence of a scattered nation.
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.
Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream
Superflux
This speculative work counters contemporary AI narratives, foregrounding rivers as embodied sources of ecological intelligence. Instead of humans prompting machines, here the river prompts us, using technology as a bridge language to encourage deeper attunement with the world.