HOME | SPARKS | EXHIBITIONS | EVENTS | COMPETITIONS | VIDEO | ABOUT

2026-02_Competition_Header_Speculative Futures
OVERVIEW | ARTWORKS | ARTISTS | DAC 

The submissions to the Speculative Futures student competition came from 11 different countries and the jurors were from United States, South Korea, Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan. Seventy one students submitted 56 projects for review. The jurying was very difficult because of the excellent work submitted.

List of Artists in the Exhibition


Award Winner (Graduate Student)

Trout Telephone is a telematic art installation presenting a communication system for trout across habitats fragmented by dam constructions in Los Angeles’ Arroyo Seco watershed. Responding to their interrupted migration from forest stream to sea, this work creates a call-and-response system between the distant extremes of the trout populations designed primarily for fish.


Winner (Undergraduate Student)

Genetically Engineered Babies is an interactive installation that simulates the selection and purchase of a genetically engineered child. Examining medically assisted reproduction, designer babies, and surrogate parenthood, the work questions the transformation of parenthood from a private, intimate choice into a consumer-driven entitlement.


Honorable Mention (Graduate Student)

An AI-driven interactive narrative in which players enter a virtual Huang Long Cave and converse with YELL, a digital father across three life stages. Through voice dialogue, memory fragments, and psychoanalytic storytelling, the work reimagines AI as a mediator of family memory, absence, and emotional reconciliation.


Honorable Mention (Graduate Student)

Between Two Worlds explores the fragile boundary between human presence and machine intelligence through gesture-based interaction. Viewers navigate a reactive digital environment where movement, control, and perception continuously shift, reflecting the evolving relationship between humans and artificial systems.


Honorable Mention (Graduate Student)

Cold Sweat is an interactive 3D environment exploring the psychological residue of political repression. Transitioning from functional architecture to digital world-building, it serves as an indestructible archive of trauma, countering state-sponsored erasure through a visceral descent into a decaying, biomechanical system.


Honorable Mention (Undergraduate Student)

Script Hybridity maps a speculative future where cultural co-existence is embedded within digital systems. By injecting the Chinese writing system into Latin script via bi-directional trans-scripting, digital artefacts navigate new modes of expressing hybrid identity, transforming autoethnographic friction into a site of collective cultural resonance.


Honorable Mention (Undergraduate Student)

This is not the last living insect.
It is the archive of its remaining behaviour.
A speculative interactive installation exploring extinction, observation, and how future technologies may preserve non-human life as reconstructed data.


Finalist (Graduate Student)

Magic You uses virtual reality to translate the inner experience of ADHD into an embodied, poetic journey. Through dreamlike visuals, fragmented narration, and intimate interactions, the work invites audiences to feel attention, memory, and identity as fluid, shifting landscapes of empathy and self-recognition.


Originating from an ancient grid divination, this audio-visual experiment oscillates between control and chaos. Within a nine-square layout, a specimen repeatedly breaks free, its form constantly rewritten. Forces interweave and flow, driving an abstract dispersion.


Translation Dies in the Tongue explores AI image-to-3D systems as speculative translation devices. Referencing Moche ceramics and fragmented visual archives, the project examines how machine perception reconstructs cultural imagery into unstable sculptural forms through processes of mistranslation, distortion, and generative transformation.


Finalist (Graduate Student)

Hidden Protocol comprises a series of interactive soft robotics, aiming to translate invisible safety behaviours into a tactile material language and flexible animation. It invites audiences to reflect on their social conduct during aesthetic experience, exploring thresholds of communication and offering a potential pathway for future forms of social interaction.


Finalist (Undergraduate Student)

A musical fantasy inspired by the history and culture of WanHua, Taipei, this film transforms personal memories, Taiwanese folklore, and religious parades into a story about identity, stigma, and self-acceptance. Through music and surreal visuals, it explores what it means to embrace the place that shaped you.


Finalist (Undergraduate Student)

Fallen is a speculative VFX allegory visualizing the fragility of our ecosystem. Through the decaying form of an “angel of nature,” this hybrid work questions the trajectory of human progress across three eras. It exposes the cost of industrial expansion, blending live-action with procedural decay to critique our collective future.


Finalist (Undergraduate Student)

Shedding is a real-time “time sculpture” and techno-ritual of mourning. By entangling the physical act of hand-weaving with a fragile, multi-channel audio feedback matrix, the artist creates a post-human farewell field. It materializes longing into an evolving spatial resonance, offering a gentle gaze into absence and total release.