The ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community is proud to continue the 3rd Digital Arts Student Competition – Speculative Futures, inviting students to imagine, question, and critically shape worlds that might yet come.

Resonating with the themes of the SIGGRAPH 2026 Art Gallery and Art Papers, this competition considers creation as a generative and translational process that unfolds between technology and humanity, between material and perception, and between individual experience and collective structures. Creative work can construct new forms of understanding and dialogue within these in-between spaces.

Speculative Futures treats creative practice as a means to explore possible worlds by building scenarios, crafting experiential prototypes and artifacts, and articulating alternative trajectories for life, society, and the environment. Digital artworks may envision a world saturated with technological wonders, expose fragile infrastructures and potential pitfalls, or propose subtle shifts in everyday experience.

We invite creators to think of art as a medium that operates between systems, materials, data, and publics. We seek works that explore translation, hybridity, and generative complexity, contributing diverse visions to the evolving landscape of speculative futures in digital art.

Exhibition Details: 

Selected works will be showcased digitally at SIGGRAPH 2026 in the ACM SIGGRAPH Village in Los Angeles, US, as well as on the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community website.

Awards:

The first-place winners in each category will receive full conference registrations for SIGGRAPH 2026.

Types of Work Accepted: 

• Still Image: Single-frame digital works (CG, digital imaging, generative stills). 
• Time-Based Media: Moving-image works (animation, video, motion graphics), including VR video and screen-based documentation. 
• Interactive Art: Documentation of interactive installations, performances, AR/XR interactive experiences.

Submission Categories: 

• Undergraduate
• Graduate 

Eligibility:

• Submissions to this call for exhibition are open only to currently enrolled students at the time of submission.
• Each submission must list the student(s) as the sole artist(s).
• Faculty members, teachers, instructors, or advisors may not be listed as artists or co-artists.
• Teachers, instructors, or advisors may be included only in an advisory capacity and must be clearly identified as advisors, not as contributors to the artwork.
• Any submission that lists a non-student as an artist or co-artist will be considered ineligible.

What to Submit:

• Information about the artwork (Title, Keywords, Category, Type of Work, Year Produced)
• Statements (Short Statement ≤ 50 words; Artist Statement ≤ 200 words; Technical Information ≤ 100 words) 
• Project URL (required) and Video URL if applicable (no password protection) 
• Representative Image (required), optional additional images
• Artist photo(s) (required)
• Author information and short bio(s) (team submissions are accepted)