As part of ACM SIGGRAPH DAC’s host city community outreach initiative, this project expands the New Media Architectures series through a collaborative cultural partnership within the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art (LACDA). Developed for SIGGRAPH LA 2026, the project positions Los Angeles itself as an experimental civic platform for artistic research, public engagement, and interdisciplinary collaboration across art, science, technology, and urban culture.
This co-curated Augmented Reality experimental exhibition brings together architects, artists, composers, computer scientists, media artists, musicians, designers, and technologists to collaboratively develop responsive site-specific works. By engaging the city’s cultural histories and communities, the project transforms LA into a living laboratory.
The exhibition investigates how AI, autonomous systems, algorithmic governance, surveillance infrastructures, and machinic economies are reshaping contemporary urban life locally and globally. Through geospatial interventions and hybrid physical-digital experiences, the project proposes new curatorial and research models that rethink public and private space as an augmented networked fabric for artistic, and performative inquiry.
Framed through the concept of “Techspressionism,” the project explores emerging expressive forms shaped by cinematic culture, computational media, immersive environments, and layered digital realities. Central to this initiative is a dialogue between artists, researchers, and local arts communities exploring how creative practice can critically engage and reimagine the future of urban experience.
This DAC session invites the SIGGRAPH community to explore new collaborative models of cultural expansive production that transform Los Angeles into a distributed platform for collective imagination, experimentation, public discourse, and community-centered technological futures.
SIGGRAPH 2026 Presentation: https://s2026.conference-schedule.org/presentation/?id=thea_124&sess=sess307
Dr. Gustavo Alfonso Rincon (Ph.D., M.Arch., M.F.A., B.S, B.A.) earned his doctorate in Media Arts and Technology at UCSB. Rincon is educated as an architect, artist, curator, & media arts research scholar. His academic works have been exhibited nationally & internationally along with serving clients globally. His work with DigitalFutures has gained a global audience with a yearly program along with a series of free summer workshops. His dissertation “Shaping Space as Information: A Conceptual Framework for New Media Architectures,” led to a Postdoctoral appt. at the AlloSphere Research Facility, affiliated with the Media Arts & Technology Program, California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Joshua Dickinson is an artist working at the intersection of sound and sight. His work often addresses the hyperreal, questioning the limits of sensory possibilities, and creating supernatural spaces and experiences. He has built interactive installations for museums, festivals, and academic conferences which have been shown both domestically and internationally, such as the interactive sound installation “Drip” which was featured as a multi-week installation throughout the 2013 NIME conference hosted by KAIST University in Daejeon, South Korea. He is the co-founder of the companies Unfiltered Audio and SoundLabs, and teaches in the Multimedia-Arts department at Berkeley City College.
Tuna is a Turkish illustrator/animation director, exploring connection, norms and identity. They are the award winning production designer of Pearl (VR), and creator/director of Little Red (AR) on the Wonderscope app.
They are best known for their distinctive storytelling style that transcends classic distinctions between narrative and experience design. Their other specialties include positively existential lectures on color, creative psychology, and design, as well as their 7+ year practice of publishing daily work.
Their clients include Google ATAP, Nike, Netflix, DreamWorks, Disney Japan, Sony, Adobe, Coca Cola, and Buck.