The 3rd Speculative Futures International Student Competition presents selected student works that imagine, question, and critically shape worlds that might yet come. Rather than treating the future as a fixed destination, the exhibition approaches speculation as a creative method for examining how technology, culture, bodies, environments, and social systems are continuously reconfigured.
Across moving images, interactive systems, games, VR, performance, sculpture, sound, and AI-assisted processes, the selected works explore the unstable relations between technology and humanity, material and perception, individual experience and collective structures. They address futures shaped by ecological vulnerability, machine intelligence, cultural memory, language, identity, embodiment, and emerging infrastructures of everyday life.
Together, these works do not propose a single vision of tomorrow. Instead, they construct scenarios, artifacts, and experiential systems that invite reflection on possible trajectories for life, society, and the environment. Through critical imagination and digital practice, Speculative Futures highlights how student artists and designers engage contemporary technologies not only as tools, but also as media for sensing, questioning, and rethinking our place within complex technological worlds.
Scottie Chih-Chieh Huang is an artist, designer, and educator whose work develops nature-inspired generative systems, using rule-based morphogenesis to explore aesthetic abstraction, structural form-finding, and responsive, agency-like behavior through kinetic and interactive installations. His work has been presented at ZKM, ACM SIGGRAPH, CHI, Ars Electronica (Expanded), IEEE VISAP, ISEA, ALIFE, and Bridges, and featured in Domus, ELLE Decor Italia, FRAME, Leonardo (MIT Press), and Peter Weibel’s Enzyklopädie der Medien (Hatje Cantz). He is an Associate Professor at National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan) and currently a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Syracuse University.
Rebecca Ruige Xu, professor of computer art and animation at Syracuse University, focuses her research on the intersection of data visualization, experimental animation, and interactive media. She investigates how emerging technologies can transform creative practices, particularly in artistic data representation, visual music, and digital performance. Her projects have been exhibited globally at venues like ISEA, SIGGRAPH, and Ars Electronica. A co-founder of the ChinaVIS Arts Program, Xu also chaired the IEEE VIS Arts Program in 2023 and 2024 and currently chairs the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Committee.
Bonnie Mitchell is a new media artist and Professor at Bowling Green State University in Digital Arts, in Bowling Green, Ohio, USA. Mitchell is a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH History and Digital Arts Committee where she focuses on the development of the SIGGRAPH archives and coordination of the SPARKS lecture series. Mitchell’s artworks explore spatial and experiential relationships to our physical, social, cultural, and psychological environment through interaction, abstraction and audio. Her current creative practice focuses on development of physically immersive environments using interaction via electronics and special FX to reveal change over time. Her work has been exhibited internationally at numerous venues.
Sanglim Han is a media artist and assistant professor at Chung-Ang University. Her work investigates how emerging technologies reshape aesthetics and production in contemporary media, with a focus on computational image-making and real-time systems. She examines the cultural and artistic implications of algorithmic processes within creative practice. Han has presented her work and research internationally at venues including Ars Electronica, ISEA, and the Biennial Symposium for Arts and Technology. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Mona Kasra is a new media artist, designer, and interdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges emerging technologies and contemporary art practice. Her research examines the political and cultural implications of visual media technologies across global contexts, while her creative practice explores improvisation, embodiment, and expression through experimental media forms. She frequently collaborates with musicians, choreographers, and theater-makers to explore new approaches to new media and performance, enhancing narrative structures and audience immersion.
Kasra is an Associate Professor of Digital Media Design at the University of Virginia, where she teaches digital art, projection design, and creative technologies. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and film festivals, and she has contributed to the field as a juror, curator, and programmer for numerous exhibitions, festivals, and conferences. Her designs for live performance have earned four Helen Hayes Award nominations for Outstanding Projections/Media Design. She has held significant leadership roles, including elected service on the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee (2019–2025), where she served as Organization’s Chair from 2023 to 2024, as well as Conference Chair for SIGGRAPH 2016 and Art Gallery Chair for SIGGRAPH 2011. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the New Media Caucus. Kasra holds an MFA in Video Art and a PhD in Arts & Technology.
June-Hao Hou received a Doctor and Masters of Design degree from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He also has a Master of Arts from National Chiao Tung University.
Scottie Chih-Chieh Huang is an artist, designer, and educator whose work develops nature-inspired generative systems, using rule-based morphogenesis to explore aesthetic abstraction, structural form-finding, and responsive, agency-like behavior through kinetic and interactive installations. His work has been presented at ZKM, ACM SIGGRAPH, CHI, Ars Electronica (Expanded), IEEE VISAP, ISEA, ALIFE, and Bridges, and featured in Domus, ELLE Decor Italia, FRAME, Leonardo (MIT Press), and Peter Weibel’s Enzyklopädie der Medien (Hatje Cantz). He is an Associate Professor at National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan) and currently a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Syracuse University.
Rebecca Ruige Xu, professor of computer art and animation at Syracuse University, focuses her research on the intersection of data visualization, experimental animation, and interactive media. She investigates how emerging technologies can transform creative practices, particularly in artistic data representation, visual music, and digital performance. Her projects have been exhibited globally at venues like ISEA, SIGGRAPH, and Ars Electronica. A co-founder of the ChinaVIS Arts Program, Xu also chaired the IEEE VIS Arts Program in 2023 and 2024 and currently chairs the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Committee.
Dr Melentie Pandilovski is an Executive & Artistic Director who has curated over 200 projects. He is the Founder & Principal of Pandilovski Cultural Futures| Cultural Strategy, Contemporary Art & Art–Technology Advisory, based in Melbourne, Australia. His roles include: Creative Producer at JOLT Arts (Melbourne); Director of Riddoch Art Gallery (Mount Gambier, S.A.); Director of Video Pool Media Arts Centre (Winnipeg, Canada); Director of the Experimental Art Foundation (Adelaide, South Australia); Director of the Contemporary Art Center and Curator of SEAFair in Skopje, Macedonia. He was Editor of Art in the Biotech Era; Marshall McLuhan and Vilém Flusser’s Communication and Aesthetic Theories Revisited. He published Perspectives on Living and Thinking Vectors of the Anthropocene, Found Sci; Arts & Science – the Intersection (re)engineered in: Wiley Blackwell; The Phenomenology of (Non)Habitual Spaces for the Bioarts in Catalyst Book Series (2017).