In 2026, as part of the SIGGRAPH Los Angeles Conference, a curatorial team supported by a collaborative partnership between ACM SIGGRAPH DAC, Techspressionist Artists, and LACDA debuted six new co-created works. Each team consisted of at least one, Techspressionist artist, composer, and technologist. Their artistic collaboration, “the experiment”, explores a new creation resulting in an ongoing augmented interactive space and soundscape within a speculative expression of an alternate reality.
Within the New Media Architectures (NMA) exhibition series, this exhibition conceptually anchors a second part of this global invitation for selected composers to share music / sound works for a soundtrack engaging our LA moment in time. The theme prompts were Granular Synthesis, Electro-Acoustic Improvisation and Live Performance, Remix Culture, Spatialization, Live Streaming Performance, Modular Synthesis, Generative Systems, Game Engines &/or Visual Music, Glitch Art, and Los Angeles.
The New Media Techspressionist Architectures Exhibition Experiment lives at the intersection of art, music, and technology revealing new states of being, “life” within contemporary artistic visions of the existing imaginative architectures of today.
Exhibition Dates @ SIGGRAPH: July 19 (Opening) – 23rd (Closing Event)
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 project invited 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.
The Idea: Exhibition Experiment – Techspressionists
We invited creatives from all over the world – Composers, Sound Artists, Music Producers, Computer Scientists, Visual Artists, and Media Artists to be part of a collaborative Augmented Reality exhibition between the SIGGRAPH LA 2026 conference and LACDA. Our invitation was answered by artists, hackers, makers, and techno-scientists to build a new creative community exchanging artistic gestures for all to hear, feel, and see as a non commodifiable open performative experience – as forms + shapes + sounds.
AI, data, and automated robotic systems now decorate and reshape movement within the Los Angeles building blocks, streets, freeways, highways, and underpasses. The impact on all the living interspecies populations in flowing movement above, below, within, and through a new definition of a City built on invisible economies of desire. Delivery robots, self-driving cars, and app-based mobility transport can be seen in its totality as a new kind of realized machinic – Algorithmic “Dream.”
How can we describe this new state of being, “life” within a new contemporary media-architecture(s) in arguably the most creative media city in the history of the world, Los Angeles, CA? What is a performative expression today in the arts for the 21st century? Techspressionism in LA is born of the science of fiction, the economies of cinematic dreams, experiences as a collapse of urban (e)scapes, and the contrasting geospatial maps that lead our lives forward in space and time.
A new rethinking in all forms of space, an augmented public and private urban layered series of technological fabrics are born by reclaiming space as a radical medium within our invisible digitized world as part of a new expressive language of media.
Our creative inquiry draws from sources that help frame our contemporary life starting from Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema on the boundaries of the art of perception from moving images; Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation on the realities produced by language of symbols in a Post Modern society; Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology on the meaning of being, embedded in our many types of material worlds; and Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus for proposing tools for releasing our limits in rethinking our existing philosophical grounds for reimagining society. To bring these ideas into a critical and radical conceptual dialogue, we look to Andrew Culp’s Dark Deleuze as a guerrilla guide to refusing the algorithmically-guided lights, synthetic cloud computing systems substituting nature into the minds of each person as an agent.
The days and nights of LA’s inhabitants with a constantly evolving visual music of technological messaging, let us rethink as New Media Architect(s), the composers of the covered walls and signage on the sides of buildings made of the images on LED Screens. The spaces that live in the in-between without viewable biological life, let’s explore together all possible computationally born life that can add to our human experience.
We discovered a community of artistic explorers, urban media artists and scientists, who radically reimagined a human digitized expression for our world. We moved beyond Mike Davis’ The City of Quartz, a text that defined LA’s past, Hollywood’s cinematic visions of escape in the future, and the music that marked many generational shifts making sense of our sonically chaotic present day.
This is an artistic movement realized in an exhibition as critique starting from LA and moving out toward a global celebration of the miracle that we call “life.” We found a new language of augmented mediated reality.
Collaborative partners:
Techspressionists – https://techspressionism.com/
- Artists: Victor Acevedo, Randi Matushevitz, Cynthia Beth Rubin, Lucy Boyd-Wilson , and Annette Weintraub
LACDA – https://www.lacda.com/
- Rex Bruce
ACM SIGGRAPH DAC – https://dac.siggraph.org/
- Special Thanks to Rebecca Xu, Bonnie Mitchell, & Victoria Szabo from the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Committee
Joshua Dickinson is a programmer and computational artist interested in blurring the boundary between humans and machines. He received a BA in music composition from Columbia University in 2010 and an MS in Multimedia Engineering from the Media Art and Technology department at UC Santa Barbara in 2013. His research centers around human-computer interaction, cultural analytics, computer vision, and the exploration of large or otherwise unique datasets. He enjoys trying to digitally quantify and simulate things we normally consider very “organic,” hopefully as a way of getting closer to what actually makes us human.
In 2012 he founded Unfiltered Audio, a company that has released dozens of instruments and effects used throughout the music industry. In 2023 he founded SoundLabs.ai, dedicated to pushing the boundaries of human creativity through novel generative AI algorithms. SoundLabs has formed a research-partnership with Universal Music, with which they created a Spanish language AI recreation of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” by Brenda Lee, a first in the industry and featured in Rolling Stone Magazine.
As a teacher at Berkeley City College, Joshua has developed curriculum related to Virtual Reality, Game Design, HCI, Computer Graphics, and Creative Coding.
Dr. Gustavo Alfonso Rincon is an educator, design practitioner, entrepreneur, research scholar, and thought leader in the fields of art, architecture, and media arts and sciences. His work explores new forms of spatial intelligence, digital creativity, and interdisciplinary innovation, while advancing education and research as a human right.
Rincon is educated as an architect, artist, and media arts researcher. His academic and creative research has been exhibited nationally and internationally, alongside collaborations with global clients. As a member of the AlloSphere Research Group, Rincon has collaborated on immersive projects, featured at the Computer History Museum, Getty’s PST ART, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, and TED Vancouver.
Currently, Rincon serves as Design Research Director for New Media Architecture(s) & Engineering, as well as Curator for Media Arts/Design & Sciences – Senior Adv. at the AlloSphere. Gustavo also is an administrative Co-Director and Curator for Digital Futures International. He is an Editorial Board Member for the Design International Series at Franco Angeli, Milan, a reviewer for Leonardo | MIT Press Journal, and a juror for the Excellence in Science Communication Awards, administered by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in partnership with Schmidt Sciences.
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.
Randi Matushevitz is a multimedia visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her large-scale mixed media drawings, video and installation projects juncture at the intersection of meaning and association in analogue and digital art, exploring the subjective nature of human connection.
Matushevitz is a recipient of a California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship 2023-24, Curator’s Choice Award Video Installation 2024, Safe Spaces Exhibition, Art Connect Society, and Finalist Money For Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund 2024. Her artwork has been exhibited in galleries, museums and cultural spaces nationally and internationally including Immerse Fest, Projecting Possibilities Los Angeles, Jerusalem Biennale, and Las Vegas Art Museum. Public acquisitions include Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA, Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Brain Center, the Marjorie Barrick Art Museum, Las Vegas, NV, and the Enter Art Foundation, Berlin, Germany.