A New Media Techspressionist Architectures-AR Experiment

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.

Through augmented reality and geospatial interventions, the exhibition examined how AI, autonomous systems, algorithmic governance, surveillance infrastructures, and machinic economies are reshaping contemporary urban life. Framed through Techspressionism, the project explored emerging expressive forms shaped by cinematic culture, computational media, immersive environments, and layered digital realities.

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. 

By connecting SIGGRAPH’s international community with Los Angeles artists, institutions, and communities, the project proposed new curatorial models for collective experimentation transforming the city into a distributed platform for imagination, public discourse, and community-centered technological futures.

The Idea: Exhibition Experiment – Techspressionists

We invited artists from all over the world 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. 

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? As AI, data, and automated robotic systems now decorate and reshape movement within the Los Angeles building blocks, streets, freeways, highways, and underpasses – What is a performative expression today in the arts for the 21st century?. 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. All 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.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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