Los Angeles, USA Fri, Sep 25, 2026 at 3:00 pm PDT
New York, USA Fri, Sep 25, 2026 at 6:00 pm EDT
London, United Kingdom Fri, Sep 25, 2026 at 11:00 pm BST
Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam Sat, Sep 26, 2026 at 5:00 am ICT
In 2026, as part of SIGGRAPH Los Angeles, ACM SIGGRAPH DAC, Techspressionist Artists, and LACDA presented six collaborative works bringing together artists, composers, scientists, designers, hackers, and technologists. Part of the New Media Architectures (NMA) exhibition series, the project explored Augmented Reality, sound, geospatial interventions, and interactive media to connect physical and digital environments.
Using Los Angeles as a living laboratory, the exhibition examined how AI, autonomous systems, robotics, data, surveillance, and algorithmic infrastructures are transforming contemporary urban life. Framed through Techspressionism and New Media Architectures, the project reconsidered space as a creative medium where physical, digital, sonic, and computational realities converge. Through sound, image, movement, geospatial intervention, and emerging technologies, participating artists explored new forms of performative expression and computationally mediated experience.
The conceptual inquiry was informed by critical and philosophical perspectives including Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema, Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, and Andrew Culp’s Dark Deleuze. These frameworks provided a critical lens for examining perception, simulation, materiality, networks, algorithms, and the increasingly synthetic infrastructures shaping contemporary life.
Through this exhibition, we discovered a community of artistic explorers, urban media practitioners, scientists, hackers, and makers collectively reimagining human expression in a digitized world. The exhibition also created an open platform for interdisciplinary experimentation, connecting SIGGRAPH’s international community with Los Angeles artists and cultural practitioners. Moving beyond established narratives of Los Angeles—from Mike Davis’s City of Quartz to Hollywood’s cinematic futures—we approached the city as a living laboratory for artistic critique, experimentation, and collective imagination.
The project proposed a new language of augmented, mediated reality, positioning Los Angeles as a platform for artistic research, collective imagination, and community-centered technological futures.
Ambient Ocean
This collaborative artwork invites us to imaginatively experience the rhythms of microscopic ocean life through artistic moving images and a musical score driven by ocean data. Together they create an immersive experience highlighting plankton as vital to marine ecosystems, inviting reflection on unseen life, interdependence, and hidden rhythms sustaining the ocean and ourselves.
Fringe Vision
Fringe Vision presents an eccentric landscape inhabited by discarded everyday objects. Based on extracted style images, the video combines AR screenshots, AI generated 3D objects and video, set against a complex sonic landscape. Fringe Vision disrupts perceptions of scale, materiality, and liminality, transforming everyday space into a speculative landscape.
On the Corner
On the Corner is a collaborative work of Augmented Reality which interrogates and abstracts fleeting moments captured mostly at a street corner in downtown Los Angeles. The work features live video, spatialized audio, musical compositions, and 3D renders to decode a moment in time and explore the subjective nature of our perception.
Tread Softly
Tread Softly is an interactive work exploring our presence within living ecosystems. An Azure Kinect camera tracks viewers’ movements, triggering particles from projected forms – from abstract geometries through soil, roots, flowers and trees. Every movement leaves a trace. We are never outside nature; we are always moving through it.
Garden of Becoming
Garden of Becoming explores humanity’s instinct to create ideal refuges for an ever-evolving self.
Point of view is from the Met’s Museum Astor Court, an avatar of 14th century scholar’s escape the rigid politics, where now three artists merge its virtual architecture existence, animated fragmented self, and sonic fingerprints into a single work, where a classical Chinese garden becomes a space where completeness is perpetually desired and perpetually deferred.
Uncanny Garden
Uncanny Garden is a collaborative augmented reality and sound work inspired by Randi Matushevitz’s Flowergirl (2026) and Limelight (2026). Participants summon five Flowergirls through hand gestures rooted in elemental cosmology, each seeding, blooming, becoming. A mediated ritual exploring fertility, transformation, and the nature of self in a surrealist botanical world.
Scenes in the Hyperreal
Scenes in the Hyperreal is less a compilation album than a snapshot of a living creative network. The composers span generations, continents, institutions, and artistic traditions, yet they are connected by a common impulse: to design systems that transform our perception of reality. They each push the boundary of human-computer hybrid systems and are exemplary in one or more compositional sub-fields. The following 4 compositions will be discussed:
Here Come the Warm Clouds – Ursula Kwong, Danny Erdberg
Edgewise Dub – Michael Hetrick
Timeandagain – Joann Kuchera-Morin
Riding the rings of Saturn. Chasing the moons of Mars (Excerpts) – Xárene Eskandar
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.