New York, USA Fri, Jun 26, 2026 at 4:00 pm EDT
London, United Kingdom Fri, Jun 26, 2026 at 9:00 pm BST
Los Angeles, USA Fri, Jun 26, 2026 at 1:00 pm PDT
Melbourne, Australia Sat, Jun 27, 2026 at 6:00 am AEST
Join us for the SIGGRAPH 2026 Creative Content Sneak Peek, a SPARKS lightning talk session offering a preview of the exciting creative programs coming to SIGGRAPH 2026. This session will introduce highlights from across the conference’s creative landscape, including art, animation, real-time technologies, immersive media, spatial storytelling, and critical research in digital and interactive practices.
SIGGRAPH 2026 brings together artists, researchers, technologists, designers, educators, and industry professionals to explore how computer graphics and interactive techniques continue to shape culture, creativity, and everyday life. Building on SIGGRAPH’s 50-plus-year legacy, this session offers a lively introduction to the programs, ideas, and communities that make the conference such a vital meeting point for innovation.
Whether you are planning to attend, collaborate, present, or simply learn more, this session invites you to discover what is ahead and get inspired by the creative energy of SIGGRAPH 2026.
SIGGRAPH 2026 Art Gallery
This year’s SIGGRAPH Art Gallery theme, In-Betweens, presents digital and technologically mediated artworks that foreground relations across systems, materials, publics, histories, and infrastructures. Looking back to SIGGRAPH’s early computer art exhibitions and forward to contemporary GPU-driven and AI-enabled practices, the program considers interactive technologies not only as tools or devices, but as expressive languages and symbolic systems. In-Betweens explores how artists engage the technical, conceptual, temporal, and spatial connections that shape our increasingly networked world, from humanitarian concerns and algorithmic methods to computing hardware, perception, and our place within the layered infrastructures of contemporary technology.
SIGGRAPH 2026 Art Papers
This year’s SIGGRAPH Art Papers theme, The Creative Complexities of Translation: Practices, Artifacts, and Stories, explores translation as a creative, cultural, technical, and embodied process. The program asks how artists, designers, critics, technologists, and activists translate ideas, histories, materials, and knowledge across time, culture, community, domains, and media. Moving beyond language alone, it considers the labor, complexity, and creative possibilities of translating practices and artifacts through diverse knowledge systems and hybrid forms. The theme invites radical rethinking of how creative work can reinterpret the past, remediate the present, and imagine possible futures while remaining grounded in lived realities.
SIGGRAPH 2026 Computer Animation Festival
Experience the cutting edge of digital storytelling at the Computer Animation Festival, an Academy Award® Qualifying Festival that honors the very best in animated short-form content with its coveted Best in Show prize. From the dazzling Electronic Theater to the visionary Animation Theater, this globally acclaimed event showcases outstanding work in computer animation, VFX, advertising, game cinematics, real-time graphics, and scientific visualization. The festival offers a thrilling celebration of innovation, creativity, and the limitless future of animated storytelling, bringing audiences into conversation with the artists, technologies, and ideas shaping the field today.
SIGGRAPH 2026 Emerging Technologies
Emerging Technologies celebrates the inventive spirit driving the next generation of graphics and interactive experiences. The program presents innovations that reveal how new technologies are shaping creative practice, industry, research, and everyday life. Spanning areas such as display technologies, fabrication, haptics, interaction, robotics, sensing, and computer vision, Emerging Technologies highlights projects that open new possibilities and enable new kinds of experience. Together, these works show how technical imagination and unexpected approaches can transform the ways we see, touch, build, move, and interact with the world around us.
Immersive Pavilion
Immersive Pavilion highlights the convergence of human experience and emerging technology, presenting work across virtual, augmented, mixed reality, and beyond. As a space for multi-sensory environments, interactive techniques, social experiences, games, artistic expression, and hybrid systems, the program explores how immersive media can transform the ways we interact, communicate, and tell stories. This year’s focus places special attention on live performance and virtual production, including real-time environments, motion capture, LED volumes, in-camera visual effects, and workflows that connect human performance with immersive technologies.
SIGGRAPH 2026 Real-Time Live!
– Mk Haley
Real-Time Live! presents a dynamic showcase of cutting-edge real-time technologies and interactive experiences. Bringing together work across game technology, scientific visualization, design tools, robotics, entertainment, play, augmented reality, and beyond, the program highlights how real-time systems are transforming the ways we create, perform, experiment, and engage. This year’s program places special attention on projects that move beyond the screen, demonstrating how real-time graphics and interactive technologies can shape physical, spatial, and embodied experiences. It is a lively celebration of innovation, technical imagination, and the expanding possibilities of real-time creation.
SIGGRAPH 2026 Spatial Storytelling
Spatial Storytelling celebrates the fusion of immersive technology, narrative design, and experimental media. As one of SIGGRAPH’s most interdisciplinary programs, it brings together work across XR, AI, interactive environments, live performance, installation, generative systems, and embodied experience. This year’s program places special emphasis on process, revealing the tools, techniques, creative workflows, experiments, and problem-solving behind spatial and immersive projects. From wearables and volumetric video to projection mapping, haptics, SLAM, hardware, and software systems, Spatial Storytelling explores how stories unfold across time, space, and medium, and how artists, technologists, and researchers are shaping the future of storytelling.
Rebecca Ruige Xu currently teaches computer art and animation at Syracuse University. Her artwork and research interests include experimental animation, visual music, artistic data visualization, interactive installations, digital performance, and virtual reality. Her recent work has been shown at: ISEA; Ars Electronica; SIGGRAPH Art Gallery; IEEE VIS Arts Program, Museum of Contemporary Art, Italy; Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, USA; FILE– Electronic Language International Festival, Brazil; International Digital Art Exhibition, China; Boston Cyberarts Festival, USA. Xu is the co-founder of the ChinaVIS Arts Program, Co-Chair of the IEEE VIS 2023 and 2024 Arts Program, and currently serves as Chair of 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.