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 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.
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 media artist, interdisciplinary researcher, and Associate Professor of Digital Media Design at the University of Virginia. Her work examines the political and theoretical implications of visual media technologies within our culture and cross culturally. She frequently collaborates with musicians, choreographers, and theater-makers to explore new media and performance, enhancing narrative and audience immersion. Kasra’s artwork has been exhibited in galleries and film festivals worldwide, and she has contributed as a curator, programmer, and reviewer for major exhibitions, film festivals, and conferences. She was an elected member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee (2019–2025), SIGGRAPH 2016 Conference Chair, and SIGGRAPH 2011 Art Gallery Chair. She is currently a board member of the New Media Caucus.
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 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.
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).