We are excited to announce our new 2025/2026 season, Speculating on Plurality—a prompt to artists, technologists and writers who playfully and critically, take up questions, instigations and interventions to address what concerns us the most.

We are more digitally connected than ever, but are we sharing realities? What do these disparate and parallel realities invite us to consider urgently? In an era of technofeudalism, is it possible to escape technology’s deployment in state surveillance? Do our most popular technologies have an impulse towards creating sameness? And, what is required to move us towards a pluralistic commons—a space that might hold our multitudes and their potentials towards shared futures?

The new season of gatherings, making, and togetherness features two artist conversations with our community at Secret Riso Club, experimental writing and storytelling, and a return, for the first time since the onset of the pandemic, to Eyebeam’s nourishing and supportive physical residency in New York City.

In November, Eyebeam will hold two in-person alum artist conversations hosted by our friends, Secret Riso Club in Bushwick under the banner of Urgent Inquiries. We invite you all to explore how, as makers, we collectively think and act through hyper-contemporary issues we care about most in the arts, tech, and society.

Events at Secret Riso Club

Concurrently with our series of events, we are launching an ongoing, online channel on Discord, inviting all practitioners and supporters in the Eyebeam community to share critical thoughts and responses to shared themes and questions throughout the series.  We invite conversations and questions about frameworks, interventions, or inventions that move us to challenge the existing system of surveillance, techno-feudalism, and repression prevalent in and out of our digital spaces.

In the spring of 2026, we will continue the series of programming with the return of our flagship New York City residency by providing studio space, inviting emerging artists interested in developing and expanding current work via an open call in the winter. The 12-week residency, which will include a $4,000 stipend and additional funds for activations, will also support each artist’s ongoing practice; residents will not be required to complete work, but rather share and develop work in process with each other and Eyebeam’s communities through discussion and open studio events.

The season will culminate in a juried speculative fiction writing contest, inviting writers and creatives to submit short stories around the theme of “Speculating on Plurality.” With the breakneck pace of new technologies developing and their near compulsory integration into our lives, these new modalities are mediating our relationships with ourselves, with each other, and the world around us.  Algorithms and their data feel as influential as geography in determining what and how we experience the world. We invite writers to explore the potentialities of the human/tech relationship in the near and far futures. Submissions will be read and reviewed by an alumni committee and the Eyebeam staff. Winners will be invited to read their submissions in an evening program in June 2026. A selection of submissions will be published in Feed, our content channel featuring a continuous selection of artist interviews, essays, and criticism, and designed, printed, and distributed as a zine.

The new season is a return for Eyebeam and offers artists and our communities platforms to think critically and share ideas, focused time and resources for creation, and a dynamic, evolving space for play, risk-taking, and connection. The series will also give a special focus to bringing voices across generations, media, mediums, and experiences together. We will continue to write to you with new details and on eyebeam.org. 

Towards shared futures,

The staff of Eyebeam