Speculating on Plurality

In the fall of 2025, we announced the 2025/2026 season of programming, a warm, open invitation, Speculating on Plurality prompting artists, technologists and writers to playfully or critically imagine and instigate new frameworks, interventions, or inventions to address what concerns us the most: from state surveillance, the climate, digital fugitivity, the rise of techno feudalism/fascism.

The new season of gatherings, making, and togetherness featured a pair of artist conversations at Secret Riso Club in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and will mark a return, for the first time since the onset of the pandemic, to Eyebeam’s nourishing and supportive physical residency in New York City.

Open Call: March 2 – March 20, 2026
Jury & Selection: March 20 – March 27, 2026
Residency Term: April to June 30, 2026.

At Eyebeam, we have been concerned with the ever-growing integration of algorithmic systems into our daily lives. Noticing that although we are more digitally connected than ever, we experience a deepening alienation. Our interconnected realities have become more opaque, as algorithms become a determining factor in how we experience the world and steer us further into conformity. This contradiction of existential separation and engineered compliance beckons us to abandon our multiplicities and each other.

Earlier this year, we issued a call to emerging artists whose practice not only interrogates this conundrum but also addresses how we might move towards a pluralistic (pluriversal) commons, a space that holds our multitudes and their potentials for shared futures. Following an extraordinary response from our community, we selected six New York City-based artists who, in the first decade of their careers, have already demonstrated their ability to consider and respond to these concerns with curiosity, play, and expansiveness.

Each artist receives a $4,000 stipend to support the development of their project, along with access to Eyebeam’s network of peers, mentors, and field experts. Residents will work out of NYU Tandon @ The Yard, a partner facility for integrative research in AR/VR/XR, virtual production, and experiential computing. There, they will have access to top-of-the-line production equipment and hands-on support from the talented practitioners enrolled in NYU Tandon’s Integrated Design and Media (IDM) Master of Science program.

In an era when we are more digitally connected than ever, algorithms and data determine how we experience the world. With the rapid development of new technologies and their near-compulsory integration into our lives, they have permanently altered our relationships with ourselves, with each other, and the world around us.

What do these disparate and parallel realities invite artists and cultural workers to consider urgently? In an era of technofeudalism, is it possible to escape technology’s deployment in state surveillance and impulse towards creating hegemonic sameness?

Guided by the central prompt “what is required to move us towards a pluralistic commons, a space that holds our multitudes and their potentials towards shared futures?” Eyebeam’s 2026 Residency is designed for New York-based emerging artists in the first decade of their careers, asking practitioners to consider these questions with curiosity, play, and expansiveness. We offer this prompt for artists, technologists, and writers to instigate and imagine new frameworks, interventions, or inventions that address the issues and ideas most critical to building the futures we seek.

This 2026 Residency calls on emerging artists based in NYC within the 5 boroughs to apply to the Open Call; artists whose practice and thinking act as catalysts in defining our paths ahead, and align with the theme Speculating on Plurality. This residency supports emerging artists seeking to further develop work in progress. Residents will not be required to complete any work during the residency; rather, they will share in the process with one another and Eyebeam’s communities through discussion, writing (optional), and related events.

Six NYC-based artists will be selected for a 12-week spring-to-summer residency at NYU Tandon @ The Yard that will include:

• $4,000 Stipend
• Daily access from 9 AM to 9 PM to shared studio space and a dedicated desk;
• The option to work with an NYU graduate assistant for technical production support for the following: 3D Design, AR/VR development, Motion Capture, XR production, TouchDesigner, Coding, AutoCAD, Web Development, Videography, Unreal Engine, etc.
• Mentorship with Eyebeam alumni and opportunities to engage with partner organizations and visiting professionals

On Tuesday, June 30th, in the midst of blistering summer heat, Eyebeam hosted a lively gathering that brought together over 100 artists, cultural workers, friends, and supporters to celebrate the cohort of emerging artists from our 2026 Speculating on Plurality residency.

Eyebeam and NYU Tandon @ the Yard worked closely with the six artists to reimagine the plural (material and conceptual) possibilities of art and technology. Marking the end of this exploratory journey, the artists threw an ambitious showcase of work in progress, presented as a choose-your-own-adventure-style survey, in the massive 14,000-square-foot production and research facility at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

In anticipation of presenting to the public, the genre-expansive cohort brought to life ideas that they have been thinking and actively shaping through conversations with visiting guest critics, mentors, staff, and each other.

We were met with a striking array of installations and performances: an interactive play melting the boundaries between audience and performers to confront issues around the portrayals of Black suffering; a dance performance examining intimacy and identity through AI agents; a community-led counter-archive system built with alternative protocols of access; a spatial audio environment abstracting ceremony and speaking to Land Back as embodied daily practice; a film exploring the speculative lives of indigenous-made objects housed in ethnological museums as a call for re-matriation; and, a pop-up shop meets XR environment as a vessel for a speculative travel agency modeled in the aesthetics of SWANA digital kitsch.

Speculating on Plurality residency showcase, presented by Eyebeam at NYU Tandon @ the Yard, Brooklyn, June 30, 2026. Photo credit: Cal Hsiao.