2026/2027 Season: Agency
What does it mean to have agency today?
Who has agency and how is it enacted? How is our understanding of agency being rewritten as "AI agents" and "agentic systems" increasingly act, make decisions, and carry out tasks on our behalf?
This year at Eyebeam, the theme of AGENCY will guide a shared research agenda for our artists, staff, audiences, and collaborators.
Two cohorts of artist residents, six virtual in Fall 2026 and six NYC-based in Spring 2027, will explore the theme through critical inquiry and making, supported by funding, mentorship, and access to tools and expertise from Eyebeam's network.
Public programs will bring AI researchers, scholars, philosophers, and social scientists together with artists and communities to think through how our understanding of agency is evolving.
Throughout, the program positions artists as interlocutors of technology, exploring its possibilities and pitfalls and proposing how these tools might serve people over profit.
Residency Open Call: Apply Now →
The concept of agency has occupied artists and philosophers for centuries.
Cybernetics tried to model it through feedback and control; actor-network theory insisted it was distributed across humans, tools, and nonhuman systems.
Feminist and posthumanist thinkers pushed further, arguing that agency is never fully individual, that it emerges through the bodies, structures, and technologies we act through.
Today, as agentic machine learning systems execute tasks with minimal human oversight, critics are sounding the alarm that human agency may be eroding.
In the political sphere, the concentration of AI power among a small group of tech companies has made agency feel less like a philosophical question and more like a material one about who gets to shape the future and who is simply shaped by it.
Against this backdrop, we want to consider how our understanding of agency may be shifting and where agency actually lives now: in bodies, in labor, in collective and political life, as much as in code.
