Submission Deadline: 18 June 2026, 23:59 AoE (Closed)
Art Gallery Theme: Starting with Spinning
SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 takes inspiration from batik, Malaysia’s traditional textile, and adopts the theme “Weaving the Future.” Every textile begins as fiber—spun into yarn. For this exhibition, we gather artworks that begin at that origin: works born from the act of spinning—creating from raw conceptual, technical, or cultural fibers.
Around the time SIGGRAPH began—and even earlier—computer graphics were far more constrained than it is today. To break through those creative limits, artists wrote their own code, built their own devices, and used hacking and tinkering to make what did not yet exist become real. In doing so, they also shaped new concepts and ways of thinking—defining not only how such works could be made, but what computer-based art itself could be. Their practice resembled the long arc of textile-making—not only in process, but in its necessity to construct each layer from raw material: selecting fibers, twisting yarn, weaving cloth, and tailoring a garment. In those works, there is a universality that crosses time—something that, even now, does not feel dated.
Today, computer-based expressions have become easier to produce than ever. With generative AI and off-the-shelf devices, polished results can be created with speed. The more immediately “readable” a work is, the more quickly it circulates across social media as short-form video. Like fast fashion made from synthetic fibers, this acceleration makes works abundant, yet often fleeting. Yet works made in this way can become difficult to remember even a year later.
That is precisely why this exhibition turns its attention to digital art that feels as though it was made by returning to the fiber level—the act of spinning a single strand. It is work that returns to a pioneer’s spirit, the impulse to bring something into being from the ground up. The thread may be aesthetic, technological, social, or cultural; we leave that point of departure to each artist. We impose no restrictions on form: computationally created still images or moving images; installations or performances that engage with information environments; expanded sculpture such as kinetic art or robot art; and crafts realized through digital fabrication, among others.
What we seek to follow closely is why a particular subject or material was chosen, how it was tested, and what failures or detours shaped the work into its final form. In tracing these paths, we hope that these singular works—emerging from each artist’s trial and error, and arriving from outside the familiar—will unsettle and renew how we see the world, and how we interact with it.
