Art Contest Awards

We launched the Art contest through two narratives which we intended not as a model to replicate, but as a spark to inspire the exploration of postdigital positionalities.

The 2026 ETH-TECH International Art Contest, “Inhabiting Technological Present and Futures: What’s my postdigital positionality?”, invited students internationally to explore their relationships with technologies through creative expression. A postdigital positionality is a situated, evolving ontological and epistemological orientation to digital technologies, shaped by lived experiences, values, needs, goals and relationships (Hayes, 2021). It is not a fixed position for or against technology: it concerns how digital and analogue realities are already entangled and how people critically inhabit those conditions. It clearly refers to the personal makers like gender, race (Hayes, 2023). Sergio Carvajal-Leoni adopts the metaphor of a compass  that allows any person to accommodate experiences, needs, values, goals and relationships through, with and without technology. In this sense, this Art Contest strongly embraces the idea of postdigital education and research, as something “firmly (rejecting) differences between the digital and the analogue and sought a more nuanced understanding of their relationships” (Jandrić & Knox, 2022, p.784) . It is to be noticed that the world heard about the idea of postdigitalism firstly from the voice of music and visual arts. Petar Jandrić  has led the movement expanding the discussion to the field of educational practice and research. As expressed in the two examples offered in the Art Contest Call, some of us chose to name positionalities and offer autoethnographic processes of action and reflection to articulate our stance (Raffaghelli, 2025). Others have undertaken extensive processes developing manifestos and creating artifacts that help them reflect, refine, communicate and put their positionality into practice (Carvajal-Leoni, 2026). Drawing on transformative learning theory, Carvajal-Leoni highlights the distinctive contribution of visual art to critical inquiry. By engaging with dimensions of experience that words alone may not fully capture, visual art offers opportunities for critical reflection and potentially transformative shifts in perspective (Kokkos, 2010; Hoggan et al., 2009).

The contest was presented through a collaboration among the College of Fine Arts and Communication at Texas State University, the University of Padova, the EU co-funded ETH-TECH project, and Education Is Boring.