International Art Contest 2026
By
Juliana E. Raffaghelli (UNIPD Team)
What happens when we invite young artists to question their relationship with technology, and then discover that we, as researchers and educators, need to question our own?
This question accompanied us throughout the second edition of the ETH-TECH International Art Contest, Inhabiting Technological Present and Futures: What’s my postdigital positionality? It became particularly meaningful on 30 September 2026, when an international jury of scholars and educators gathered to deliberate on the submitted artworks.
We had prizes to award, evaluations to discuss, and decisions to make. But we also hoped for something more: a small laboratory for postdigital research, opening up unexpected epistemological and methodological reflections on what it means to express ourselves in a society where the boundaries between the digital and the analogue are constantly blurred, crossed, and redrawn.
After all, we had invited artists to explore their ways of being in and making sense of a world we describe as postdigital. It seemed only reasonable that we, too, should be willing to question our own ways of inhabiting and understanding that world.
It started during a rainy spring in Padua
The story began when Sergio Carvajal-Leoni arrived in Padua during a rainy spring, bringing with him some rather uncomfortable questions about academia, adult learning, and what we are actually doing within our institutions.
Our paths crossed, and we started thinking together.
At the time, ETH-TECH was just beginning. The project was built around a question that remains profoundly unsettling: is an ethical approach to AI and data in education even possible when we are increasingly compelled to adopt these technologies, often before we have had the opportunity to understand what we are consenting to?
I was also developing the ETH-TECH Art Contest. Its first edition had explored ethics and ethical dilemmas in technological environments. But Sergio’s work on creative and visual inquiry opened another possibility.
What if we approached art not simply as a medium for representing ethical dilemmas, but as a way of exploring how people inhabit technological worlds?
I proposed Sergio to meet Sarah Hayes’s work particularly the notion of postdigital positionality, and Petar Jandrić’s theoretical contributions to postdigital thinking, to dig deeper about such a question. Sergio invited Sarah into the conversation. Then came readings, discussions, unexpected connections, and probably a few more theoretical complications than we originally anticipated.
The result was a new edition of the contest, developed through 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.
More importantly, it was the beginning of a transformative space…
Why postdigital positionality? And why now?
A postdigital positionality can be understood as our situated, evolving orientation towards technologies and the ways they shape our lives. As Hayes (2021) suggests, it involves ontological and epistemological questions: how we experience the world, what we consider knowledge, what we value, and how we understand our relationships with technological environments. I had read Sarah some years ago and the idea of postdigital positionality was inspiring me to understand the different ways educators related to datafication (with Caroline Kuhn, 2023). This is exactly how I referred to Sarah’s work:
Hayes’ conceptualisation of positionality is helpful here, which she understands as ‘the intimate and ever-changing social, technological, and political contexts that intermingle with, create and continue to influence, a person’s values, identity and opportunities’ (Hayes 2021: 10). Thus, who we are and how we approach the world of data and data-driven systems is shaped by different dimensions.
It is not simply a position for or against technology. And here is where the postdigital notion becomes central to move beyond the data and data-driven systems as only one of the multifaceted experience in today’s technological landscape. We inhabit a world where digital and analogue realities are deeply entangled, and we stay with that entanglements, we don’t need classifications or new categories (Jandrić et al. 2018) . Our relationships with technology are shaped by personal experiences, institutional conditions, social inequalities, material infrastructures, and changing possibilities for action.
And these relationships are anything but stable.
Today, technology corporations are pushing artificial intelligence into almost every possible corner of our lives. We are constantly invited, and sometimes pressured, to adapt, innovate, accelerate, and become more productive, while somehow remaining ethically responsible throughout the process. Meanwhile, many people feel increasingly small and disoriented in the face of these transformations.
What I contend here is that perhaps exploring our postdigital positionalities can offer something like a balm. Certainly not another framework promising to fix everything, but a way of inhabiting the technological transformation. A way of recovering our capacity to think, feel, question, and imagine alternatives together.
A rather unconventional manifesto
Somewhere along the way, I realised that the jury brought together for the Art Contest, an extraordinary group of scholars and educators assembled by Sergio Carvajal-Leoni, guided by his vision of what we might explore through artistic inquiry, shared a few productive obsessions.
The first concerned art and postdigital education. We were interested in exploring positionalities, not necessarily defining them. We wanted to create opportunities for people to examine how they inhabit technological environments, including the contradictions, tensions, and uncomfortable compromises that accompany those relationships.
The second concerned activism. This experiment sits somewhere along the jagged frontiers of academia. We wanted to create a space for young people to experiment, express themselves, and question the technological world they are inheriting.
But this space was also for us. As researchers and educators, we need opportunities to question the institutions we inhabit, the assumptions that organise our work, and the ways academic knowledge is produced and legitimised. This brings us to a third concern: resistance, or what we have provocatively called purposeless resistance.
What happens when we engage in an intellectual and creative experiment without predetermining its outputs, its measurable impact, or even its eventual contribution to research? What if we allow ourselves to do something simply because it opens a space for thinking and creating together? We are doing what we are doing, and who knows what comes next?
Finally, there is transformative learning and agency. I was introduced to this idea by Sergio Carvajal-Leoni whose comments and intellectual work during the Art Contest. While we – the jury- were all convinced about the distinctive contribution of visual art to critical inquiry, Sergio brought to the fore the idea of engaging with dimensions of experience for critical reflection and potentially transformative shifts in perspective. He bridged the research of the juries focused on adult’s education and art (Chad and Tetyana Hoggan) with the idea of transformative learning.
This laid the groundwork for an experience in which our engagement with art could become a form of postqualitative inquiry. It was not planned around predetermined procedures, but imagined through engagement, emotions, and a shared willingness to produce something more meaningful than yet another study of AI’s impact on human learning and behaviour.
How do you evaluate art work without turning it into yet another evaluation factory?
This was one of our most interesting methodological challenges for me. An international jury of scholars and educators was assembled, bringing together different disciplinary traditions, research interests, and aesthetic sensibilities.
Each submission was assigned to two independent reviewers. We deliberately limited the number of artworks assigned to each juror, aiming to keep the workload manageable and allow sufficient time for meaningful engagement.
The assessment considered three dimensions: originality, clarity, and thoughtfulness.
Yet beyond these relatively conventional criteria, we were particularly interested in the relationship between the creative process, the final artwork, and the artist’s postdigital positionality. Not simply what the artist was saying about technology, but how they were thinking, experimenting, and negotiating their relationship with it. We approached the assessment process somewhat in reverse. In fact, reviewers first expressed their impressions, enthusiasm, reservations, and arguments about each work. These qualitative judgements were subsequently translated into a four-colour scale, from blue to red, corresponding to numerical values from four to one. Only after that colorful work we moved to comparing and contrasting, and occasionally converting that into frequencies or scores.
The resulting shortlist was not a verdict, but the point where our collective conversation began.
30 September: the jury’s experience
When the jury met synchronously on 30 September, we had the qualitative assessments, the quantitative synthesis, and the shortlist available in a shared working document.
We might discuss one artwork, agree on a possible ranking, and then encounter another that challenged our assumptions and made us reconsider everything. We wanted genuine deliberation, rather than a negotiation over scores. And with a room full of people professionally inclined to question everything, keeping to our planned ten minutes per artwork may have been the most ambitious experiment of the day.
The discussion revealed how differently the same work could be experienced and interpreted. Some jurors were moved by conceptual originality, even when the visual output appeared unremarkable. Others placed greater emphasis on aesthetic composition, material experimentation, or the coherence between artistic intentions and their execution.
Questions about AI-generated images, authorship, human intervention, ecological consequences, artistic labour, and the boundaries of conceptual art emerged repeatedly.
In several cases, the discussion did not simply clarify our judgements. It changed them.
Encountering postdigital positionalities: the awarded works
The synchronous deliberation was followed by an asynchronous voting round, allowing jury members to reconsider the shortlisted works and express their preferences.
The final decisions reflected not only the number of votes for each position, but also the distribution of preferences across rankings.
Three prizes and five honourable mentions were ultimately confirmed. The resulting collection presents remarkably different ways of inhabiting, questioning, and imagining technological environments.
I suggest to take a look at the awarded works here. There are Art Contest’s Deliberation Notes that report in detail the decisional process.
Let me just say that the awarded works revealed not only different ways of inhabiting postdigital realities, but also the tensions involved in recognising artistic and intellectual value. Archive404 (First Prize) stood out for its originality and unsettling experimentation with digital image corruption, although its relationship between theoretical ambition and visual expression prompted debate. The creaitive (Second Prize) was recognised for its emotionally powerful exploration of creativity, embodiment, and AI, despite contrasting views on its deliberately simple aesthetics. Perhaps the most provocative was Drainpipes (Third Prize), which transformed a €50 transaction receipt into a critique of artistic labour and AI-driven production, challenging the jury to reconsider whether artistic value necessarily requires visual beauty or can emerge from conceptual disruption.
The honourable mentions extended these conversations. The Entangled Ones was appreciated for its integration of AI-generated poetry and human visual expression, while raising questions about the transparency of the creative process. Dantes19 foregrounded the ecological costs of technological production, provoking debate about the paradox of using AI to criticise AI’s environmental impact. Jansen demonstrated how an artwork’s significance can emerge through repeated encounters and theoretical interpretation, challenging initial aesthetic judgements. FISSURA was recognised for bringing material memory, embodied creativity, and AI-mediated expression into dialogue, despite differing opinions on its final visual impact. Finally, SHAPING THE UNSEEN offered an inventive critique of technological replacement, while prompting questions about binary representations of human and artificial creativity and the consistency between artistic intentions and technological choices.
What did we learn from the artworks, and from one another?
Looking across the awarded works, we understand how postdigital positionality can be expressed in innumerable ways. Some artists approached technology through intimate experiences of creativity, failure, and identity. Others explored surveillance, ecological degradation, economic injustice, or the changing conditions of artistic labour.
Some used AI as a creative collaborator. Others made it an object of critique. Several did both, exposing the contradictions involved in using technological systems to question their own consequences.
The works also challenged conventional distinctions between visual aesthetics, conceptual strength, and critical reflection.
A corrupted image (Archive404), a childhood drawing (The CreAItive), a financial receipt (Drainpipes), a poem (The Engangled), an AI-generated landscape (Dantes19), a sequence of illustrated vignettes (Janssen), a painted jacket (Fissura), and a video framed within an old television (Roberta) became different ways of asking what it means to inhabit technological presents and futures.
The jury’s disagreements were equally revealing for me. We did not always agree about originality, artistic quality, or the relationship between an artist’s intentions and the resulting work. We questioned whether an aesthetically modest object might offer a powerful intellectual intervention, whether technical sophistication necessarily strengthens artistic expression, and whether a convincing critique of AI must also demonstrate consistency in its own use of technological tools.
The assessment process therefore became an opportunity for the jury to examine its own assumptions about artistic value, research, and knowledge production (the idea of epistemic justice was turning around in my head!)
Purposeless resistance and the possibility of transformation: Art as Experience
It would be tempting to conclude this story by celebrating the winners, thanking the jury, and declaring the initiative a success. And certainly, the artists deserve recognition for their intellectual generosity, creative courage, and willingness to make their relationships with technology visible. The jurors also deserve our gratitude for the time, care, and openness they brought to a demanding process.
I will focus on the idea of Art as Experience, brought to us in 1934 by John Dewey. He opposed the idea of placing art on a distant pedestal, as something static, or even as a luxury commodity. An experience is a unified, self-contained event with a clear beginning and end. And art becomes an experience because it is practised, embraced by anyone as a means of expression, and also lived as a powerful means of reflection. Dewey also viewed this debate as a primary way to overcome rigid philosophical dualisms, like the split between thought and feeling, or mind and body. Or digital and analogical, let me say, reorganising social conventions, expressing concerning issues, playing with meanings, generating means for empathy and imagination.
That was the Art Contest. An experience in which conversations challenged assumptions, and in which we decided to enjoy the experience without any further predetermined purpose.
Awarding prizes was a way of supporting young artists, or, more broadly, encouraging young people to engage with art as an experience. An experience of postdigital inquiry, perhaps, opening up possibilities for transformative learning and agency: I live this experience; I can be recognised for actively engaging in it.
It also reminded us that agency is not simply something researchers should study or educators should promote in others. It is something that requires spaces to be exercised.
We need hence spaces where we can experiment without knowing exactly what will happen, reconsider our interpretations, change our minds, and allow ourselves to be affected by the perspectives of others. In a university environment increasingly organised around productivity, measurable outcomes, and technological acceleration, such spaces may seem marginal.
But they do exist.
And perhaps that is already something worth celebrating about the Art Contest’s results.
The 2026 ETH-TECH International Art 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.
The awarded works and the jury’s deliberation are documented in the ETH-TECH Art Contest Deliberation Notes 2026.
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