CICA Museum, an independent contemporary art space in South Korea, has opened submissions for the 11th CICA New Media Art Conference & Exhibitions 2027, and the deadline is close: November 4, 2026. It’s one of the more structurally generous open calls this site has covered recently, because it isn’t just asking for a single artwork — it’s three separate tracks (papers, exhibitions, and institutional participation), with a gallery show and a published book attached to the ones that get accepted.
What it actually covers
The call’s 19 listed categories read like a syllabus for exactly the beat this site covers: AI & Algorithmic Media, Synthetic Media & Misinformation, XR, Spatial Computing & Immersive Media, Robotics, AI Agents & Social Machines, Games & Gaming Culture, Digital Colonialism & Platform Power, Posthumanism, Bodies & Technology, and more. Submissions can be a paper presentation, a workshop, an experimental session, or an artistic performance.
Call for Exhibitions runs in parallel: accepted artists get a solo exhibition in the museum’s gallery space, with roughly 44 square meters assigned per artist, plus inclusion in a group showcase (“CICA NMAC 2027 Showcase”) during conference week where every exhibitor shows one additional work.
The terms, plainly
- Who can apply: writers, scholars, researchers, and artists worldwide — no geographic restriction stated.
- How to submit: a 300–600 word abstract/proposal plus a bio for papers; up to 10 portfolio images and/or 3 links to video, web-based, or interactive work plus an artist statement for exhibitions. Both go by email (
submission@cicamuseum.com), DOC/DOCX/PDF only — no ZIP files accepted. - Submitting is free. Acceptance requires registering and attending in person; the registration fee is $430 USD. There’s no fee just to apply.
- Conference dates: June 26–28, 2027, with solo exhibitions running in a staggered schedule in June 2027. The venue is near Hapjeong Station in Seoul’s Hongdae area, and CICA provides complimentary shuttle service for presenters and exhibitors.
- Publication: on-site presenters and exhibitors are featured in “New Media Art 2028,” CICA’s annual book, distributed through Korean bookstores and internationally via CICA Press.
The catch worth flagging up front
This isn’t a remote-friendly call. Both presenters and exhibitors must attend in person to be included — there’s no option to show work or present a paper without traveling to Seoul and paying the registration fee once accepted. For anyone weighing whether this is worth an application, that travel-and-fee commitment is the real cost of entry, not the (free) submission itself.
Why it’s worth the short runway
Three days isn’t much notice, but the category list alone — spatial computing, synthetic media, AI agents, platform power — maps unusually well onto the kind of practice-plus-critique work that’s hard to place elsewhere. A conference that explicitly wants XR and AI-adjacent artists in the same room as media theorists and platform-power researchers is a narrower, more specific audience than a general open call, which can be worth more than a bigger one with less topical overlap.
CICA’s own recap of its 2026 conference, for a sense of what gets shown.
Related Reading
- Call for Submissions: The 11th CICA New Media Art Conference & Exhibitions — official page
- EMAP’s 2027 Residencies Fund Two Months of Production at 15 European Hosts — our earlier coverage of a similarly structured media-art open call
- Applying to Open Calls and Festivals: Getting Started — our tutorial
- Artist Statement: Getting Started — our tutorial, directly useful for this call’s exhibition track