CURRENTS 2027: Art & Technology Festival opens 11 June 2027 and runs to 20 June, at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe in the Railyard Arts District. Artist submissions are open and the deadline is 8 December 2026. Participating artists will be posted in March 2027.
CURRENTS New Media is a non-profit in Santa Fe, New Mexico running an annual festival, a year-round exhibition and experience space, and an internship programme. The festival has run since 2010.
The categories
Per the published call, seven strands:
- Installations — interactive or non-interactive
- Audio experiences
- VR, AR and mixed-reality environments
- Robotics, kinetic and electro-mechanical work
- Multimedia performance
- Fabrication, 2D and 3D printing, wearables
- Experimental single-channel video, documentary and animation
The robotics and electro-mechanical strand is the one that distinguishes this call from the general run of digital-art festivals, most of which quietly mean “screens.” If you have built a thing that moves, this is a venue that programmes them.
Fees, and the shipping caveat
$30 for a single submission, $25 per entry for multiple submissions.
And then the sentence that is genuinely useful, because most calls do not say it: the festival notes it may not be able to cover international shipping costs, which it describes as high and rising, but may be able to supply needed equipment.
Read that as an invitation to design for it. A piece specified as “a projector, a Mac mini, four speakers and a 4 × 3 m dark space, plus a drive with the files” is one the festival can realistically mount. A crate from Europe may not be. If you are outside the US, write the equipment list into the proposal and say what you can bring in hand luggage.
A date discrepancy to be aware of
The festival’s own dedicated page for CURRENTS 2027 gives 11–20 June 2027. The carousel on the organisation’s homepage currently reads “CURRENTS 2027 June 12 – 21, 2026” — which is a typo on their site rather than a second set of dates. Work from the festival page, and if your travel depends on the exact day, confirm with the organisers.
Separately, the “Submit Here” call-to-action on the festival page is not a plain link in the page source, so there is no stable submission URL to publish here. Go via the festival page. We are not going to guess a portal address.
Entry fees and the category list come from the call text as reproduced by the New Media Caucus; the dates, venue and deadline are from the festival’s own page.
Why bother
Santa Fe is an odd and good place for this. It is a small city with a disproportionate art market, a railyard district built out for exactly this kind of programming, and a festival that has been doing it for seventeen years without drifting into being a brand activation. The archive is public — the organisation’s own channel has highlight reels going back to 2009 — which is the cheapest possible way to work out whether your piece belongs there before you pay $30 to find out.
For anyone tracking deadlines: this one lands between the 6 November close of the EMAP 2027 media-art residencies and the December holidays, which in practice means writing it in November.
Sources
- CURRENTS 2027: Art & Technology Festival — CURRENTS New Media
- CURRENTS New Media — organisation homepage
- Open call for CURRENTS 2027 Art & Tech Festival — New Media Caucus
- Currents 2024: Three Minute Highlights Video — currentsnewmedia