The Expanded Conference — now in its fourteenth edition, run in cooperation with ACM by the Hagenberg Campus of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria together with Ars Electronica — takes place September 9–11, 2026 at the skyloft at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, embedded directly inside the Ars Electronica Festival (September 9–13, theme: “Future Begins,” subtitled “Negotiating Humanity”). It’s an unusual arrangement worth understanding: a rigorously peer-reviewed academic conference running inside the world’s best-known media-art festival, rather than adjacent to it.
Four submission categories, one peer-review process
The conference accepts submissions across four categories — Research Paper, Art Paper, Doctoral Consortium, and Play Gallery — all subject to peer review. The Art Paper category is the structurally interesting one: it treats artistic practice as a legitimate site of research contribution subject to the same review rigor as a technical paper, a stance shared with SIGGRAPH’s own Art Papers track but still relatively uncommon across computer science venues.
The topic list is a map of the field
The call for papers spans a genuinely broad slice of what this site covers week to week: 3D scanning, AI-generated media, human-AI collaboration, art-science and interdisciplinary collaboration, artistic computer animation, artistic human-computer interaction, audiovisual experiments, data journalism and animated documentary, digital media art, digital theater, expanded animation, game art, generative and algorithmic art, music visualization, and physical computing and robotics. Taken as a list, it’s a useful reference document in its own right for where academic media-art research currently draws its boundaries.
Open access is the part practitioners should care about
Accepted papers appear in the Proceedings of the Expanded Conference in the ACM Digital Library — and, critically, all accepted Expanded 2026 papers are published Open Access and linked from the Ars Electronica Archives. For a field where a large share of the working practitioners are independent artists rather than affiliated academics with institutional library access, a paywall is a genuine barrier to research actually reaching the people who’d apply it. Publishing the full proceedings open access, alongside a festival that tens of thousands of practitioners already attend, is a deliberately practitioner-facing choice — and one more academic venues in this space could stand to copy.