Eyebeam, the New York nonprofit that’s spent more than 25 years supporting artists making radical, independent work with technology, structured its current residency season around a theme that reads less like an art-world buzzword and more like a diagnosis: Speculating on Plurality, a direct response to digital connection, surveillance, and technology’s quiet flattening of shared reality into something more uniform and less genuinely shared.
Watch: Eyebeam Art + Technology Center Showcase, New York City (YouTube)
What the residency actually offers
The program is a 12-week, project-based residency for emerging artists — defined as practicing professionally for no more than a decade — who aren’t currently enrolled in a full-time degree program or working full-time faculty at a higher-education institution. This cycle ran spring 2026, based on-site at NYU Tandon’s Brooklyn Navy Yard facility, a 14,000-square-foot production and research space offering residents 9am–9pm weekday access to a shared workspace and dedicated desk, plus the option to work alongside an NYU graduate assistant for technical production support. Each resident receives a $4,000 stipend along with additional funds for activations, and eligibility is restricted to artists based in New York City’s five boroughs.
Why the theme is worth sitting with
Rather than asking artists to illustrate a topic, Speculating on Plurality frames the brief around a lived tension: how new technologies get integrated into daily life almost compulsorily, and what gets lost — genuine difference, a truly shared reality, resistance to surveillance — in that process. Residents aren’t required to produce a finished work by the end of the 12 weeks; the program is explicitly structured around sharing and developing work in process through discussions and open studio events with the wider Eyebeam community, treating the residency as a space for genuinely unresolved work rather than a deadline-driven production pipeline.
What to actually do with this if you’re not eligible right now
This cycle’s residency period has already run its course, and Eyebeam’s next open call is expected to be announced in winter, ahead of a following spring cohort — so there’s nothing to apply to immediately. But for anyone doing technology-and-society-focused creative work in New York, it’s worth bookmarking now rather than discovering the call after it’s already closed: a 25-year track record and a facility-backed, stipended residency built specifically around social and political questions, not just technical novelty, is a genuinely uncommon combination in the current residency landscape.