Sound artists get fewer open calls than visual artists, and the ones they get tend to carry entry fees, age brackets, or a requirement that you already have a performance history. “The Sound Of Future” has none of those, and its deadline has just been extended from October 1 to November 1, 2026.
The specifics
- Deadline: November 1, 2026 (extended)
- Organisers: The New Museum of Networked Art, in collaboration with TAM – Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles
- Entry fee: none
- Age limit: none
- Geographic limit: none stated
- Submissions: up to 3 works per artist, each on a separate entry form
- Format: MP3 only, 1–15 minutes (exceptions on request), works made 2020–2026
- Delivery: WeTransfer or Swiss Transfer, emailed to artvideokoeln@gmail.com with the subject line “The Sound of Future”
- Presentation: selected works appear as an interactive installation online at The New Museum of Networked Art, simultaneously with a transcontinental exhibition running March 27 – July 31, 2027 across Los Angeles and Cologne
The brief
Artists are asked to transform ideas about spiritual and physical energy and power into sound compositions that function as a concept for a sustainable future — explicitly addressing war, inequality and climate change.
That is a wide and fairly heavy brief. Read generously, it’s an invitation rather than a constraint: almost any serious sound work about force, extraction, or endurance fits inside it. The 2020–2026 window also means you probably already have something eligible, which is unusual — most calls want new work.
Why it’s worth ten minutes of your time
The economics here are straightforwardly good. No fee means the only thing you’re gambling is the effort of filling in a form and starting a WeTransfer, and you can submit three pieces. Against that, the upside is an online installation with a real institution’s name on it plus inclusion in a four-month exhibition on two continents.
The MP3-only requirement is worth flagging for anyone who works in high resolution or multichannel — this is a call for stereo compositions that will be heard online, not for spatial installation work. If your practice is 16-channel diffusion, this isn’t the one.
Reading the organisers
The New Museum of Networked Art (not to be confused with the New Museum in New York) is the long-running Cologne-based project run out of the artvideoKOELN orbit, which has been staging online and hybrid exhibitions of net-based and media art for years. Its calls are consistently free and consistently aimed at breadth rather than prestige.
Pairing with the Torrance Art Museum, a public museum in Los Angeles County with a solid contemporary programme, gives this edition a physical anchor the organisation’s purely online calls have lacked.
Other calls currently open
For anyone doing a sweep: Arch Enemy Arts closes November 13 (representational and surrealist work, international, remote), and Glen Arbor Arts Center’s two-week residency closes November 5. Neither is technology-focused, but both are still open.