The ICIDS 2025 Art Exhibition invited artists to submit interactive digital artworks that explored the theme of Kaleidoscopic Machines in an era of accelerated entanglements. The exhibition will take place in Malta from 1–5 December 2025, as part of the 18th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS).

In parallel with the call for papers, this year’s curatorial theme drew inspiration from media theorist Janet H. Murray’s notion of kaleidoscopic machines—systems of storytelling that harness the affordances of digital media to generate multilinear, multiform, and reconfigurable narrative experiences. In these systems, stories unfold not as fixed arcs but as shifting constellations of meaning, co-shaped by both machines and interactors. This year we invited artists to imagine digital artworks as kaleidoscopic machines: ever-shifting systems of reflection, refraction, diffraction, transformation, and multiplicity. We were interested in how these machines (IDNs) are being created and reconfigured in recent years marked by technological acceleration and, at the same time, how these processes reflect and reconfigure the entanglements between humans, more-than-humans, and non-humans (AI, planetary material structures, platforms, etc.).

Practices of IDNs development, as kaleidoscopic machines, shaped by technological acceleration, can now be reimagined and rethought as material ecosystems and entangled processes of creation. In these assemblages, machines are no longer merely tools, but generative, sympoietic, refractive, speculative, and participatory systems in which narrative elements fracture, loop, combine, mutate, hallucinate, or multiply in response to agential interaction and algorithmic processes.

We particularly welcomed works that engage with Generative AI (and beyond), understood as a critical site of inquiry, poetic invention, and cultural speculation. How much AI do we want involved in the shaping of our interactive digital narratives (IDNs)? What happens when authorship, imagination, agency, and interpretation are distributed across multiple agencies and entities? We invite submissions that explore these questions through forms such as algorithmic storytelling, speculative interfaces, autonomous agents, and AI-based collaboration. We were especially interested in works that challenge conventional modes of narrative and interactivity—works that are nonlinear, emergent, iterative, and refracted. Nonetheless, we also welcome other creative approaches to IDNs.

We invited artists to think about IDNs as interfaces for experiencing stories and meaning through multiple lenses—reflecting the complexity of the accelerated world we live in—and as opportunities to empathise with multiple forms of “otherness”.

• What does it mean to collaborate with a machine—creatively, critically, or speculatively?
• How can AI, generative algorithms, or interactive systems create, disturb, expand, or reconfigure narrative meaning?
• What aesthetic and ethical questions arise when machines participate in cultural production?
• How can digital storytelling artworks reflect on the multiplicity of perspectives, identities, realities, or timelines?
• What stories do machines tell about us, and what stories do we tell through them?
• How can IDNs be rethought in relation to planetary material structures?
• What are the politics of machinic storytelling?