We are pleased to announce that the jury selected a total of 25 artworks for this year’s art exhibition.
This year’s international art exhibition jury included: Mateo Alayza, Kavi Duvvoori, Paula Fleisner, Iliana Hernández García, Matti Kangaskoski, Diogo Marques, Rafaela Nunes, Ramiro Sanchiz, Shamim Shoomali, Shanmugapriya T and Nico Valdivia. We are deeply grateful for the contribution of each of our jury members.
The works will be spread across two venues: The Malta Chamber of Commerce in Valletta,
as well as the main conference venue, Radisson Blu St. Julian’s (for VR works and installations).
Featured artworks are:
Ghost City Avenue S By Jody Zellen,
_Prog[W]res[tle]s_ by Mez Breeze,
Static Sky: And Yet It █████ (██落在夜空生成以前) by Rhett Tsai (蔡宇潇) and Justin Bortnick,
GAIA by Matthew Mosher,
Jollof Wars by Abdul-Razak Mohammed,
C’est la vie! by Jonathan Lessard,
The Grand Hotel Sand Fountain by Roderick Coover, Caitlin Fisher and Scott Rettberg,
Lucid Assemblage by Quinn McMahon and Jenna Ng,
Shrine to Falling Microbes by Caitlin & Misha,
One Lonely World by Vegard Fotland,
Realidad Helicoide by NGO Voces de la Memoria, Victor Navarro,
Sympoietic Kaleidoscope「Kairox」by Lynda E. Torres O.,
Narcissus Bug by Ruixuan (Rashel) Li and Yuehui Du,
La chispa de Emilia (Emilia’s Spark) by Paola Harris Bonet,
The Songbird Speaks by Alinta Krauth,
Invisible City by Sihui Lin,
Al Jazirah AL Hamra – DREAM by Zlatan Filipovic and Faruk Omanovic,
You Are a Chicken by June Fields and Moss Fields,
I Have No Time for the Woods by Mattia Bellini,
Beyond the limits by Alejandro Angel,
Detty December: A Journey Home by Ahmed Musah,
Poem-Personality-Quizzes: A Series by Theo Ellin Ballew,
In The Middle by Ash Eliza Smith, Sam Bendix and Daniel Lichtman,
Reality Crafting Machine by Assem Kroma and
dis/possessed: passing on by Lissa Holloway-Attaway, Jamie Fawcus and Emma Arltoft.
Mark your calendars for the online exhibition opening on Monday, December 1st at 19:00 UTC+1,
and for the on-site exhibition opening on Tuesday, December 2nd at 19:00 at the Malta Chamber of Commerce.
The exhibition will be open on Wednesday the 3rd and Thursday the 4th from 9:00-19:00.
Content warning: contains depictions of death, suicide and animal abuse that some may find disturbing.
Content warning: this experience contains sensitive and explicit content.
Content warning: contains flashing lights and loud sounds that may trigger anxiety, panic, or seizures in sensitive viewers. Experience with care.
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”.
The ICIDS Art Exhibition is supported by the Gaming Malta Foundation.
We invited submissions of interactive digital works including (but not limited to):
Note: Artworks had to be completed by the time of the exhibition and not merely at concept stage. Technology demonstrations or works-in-progress may be more appropriate for the Late-Breaking Works track of ICIDS. All submitted works were reviewed by a jury. Selected pieces will be exhibited in the physical exhibition space and included in the online exhibition catalog. Authors were encouraged to write an accompanying article or paper about their work, to be published by Carnegie Mellon ETC Press in an ISBN-numbered volume.
Submissions had to include:
Selected artists will be included in the official ICIDS 2025 Art catalog, published as part of the Interactive Storytelling series by Carnegie Mellon ETC Press (ISBN).
Submissions were to provide details of the required equipment, and specify what will be provided by the artists themselves. ICIDS is unable to provide financial assistance. The organization will attempt to offer some assistance with equipment and manpower for installation, but artists were encouraged to provide their own equipment and to be present during setup whenever possible. The curators were happy to provide a reference letter to assist artists in applying for external funding.
Please contact the art track chairs:
📧Jaime Rodriguez [j.rodriguezgomez@uniandes.edu.co]
📧Nelson Vera [nj.vera22@uniandes.edu.co]
📧Terhi Marttila [terhi.marttila@iki.fi]
For more information about ICIDS 2025 and the full conference program, visit:
https://icids2025.ardin.online/
This year, the exhibition will take place in Valletta, the capital of Malta, in conjunction with the ICIDS 2025 conference.
The exhibition will be housed in the Malta Chamber of Commerce in 64, Republic Street, Valletta (see Map, right).
The exhibition runs from 1-5 December, with the opening taking place on December 1st (GMT).
** There will also be an online opening of the exhibition around the time of the conference. **
** Please note, in order for ICIDS to support the most inclusive art exhibition from all over the globe, accepted artists will not have to pay registration fees for the conference. **
The exhibition jury will prioritize works based on the following criteria (in order of relevance):
Let the machines dream. Let the stories glitch. Let the patterns multiply. Let the kaleidoscope turn. (CHAT-GPT 2025 and us)
We look forward to your submissions.
– ICIDS 2025 Art Exhibition Curatorial Team