Onassis ONX Showcase at the Ars Electronica Festival 2026

"Deep Space 8K" is one of the world’s most distinctive immersive digital spaces: a 16×9-meter wall projection paired with an equally large floor projection, delivering 50 million pixels of resolution through a high-performance laser tracking system. The Onassis ONX Showcase makes full use of the room, presenting each work at architectural scale.

"Explorers" features over 150 people sharing a cathartic moment of social influence. Social scientists define social influence as the idea that our thoughts, feelings, and actions are affected by the presence of others—whether that presence is real, imagined, or implied. We can be aware of social influence when it occurs, but it also often occurs without our conscious knowledge or awareness.

The work is a silent composition of a very human scene: a crowd of people pausing to witness something captivating yet unnamed. While some "Explorers" stand in contemplative thought, others snap photos of the awe-inspiring subject, which is intentionally left off screen. Are they sharing in something sublime, confounding, or disturbing? Is the role of these "Explorers" to guide us, to influence us, or to reflect on the barometers of social connection—the human interactions so often mediated by our mobile devices and tech distractions?

Undoubtedly, the reaction to seeing "Explorers" is for visitors to take out their own devices and snap photos of the installation, mimicking the performance taking place in the work. The piece creates a connection between viewer and artwork, but also questions the fragility of that connection when it is dictated by devices. In a world where so many of our connections are digital or mediated by a machine, how do we connect on a deep level as human beings?

Originally commissioned by the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California.

"Wahoo Blast" is an in-progress experimental moving-image work in which layered textile animations generate shifting, emergent forms born from an underwater explosion. Engulfing the screen through continuous metamorphosis, the work reflects on coastal resilience, militarized seas, and oceanic pollution through a digital landscape of warning, survival, and resistance. Sound by Adam Maor.

"INTERSTITIAL MAINTENANCE" presents Burr’s ongoing procedural artwork The Maintenance Game: a portrait of a building that accumulates residue from every cycle of its looping digital simulation. Maintenance workers move through stained corridors, past equipment left running, into rooms prepared for no one. The camera lingers on the small details of the world and occasionally catches a glimpse of those who tend it, sustaining a system always in decay. The showcase presents work-in-progress footage from the 2026 production. Sound by Chris Parrello, technical direction by Oren Shoham.

In "Forager: Spore to Forest Floor", witness the lifecycle of a woodland mushroom in its entirety: the eternal loop from spore to fruiting body to inevitable decay, feeding future life. The project features some of the first examples of time-lapse photogrammetry of mushroom growth, brought to life using Unreal Engine and Houdini. Technical artists: Will Young and Georgios Cherouvim.

This project was made possible through generous support from AGOG, Onassis ONX, On The Edge Conservation, Goethe Institut, NVIDIA, Capturing Reality, NYU, and the Fungi Foundation.

Our online environment is increasingly shaped by automation. Politically charged bots are deployed at national scale, influencers and brands inflate metrics to game the algorithm, and AI-generated content spreads instantly and indistinguishably, challenging not only our perception of reality but also distorting our social discourse.

"[OP]erator" is an interactive sculpture that stages a functioning bot farm, exposing the hidden infrastructure that manipulates this system from the shadows. While one might imagine these bots as purely digital, they often still rely on physical hardware controlled by a human conductor: sophisticated bot farm services operate hundreds or thousands of physical phones in synchronized automation designed to circumvent social platforms’ increasingly strict verification systems.

In the installation, 100 phones are choreographed through a single master phone, mischievously unlocked for any visitor to orchestrate. The visitor is prompted to share a thought or opinion, which is automatically amplified and posted by the 100 phones’ X accounts. Each post is passed through an LLM to generate slight variations according to each device’s persona, forming a synthetically authentic crowd.

“OP” refers to both “original poster” and “overpowered.” For a brief moment, visitors embody both, becoming digitally omnipotent and creating ripples of disruption in our algorithmic reality. This moment of access highlights the fragility of authorship and agency within networked platforms and—by returning a degree of control to the user—prompts reflection on how visibility, influence, and belief are constructed and manipulated online.

Playfool is a design and art unit established by Daniel Coppen (UK) and Saki Maruyama (JP), both graduates of the Royal College of Art. [OP]erator was realized within the framework of ONX Seeds with the support of Onassis ONX.