Summer School 2026: Innovation, Tech, & Culture

Onassis ONX, the Onassis Foundation’s global platform for art and advanced technologies, and the ACE (Athens Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation) of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) co-organize the Summer School: Innovation, Tech, & Culture for the third consecutive year.

This program is designed to equip students, emerging professionals, and established experts with skills that integrate art thinking, contemporary business methodologies, and emerging technologies into their practices.

The Summer School: Innovation, Tech, & Culture is an intensive ten-day program that seeks to bridge the worlds of Culture and Digital Arts with Technology, Product Design, Artificial Intelligence, and Entrepreneurship. Its purpose is to harness artistic and creative thinking to highlight and address social, environmental, and business challenges.

The program aims to foster the generation of groundbreaking ideas—spanning artistic projects, products, applications, and services—while advancing radical business models driven by innovation, ethics, and sustainability. It aspires to merge aesthetic excellence with entrepreneurial ingenuity.

Organized in collaboration with the Tandon School of Engineering of New York University, this initiative is part of the Smart Attica EDIH program.

Upon completion, participants will have the opportunity to compete for funding and incubation support to bring their projects to life.

Worldbuilding, Going beyond Product, Narratives, Visual Storytelling and Creative Branding

Can a narrative shape the way we interact with our products? And, conversely, can our interplay with our products formulate a narrative of its own? How can art attain a sustainable status while becoming a launching pad for creative dialogue?

This year’s program explores the concept of worldbuilding and its following integration into creative practice and design through storytelling and digital technologies. By harnessing worldbuilding methodologies, it invites creators and trailblazing entrepreneurs to develop innovative ideas that not only succeed commercially but also spark meaningful conversations, demonstrating the uncontainable potential of imagination and innovation.

The keynote speaker will be Jiabao Li, an artist, designer, and technologist whose practice explores how technology, markets, and biopolitical mechanisms shape our perceptions of the body, care, the environment, and the future. Through works that combine XR, biotechnology, performance, installation, and speculative design, Li poses questions such as: What happens when artists use the language of startups to “sell” impossible futures? What does it mean when motherhood becomes infrastructure, breath becomes climate data, perception becomes a commodity, and care becomes a programmable service? What happens when corporations turn their absurdities into art before the market has the chance to do so?

In her works, Li does not approach technology as a neutral tool, but as a mechanism that mediates reality itself: from “TransVision,” where vision becomes a commodity and perception acquires “real estate value,” to “Carbon Farm,” where human breath, climate guilt, and greenwashing are transformed into material, bioplastic, and rituals of consumption.

The Summer School 2026: Innovation, Tech, & Culture (July 1-13, 2026) is designed for students, early-career professionals, and established experts. It includes lectures, hands-on workshops, and mentoring sessions with seasoned industry leaders—artists, entrepreneurs, and creative technologists—from Athens and New York. Through exposure to diverse professional perspectives, participants will develop business skills, gain insight into art thinking methodologies and artistic creativity, and draw inspiration from radical applications of emerging technologies in art and industry.

Participants will form interdisciplinary teams to co-design innovative, impactful proposals and develop prototypes, benefiting from access to technical equipment, cutting-edge AI tools, and expert mentorship.

Onassis ONX is the Onassis Foundation’s global platform for art and advanced technologies. As a catalyst for digital cultures, Onassis ONX empowers creators developing projects with transformative potential, supporting their practice at every stage—from concept and development to presentation and distribution—so they can better tell their stories. Onassis ONX cultivates and actively participates in a network of organizations and industries ready to respond to these new forms of creative expression.

With studios in Athens and New York City, Onassis ONX provides a robust framework of technical, curatorial, and professional services. This support structure includes capacity-building programs, incubation and applied research initiatives, acceleration services, seed funding, and exhibition opportunities. Such a holistic engagement throughout the creative process enables its community to build worlds at the frontiers of AI, immersive media, spatial computing, gaming, and other emerging time-based forms.

Active partnerships with cultural institutions on residencies, exhibitions, co-commissions, and thought-leadership programming, as well as participation in cooperative European networks in the technology sector, contribute to the sustainable evolution and diversification of the field as a whole. These networked efforts position the platform as a gateway for cross-sectoral collaboration and promote production as an innovative space within the arts and beyond.

The modular infrastructures developed by Onassis ONX enable experimentation and circulation. While rooted in Athens and New York, the platform aims to foster creative innovators who meaningfully engage with audiences around the world. Through Onassis ONX, creators are given a stage to imagine new futures by questioning the systems through which culture is produced and remembered.

The Athens Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ACE) is the Incubator and Technology Transfer Office of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). ACE supports entrepreneurial teams and research groups in developing and implementing innovative business ideas. Among others, it provides hosting, training, support, and networking services, facilitating various entrepreneurship support initiatives such as the student competition “ennovation” and the open innovation program “idea,” among others. ACE helps entrepreneurial teams transition from ideation to business implementation, enhancing their chances of success through continuous market engagement. Over the past decade, ACE has supported over 5,000 beneficiaries and numerous startup teams, contributing to the creation of more than 40 new companies. It has organized over 50 specialized entrepreneurship support programs and plays a pivotal role in the commercialization of research outcomes.