
ARTWORKS
Important Dates
Abstract Submission Deadline: January 30, 2025, 11:59 p.m.
Final Submission Deadline: February 6, 2025, 11:59 p.m.
Notifications: March 20, 2025, 11:59 p.m.
Camera-Ready Deadline: April 17, 2025, 11:59 p.m.
Deadlines are specified as Anywhere on Earth time.
Venue
2025 – Online via Gather.town
2026 – To be confirmed (University of the Arts London, UK)
Example Galleries:
Explore the 2021 & 2023 Gather.town Interactive Art Galleries.
2025-2026 Chairs
Rocio von Jungenfeld (University of Kent)
Joana Chicau (University of the Arts London)
Contact Email: art2025@cc.acm.org
Curatorial Advisory Committee
- Dr Daphne Dragona (independent curator & writer)
- Prof Ina Conradi (Nanyang Technological University Singapore)
- Dr Gabriel Menotti (Queen’s University CA)
- Dr Nancy Mauro-Flude (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)
- Prof Nishant Shah (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
- Dr Rory Bester (University of Western Cape)
- Dr Clarissa Ribeiro (University of São Paulo and the Roy Ascott Studio—DeTao at SIVA)
Theme
The theme Creativity for Change invites the artists to explore how creativity and its processes can:
- inspire and enable societal transformation,
- drive positive change,
- address decolonization,
- tackle climate action,
- enquire into environmental and posthumanist relationships,
- support place-making in urban and cultural contexts.
We invite submissions in various formats that highlight how interactive systems, design, and creative processes and outputs can foster positive change and respond to global challenges.
Note:
- The 2025 conference will be hosted online in Gather.town.
- Accepted submissions will have to be resubmitted for the 2026 edition which will be hosted in a physical gallery space in London (UK).
- Both exhibitions will aim to showcase how creativity can be a lens for addressing societal and environmental issues.
Call Description
The 2025-2026 C&C Arts Exhibitions will be curated under the conference theme Creativity for Change. The exhibition will explore how artists, architects, designers, makers use creativity and its processes to inspire and enable societal transformation, drive positive change and respond to pressing global challenges (i.e. decolonization,climate action, environmental and posthumanist relationships, place-making in urban and cultural contexts).
Whether creativity is used to raise awareness, reimagine potential futures, enquire into issues or as a tool for experimentation or for initiating change, the online exhibition in 2025 may include generative artworks, photography, animation, film and moving image, sound pieces, 3D objects and virtual spaces, virtual performances, interactive screen-based experiences, among other digital formats, that explore the questions of how creativity and creative processes can:
- foster positive change and respond to local and global challenges?
- open up new possibilities and help co-create future realities?
- be the lens through which to enquire into societal and/or environmental matters?
The physical exhibition in 2026, can exhibit these ideas in the form of physical-digital objects such as interactive installations, virtual/augmented/mixed realities, experimental cinematic shorts, performances and/or works that are suited to special technological platforms that will be presented at the exhibition venue. The techniques and materials used to create the work (or intended work) should be clearly articulated in the submission: why are these processes and material qualities relevant? In your application, you should indicate the spatial, technical and environmental needs of your work, i.e. does it require power or wired / wifi internet, does it need to be in the dark, or spot-lit, does it require listening to or does it make sound, can it be outdoors, does it have a time duration, it runs once, it loops, etc.
The Arts Exhibitions will also engage their visitors in various ways. The digital exhibition will largely be seen by conference attendees as it will be online in the Gather.town platform. Where this platform can invite externals, it is likely better utilised as a prototype platform for the physical exhibition the year after. In Gather.town, the exhibiting artists have a chance to receive feedback from a knowledgeable group of peers on this digital rendition of their works. Feedback can be gathered and fed into the physical exhibition the following year. Audiences for the physical gallery space will likely be conference attendees, university staff and students, and invited guests. As is fitting with the theme of creativity for change, the works should respond to and change if necessary to fit with their respective environments, be it digital or physical.
Format
We accept submissions of:
- existing works;
- work-in-progress.
Papers should be prepared using the ACM submission template (Latex and Word templates are available) in single-column format.
For either form of submission, we require a PDF in the ACM SIGCHI submission template format (SIGCHI ACM new, standardised single-column format) that will be a part of the curated proceedings for this exhibition.
Submit a document (2000 words max, excluding titles, references and figure/table captions) that includes:
- Links to a visual portfolio of the artwork / work-in-progress
- Images, audio, and/or video for time-based work
- Narrative description of the piece (conceptual goals and its functional operations)
- Technical and logistical requirements of the piece should be clearly detailed: this includes how to embed file formats on Gather.town platform or scheduling of real-time artworks;
- Include an indication of any safety implications, such as soldering, that may require compliance with health and safety regulations.
Submissions are single-blind peer reviewed and authors are not required to ensure their submissions are anonymous.
Seeking Help
Incorrectly formatted submissions might be rejected. Online guidance is available from the ACM here:
Link: https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions
Examples of accepted submissions to the Arts Track from previous C&C online editions visit the 2021 and 2023 proceedings:
Where to Submit
Please submit via the Precision Conference (PCS) website here:
Link: https://new.precisionconference.com/submissions
- Log in to the PCS website.
- Under “Submissions,” select the following options:
- Society: SIGCHI
- Conference/Journal: Creativity & Cognition 2025
- Track: Creativity & Cognition 2025 Artworks
- Click the Go button to proceed.
Review and Selection
Submissions to the Arts Track are single-blind peer reviewed and juried by the C&C ’25 Curatorial Advisory Committee.
Accepted C&C Artworks will be distributed by the conference and in the ACM Digital Library where they will remain accessible to researchers and practitioners worldwide.
Authors will be expected to register and attend the conference online and will be assigned a time and virtual location to present their artworks to conference attendees.
Publications Policy
If your submission is accepted you and your co-authors will be subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects.
Please ensure that all authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we are committed to:
- collect ORCID IDs from all our published authors,
- improve author discoverability,
- ensure proper attribution, and
- contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization.
Your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.
For more details on ACM’s publication policies, please refer to the official ACM website.
Questions
If you have any questions, please contact us at art2025@cc.acm.org