This year’s Expanded conference will take place at the skyloft in Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria.
This year’s Expanded conference will take place at the skyloft in Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria.
The fourteenth edition of the Expanded Conference in cooperation with ACM, organized by the Hagenberg Campus of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and Ars Electronica, will take place from September 9th to 11th as part of the Ars Electronica Festival 2026.
Location: skyloft at Ars Electronica Center, Ars-Electronica-Straße 1, 4040 Linz, Austria

The Expanded Conference (Expanded 2026) will take place from September 9th to 11th as part of the Ars Electronica Festival 2026. This call for papers focuses on academic papers in the field of Expanded Animation and Interactive Art that explore and experiment with media expression at the intersection of art, technology, and society. We will have four categories (Research Paper, Art Paper, Doctoral Consortium, Play Gallery), where submissions will undergo a rigorous peer-review process.
All selected speakers will be given a free pass to the Ars Electronica Festival (September 9th to 13th).
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Research Papers focus on academic works that present study results, literature reviews, theoretical considerations, etc., based on state-of-the-art research methods.
Presentation Format
Submission Guidelines
Art Papers focus on the artwork, a case study, and work in progress, including theory and context.
Presentation Format
Submission Guidelines
The Doctoral Consortium offers a unique opportunity for doctoral students to explore and develop their research interests in animation, play, and interactive art. In this interdisciplinary workshop, students will receive feedback under the guidance of distinguished researchers.
We invite PhD students who feel they will benefit from expert feedback on their dissertation work to apply. Ideally, candidates should have a clear topic and research approach and have made some progress, but are not yet ready to defend their thesis.
Presentation Format
Submission Guidelines
Expanded Play is a gallery track for the Expanded Conference that features interactive and playful artistic works within the context of Expanded Media, including fields such as games, mixed-reality, spatial interaction, and human-computer interaction. In particular, experimental works that span multiple domains and offer innovative approaches to play are highly encouraged. Selected works will be exhibited over the course of a week and typically require supervision.
Presentation Format
Submission Guidelines
Any supplementary material (press kit, portfolio, etc.) which shows your previous work is also welcome but not required! Anonymising the material is not necessary here.
Gallery: Atelierhaus Salzamt
Generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT, may not be listed as authors of an ACM published Work. The use of generative AI tools and technologies to create content is permitted but must be fully disclosed in the Work. For example, the authors could include the following statement in the Acknowledgements section of the Work: ChatGPT was utilized to generate sections of this Work, including text, tables, graphs, code, data, citations, etc. If you are uncertain about the need to disclose the use of a particular tool, err on the side of caution, and include a disclosure in the acknowledgements section of the Work.
Basic word processing systems that recommend and insert replacement text, perform spelling or grammar checks and corrections, or systems that do language translations are to be considered exceptions to this disclosure requirement and are generally permitted and need not be disclosed in the Work. As the line between Generative AI tools and basic word processing systems like MS Word or Grammarly blurs, this Policy will be updated.
See also ACM Policy on Authorship.
Submission is via Easy Chair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=expanded2026, where you will be prompted to set up a free Easy Chair account if you don’t have one already.
Please read the ACM Submission Guidelines carefully, and prepare your submission following the Microsoft Word Template or LateX Template.
At least one author of each accepted paper must be registered for the conference and must present their contribution at the Expanded Conference in person in Linz.
Accepted papers will appear in the Proceedings of the Expanded Conference in the ACM Digital Library. Following the new ACM publishing model for conference proceedings, all accepted Expanded 2026 papers will be published Open Access and linked from the Ars Electronica Archives.
Submitters should use institutional email addresses where possible. Many authors will qualify for free OA publishing, while others will be required to pay an applicable article processing charge (APC). If you are the corresponding author of an Expanded’2026 submission, please follow the steps on the ICPS website (https://www.acm.org/publications/icps/author-guidance) prior to your submission to determine whether you will be required to pay an APC. This is a condition to the acceptance of your paper, and no exception will be made.
Please note: For proceedings that are to be published simultaneously with the conference, the payment deadline for applicable APCs is 45 days prior to the start of the conference. The coauthors on a paper are jointly responsible for ensuring timely payment of the applicable article processing charge (APC) for that paper. If the APC remains unpaid 90 days after the initial due date, all authors on the paper will be prohibited from contributing to any ACM venue (including ACM journals, conferences, magazines, and books) until the payment is completed.
The conference will be held at the Ars Electronica Center from 9th to the 11th of September 2026 as part of the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria.
The media festival will take place from the 9th to the 13th of September 2026: https://ars.electronica.art/festival/en/.
Please follow the link for the Expanded 2026 organizing committee.
Expanded ’25: Proceedings of the Conference on Animation and Interactive Art
Hagler, J., Köhl, M., Pasquier, P., Wintersberger, P., Hosea, B., Kim, J. & Kocur, M. 2025. Proceedings of the Conference on Animation and Interactive Art. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3749893
Expanded ’24: Proceedings of the Conference on Animation and Interactive Art
Hagler, J., Szabo, V., Wintersberger, P., Guljajeva, V., Mitchell, B. & Kocur, M. 2024. Proceedings of the Expanded 2024 – Conference on Animation and Interactive Art. Expanded Animation Conference on Animation and Interactive Art (Expanded ’24), Linz, Austria. Ars Electronica Linz. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13382838
The speakers for Expanded Conference 2026 will be listed here once they are confirmed.
This year’s conference schedule will be listed here once the submissions and speakers have been confirmed.
All scheduled times are local Austrian time (Europe/Vienna). Use the dropdown below to switch to a different timezone.
Visit the Expanded YouTube channel to see current and past content.
Switch to the current or next scheduled live stream by clicking on the button below.

The symposium Expanded Animation began in 2013 and offered a first approach to the expanding field of computer animation. It has since become an established part of the Ars Electronica Animation Festival and the international competition Prix Ars Electronica Computer Animation. Every year under an overarching theme, the symposium has researched the field of technology, art, animation, and aesthetics, investigated the collapsing boundaries in digital animation, and explored positions and future trends. As with the first conferences on computer animation at Ars Electronica in the 1980s, practice and theory are equally important. The richly illustrated publication Expanded Animation: Mapping an Unlimited Landscape features contributions from speakers and artists from the past six years and presents an overview of the prize winners in prix category Computer Animation from 2011 to 2018.
250 pages, 250 Illustrations
The Expanded Play exhibition features an interactive collection of playful and experimental works that explore the boundaries of mixed reality, spatial interaction, and Artificial Intelligence within the realm of playful media.
Datails about Expanded Play 2026 will be published here soon.
Videos from Expanded Animation 2025.