Book publication: Your project will be featured in a book in the Binnovative Innovation Book Series.

About The Challenge

InnovArt is an international student led hackathon for anyone who creates, views, analyzes, or performs the arts. It is open to a broad range of artistic disciplines including music, fine arts (visual and plastic arts), performing arts, design (fashion, textile, interior, exterior, industrial), and architecture.

InnovArt is intended to bring together artists, performers, designers, fans, curators, software hackers, data enthusiasts, and hardware engineers, and encourage interaction and collaboration across boundaries. It helps inspire your artistic intelligence with technology and exhibit innovative artifacts.

InnovArt welcomes anyone of all ages and all artistic/technical skills, from limited experience to advanced.

Entry is free.

Expected project topics include, but are not limited to:

Developing and improving creative skills
Teaching creative skills and training/guiding creative processes
Analyzing, interpreting, processing, enhancing and generating artistic expressions
Analyzing, exploring and discovering artistic techniques
Boosting artistic collaboration and art mashups
Personalizing artistic expressions and experience
Exhibiting, sharing, disseminating, discovering and curating artwork
Explaining and narrating artistic expressions
Developing and customizing the equipment, instruments and tools for art
Engineering venues and environment for the exhibition and performance of art
Advancing interactivity and immersion in art
Promoting and facilitating adaptive art
Reinforcing and transforming communication through art
Enhancing learning/education with art
Improving feedback for artists
Exploring and expanding artistic theories, languages and vocabulary
Preserving, revitalizing and restoring artwork and art techniques
Promoting and expanding art awareness
Engaging communities in creative process
Addressing authenticity, ownership and copyright of art assets
Exploring and enhancing relaxation, mindfulness and therapeutic aspects of art

Solutions can take many different forms such as apps, games, websites/services, media, devices, robots, UI/UX, immersive technology (AR/VR), haptics, wearables, data collection, data analysis, data visualization, audio/images/video processing, sensory/spatial signal processing, 3-dimensional modeling/printing, machine learning/AI, NFT/crypto, math modeling, and algorithms.

Book chapter publication: We will publish a book that features the projects presented at InnovArt 2026. Selected participants will be invited to extend their project summaries and publish them as book chapters. We are planning to publish this book as a part of the Binnovative Innovation Book Series.

InnovArt is hosted by Binnovative, a nonprofit organization in Massachusetts.

Organizers:

Konomi Karube
Naomi McCreary
Hanna Suzuki (Co-chair)
Alyssa Yasuhara (Co-chair)
Rimi Yoshikawa (Co-chair)

Requirements

Project Work: InnovArt is a “flexible” online hackathon. You can work on your project anytime until 12pm on January 3 (Sat), EST.

Project Submission: You are required to complete ALL of the following 3 requirements:

Submit your project to Devpost by 12pm on January 3 (Sat), EST.
Register your project presentation on a Google Forms page by 12pm on January 3 (Sat), EST.
Give a project presentation online on January 4 (Sun), EST.

The deadlines are firm. No extensions will be given. Failure to meet the above requirements will disqualify you (and your team) in award judging.

A link for presentation registration will be shared in the InnovArt 2025 channel of Discord. To register your presentation, you will be asked to submit:

Your name and contact info
Your country of residence
Your project presentation title
An abstract (short one-paragraph summary) of your project
A publicly accessible link to your project placed on an online code repository (e.g. GitHub) or online storage (e.g. Google Drive). We will verify the actual outcome of your work with this link in the afternoon of January 3. Please note that we will not schedule your presentation if we cannot verify your actual work. You can submit a link to your project on Devpost; however, please make sure that the link references the actual outcome of your work.

Project Presentation: We tentatively plan to start project presentations at 10am on January 4 (Sun), EST, but we might slightly adjust it based on the locations (time zones) where participants reside. We will announce the full presentation schedule by early morning of January 4 (Sun), EST. A Zoom link will be made available in the InnovArt 2026 channel of Discord.

You will have 10 minutes in total for your presentation, including approx. 3 minutes for QAs with judges and other participants.

Hackathon Sponsors