What AURORA Biennial 2026 Reveals About Art, AI And Human Experience

At AURORA Biennial 2026, November 4–21 in Dallas and Fort Worth, artists are using accessible data and AI to accelerate creative exploration.

Julia Kaganskiy, AURORA Biennial 2026 co-curator, says the intersection of art and technology has been expanding for decades.

“Early pioneers such as Vera Molnár and Harold Cohen had to write their own software, build drawing machines or collaborate with engineers to create computer-generated art,” said Kaganskiy. “Today, as computational tools become more accessible and barriers to entry fall, that expansion is accelerating.”

Art challenges how we see and use technology

From poetry and prose to climate awareness and our experience as a passenger in autonomous vehicles, the biennial includes artists creating digital and interactive art with technology.

Sasha Stiles’ A Living Poem is a generative language system trained on her poetry, while LaJuné McMillian’s The Portal’s Keeper is an interactive AI work built from personal writing, voice and motion data; and Theo Triantafyllidis is using live climate and ocean data to power Drift Lattice, a real-time ocean ecosystem simulation.

Our relationship with autonomous vehicles

Lauren Lee McCarthy’s AUTO uses a simulated driverless bus journey to examine automation and public transportation. The installation raises questions about how autonomous transportation changes the passenger experience and the role people play in increasingly automated systems.

Anne Berens, CEO and CTO of SunLED, whose company integrates human-centric near-infrared light into interior components, offers another perspective on that question. Reflecting on the design of autonomous vehicles, Berens says engineers have developed a beautifully engineered solution to make Waymo’s vehicles drive autonomously, but wonders if they thought about how the rider would use their time in the car.

Berens approaches the issue by asking designers to reconsider the vehicle interior from the passenger’s perspective.