“What 2026's haptic work adds to this inheritance is a kind of open refusal: rather than submit quietly to being made legible, the pieces reflected in this Daemon make the act of measurement itself the visible, leveraged content of the work. Two works from this year's shortlist render this refusal through very different registers. Laura Splan's "Baroque Bodies (Sway)" addresses epigenetic entanglement across micro and macro scales, combining a 3D gaming environment, data-driven sound, and AI images controlled by intuitive movement and emergent social interaction. As visitors encounter landscapes reflected on 3D protein surfaces, their own physical movement through the installation manipulates the camera's perspective on the molecular models themselves. Each entry triggers a new sonic layer building into an accumulating soundscape that persists even after the visitor departs, as participants hold agency over the camera, opening interpretations as to what register their control occupies: playful, collaborative, or competitive. Created in partnership with scientists and technologists, the interaction constraints and rules draw heavily on game theory and epigenetics research related to pesticide exposure, trauma, somatic memory, and gene expression. In this instance, the body's undertow is structural rather than symbolic and frames the piece's central question: what is at stake when “nature” and “nurture” are destabilised through literal (not metaphorical) mechanisms?”
— Dr. Rachel Falconer
THE LIMINAL REVIEW 2026
Daemon: New Processes in Arts Technology
Drawing on 2,225 submissions from artists across 82 countries, this year’s Review identifies a shift in how artists are working with technology. Technology is no longer simply a tool to use or question. Increasingly, artists are working within systems that can operate without being directly instructed or observed. Written by Dr. Rachel Falconer, Head of Creative Technology at Goldsmiths, University of London, Daemons: New Processes in Arts Technologies asks what this shift means for agency, authorship, and the role of the artist. To explore this changing relationship, Falconer introduces four Daemons, borrowing the term from computing, where a Daemon is a process that runs continuously in the background. Thalassic Drift, Haptic Undertow, Palimpsest Sediment, and Jurisdictional Static trace patterns emerging across the 2026 submissions and give language to a field undergoing significant change. Alongside the submissions themselves, perspectives from members of our International Selectors Committee bring different readings of the ideas emerging across contemporary art and technology. Together, they offer a critical reading of a field in motion and of what artists can reveal about technological change while it is still unfolding.
Rachel Falconer
Rachel Falconer is a curator, academic, and founder of the collective Mutable Prototype Syndicate. She is Senior Lecturer and Head of Creative Technology at Goldsmiths University London. Operating at the critical intersection of contemporary art practice, emergent technologies, feminist technoscience, and networked culture, her experience in the film, advertising, and gaming industries informs her systems-based practice. Falconer has delivered interdisciplinary curatorial platforms, alternative exhibition models, residencies, and public research platforms in an international context spanning a diversity of critical modes of engagement with technology. She participates in talks and Jury panels at institutions including; The New Museum, Transmediale, Tate , Barbican, ICA, V&A, Somerset House Studios, The Photographers Gallery, Sonar +D, Lumen Prize, Whitechapel Gallery, Coleccion SOLO, Arebyte Gallery and Gazelli Art House. Her writing has been published across platforms including; Routledge, Sternberg Press, The Guardian, Frieze, BOMB magazine, Dazed, British Journal of Photography and The White Review.
Lumen Prize Jury Members
Myriam Achard, Annie Bicknell, Dr. Rachel Falconer, Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, Melanie Lenz, Christiane Paul, and Ulrich Schrauth.
