The Media Arts and Technology Program at UCSB presents Re:agency, our 2026 End of Year Show, in two events:
California NanoSystems Institute
2nd floor Elings Hall, University of California, Santa Barbara, 93106
Paid parking is available in Parking Lot 10
Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science and Technology
513 Garden St, Santa Barbara, CA 93101
Paid parking is available in city lots 10 and 11
Exhibition Poster
These events are free and open to the public.
The event at Elings Hall will highlight MAT’s research work, spread across the Expressive Computation, AlloSphere, transLAB, and Experimental Visualization research groups.
The event at SBCAST features installations, performances and urbanXR, and is taking place along with Santa Barbara's First Thursday Art Walk. Live music will feature the MAT Create Ensemble, and large-scale projection-mapping will be presented after dark. Media arts installations will be featured throughout.
Re:agency
What does human agency mean in the presence of systems that appear increasingly "agentic" - systems designed to absorb, predict, and appropriate human action? Where does agency reside when power is concentrated in the hands of a few, who unilaterally define what is possible and what will not be tolerated? And what might agency become if we choose, collectively, to reclaim and reassert our capacity to act, shape, and intervene?
Re:agency marks a moment of reckoning. It is not only an invitation to reclaim our sense of authorship, but a demand to exercise it with renewed urgency and intention. Within MAT, we position ourselves not as subjects of technology, but as active collaborators in its evolution - re:imagining, re:purposing, and re:configuring the very systems that threaten our autonomy, and transforming them into tools for creativity.
To learn more about the show and its featured work, visit show.mat.ucsb.edu.