Video Art Works for the City Digital Skin Art (CDSA) Festival 2026
CDSA Festival in October – November 2026 in Europe, Singapore, China, and USA
Seminar@ Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) – April to July 2026
Connecting Classes – April to July 2026
Public Art Lab co-curates the 5th edition of the City Digital Skin Art Festival (CDSA), initiated by the Public Art Department of the China Academy of Art, with the 2026 programme Liquid Commons. This year’s curatorial framework investigates the ocean as a shared planetary body: a living infrastructure that connects ecologies, climates, species, technologies, and urban life across geographical and political borders. Through large-scale urban screens and media facades, the festival explores how oceans and deep-sea environments can become tangible and experiential within public space. How can urban media infrastructures make distant ecological systems perceptible within everyday city life? How can artistic practices translate oceanic data, underwater environments, fluid ecologies, and beyond-human perspectives into meaningful public experiences? And how can media art create new forms of awareness, care, and collective imagination around the future of our planetary commons?
The programme invites artists, designers, researchers, and students to develop visual narratives that engage with oceans, deep-sea ecologies, environmental sensing, marine biodiversity, extraction, rising sea levels, and the invisible infrastructures connecting human and beyond-human worlds. At the intersection of art, science, technology, and public space, Liquid Commons positions urban screens as sites for ecological storytelling, speculation, and collective reflection.
Seminar at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), Liquid Commons: Bringing Ocean Science into Global Media Architecture – April to July 2026
In collaboration with the Design Research Lab at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), Public Art Lab is organising an interdisciplinary seminar accompanying the CDSA Festival 2026. Together with researchers, curators, artists, and guest speakers, students will investigate how oceans and deep-sea ecologies can be translated into impactful visual narratives for large-scale digital infrastructures and urban screens worldwide.
Throughout the seminar, students will develop a one-minute video work responding to the theme Liquid Commons, exploring new forms of screen-based storytelling through moving image, data visualisation, AI-supported creative tools, animation, sensing technologies, speculative design, and artistic research methodologies. The course examines how urban screens can move beyond informational displays to become dynamic public interfaces for ecological imagination and beyond-human narratives.
The seminar is accompanied by a series of input talks and workshops with internationally recognised researchers, institutions, and practitioners working on oceanic and deep-sea environments. Through contributions from leading organisations such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and invited experts from the fields of marine research, environmental humanities, media art, and design research, students gain access to contemporary scientific and cultural perspectives on ocean ecologies and planetary futures.
The seminar is organised by Michaela Vieser (nature writer), Susa Pop (initiator of Public Art Lab and co-curator of CDSA), and Ayça Tugran (researcher and media architect), in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Gesche Joost and the Design Research Lab at UdK Berlin.
Connecting Classes – international online seminars
During the Summer Semester 2026, Public Art Lab and its partners will organise a series of international Connecting Classes with artists, curators, ocean researchers, scientists, media architects, and scholars working across public art, urban media, environmental humanities, design research, and marine ecologies.
The online lectures and discussions will accompany the seminar and create an international exchange platform around the theme Liquid Commons. The programme investigates how large-scale digital infrastructures and urban screens can communicate complex ecological systems and create new forms of public engagement with oceanic environments and planetary interdependence.
Connecting Classes will bring together perspectives from media art, scientific visualisation, environmental storytelling, sensing technologies, AI-generated imagery, and speculative design practices to explore how oceans can be made visible, experiential, and emotionally tangible within urban space. The sessions examine how public screens can function as living interfaces that connect cities with distant ecosystems, deep-sea environments, fluid territorialities, and beyond-human worlds.
City Digital Skin Art (CDSA) Festival 2026
The City Digital Skin Art (CDSA) Festival is initiated by Prof. Jeng Zing and Yuelai Ruan from the Public Art Department of the China Academy of Art to investigate the cultural and spatial potential of urban screens and media facades as infrastructures for public art, hybrid placemaking, and digital culture.
In its 5th edition, CDSA 2026 is co-curated by Susa Pop, director of Public Art Lab and the Connecting Cities Network, and Prof. Ina Conradi-Chavez, Nanyang Technological University Singapore, School of Art, Design and Media / Design Department. Under the programme Liquid Commons, the festival explores oceans and deep-sea ecologies as shared planetary environments through artistic interventions on urban screens presented across Europe, Asia, and the United States.
