Proposals are now being accepted for the 3rd Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland, a conference organised by Sample-Studios and the Department of Digital Humanities at University College Cork.

The 3rd Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland offers an opportunity to share research and creative contributions within an engaging, collegial atmosphere comprising digital art scholars, artists and practitioners from Ireland and beyond.

Thanks to support from the Arts Council of Ireland, there will be no registration fee for this event. Bursaries of €150 will be made available for artists and practitioners, as well as researchers and scholars in precarious employment.

The conference will be held in Cork on the 21st and 22nd of April, 2026. The symposium is an in-person event taking place in UCC for which remote participation will not be facilitated.
Submission Guidelines

Proposals are welcome from scholars, critics, artists, and practitioners, and may take one of three formats:

Academic Conference Papers

We invite proposals of ~500 words (.docx) for 20-minute academic conference presentations. Proposals may focus on any topic relating to the wider field of digital art or new media aesthetics, situated in an Irish context. Each presentation will be followed by a 10-minute Q&A.

Artist/Practitioner Papers

We invite proposals of ~500 words (.docx) for 20-minute conference presentations from artists and practitioners looking to detail and discuss some aspect of their own work. Please note that we do not have capacity for actual works to be exhibited, installed, or performed. We welcome presentations on any form of artistic practice that might be considered “digital” or reflective of contemporary digital arts practice, broadly construed.. Each presentation will be followed by a 10-minute Q&A.

Panel Discussions

90-minute live panel proposals, incorporating separate but related presentations / discussions on a consistent topic are also welcome, and may be either academic or artistic in nature (or a mix of the two). Live panel proposals should provide ~500-word summaries (.docx) of the planned structure and overall thematic emphasis.

All proposals should include the title of the submission, the name(s) and affiliation(s) of the contributor(s), 500-word abstracts, and 200-word biographical notes (all in .docx format). The deadline for submissions is January 16th, 5pm.

Submissions should be emailed to sroddy@ucc.ie by the deadline.

Submissions will be reviewed by the conference chairs, and contributors will be notified of decisions in March 2026. The Programme & Book of Abstracts for the 3rd Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland will be deposited to the Cork Open Research Archive (CORA), UCC’s institutional repository, where details of the event’s contributions will be preserved and publicly accessible.

Prospective participants may also be interested in submitting to Digital Art in Ireland: Theory, Practice, Futures, a new book that will be published in late 2026/early 2027:
https://www.blackwaterpublishing.com/digital-art-ireland

Previous programmes can be viewed as follows:

1st Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland
https://hdl.handle.net/10468/13144

2nd Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland
https://hdl.handle.net/10468/15887
Chairs

Dr Stephen Roddy (sroddy@ucc.ie)
Department of Digital Humanities / Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork

Aoibhie McCarthy (director@sample-studios.com)
Artistic Director, Sample-Studios

Dr James O’Sullivan (james.osullivan@ucc.ie)
School of English & Digital Humanities, University College Cork