Photo of Vibrating Waiting for You To Touch performed at MITU580 (Hayley Pfitzer, 2025).
Promoted through an open-call, this Fellowship is a creative laboratory where artists receive all necessary resources to execute their creative vision and bring their work to life. Incubating new and existing projects, in addition to direct funding through artist fees, Fellows are offered access to physical production spaces and the technical infrastructure needed to realize ambitious projects. This laboratory fosters an environment where artists, scientists, and technologists can experiment, refine their ideas, and push creative boundaries through creative workshops, peer critiques, and preview showcases. By offering dramaturgical guidance, production expertise, and access to collaborative networks, we help shape ambitious, interdisciplinary works from concept to realization.
Deadline: March 1st, 2026
What is our open-call?
MAXmachina 2026 is Media Art Xploration’s laboratory supporting live and immersive works that integrate technology, science, and storytelling. Centered on Human Stories inside Complex Systems, we look for projects that humanize technological complexity through strong narrative, offering a $5,000-$7,500 stipend, production support, expert collaboration, and a fully produced NYC showcase.
What kind of work are we looking for?
MAXmachina laboratory program looks for works in dance, theater, music, experimental performance, as well as immersive pieces incorporating live activation. In a spirit of Human Stories inside Complex Systems, our 2026 laboratory explores the idea that technology’s artistic potential is best realized when paired with a strong human narrative. Projects must be past the initial concept phase, must include a live element, and have not been previously presented in New York City.
What is the theme of MAXmachina 2026?
- The Ghost in the Machine: Celebrating the unpredictable human element—our creativity, mistakes, and emotions—that animates technology and gives it meaning.
- Productive Disruption: Reimagining unpredictability, imperfection, and the “glitch” as a creative catalyst in art, technology, and science.
- Narrative vs. Technology: Investigating the shifting roles of narrative and technology as allies or adversaries—exploring the “positive friction” generated when they challenge, disrupt, or transform one another.
- The Digital/Physical Blur: Projects that dissolve the binary between the digital and the physical. Are our bodies now as much computational as they are flesh?
What do we provide?
Selected projects receive a stipend of up to $5,000 – $7,500 plus tailored production support, which may include rehearsal and performance space, technical equipment, dramaturgy, stage management, and connections to scientific advisors.
What’s expected of you?
Artists participate in workshops, planning conversations, progress check-ins, and possibly a public salon presentation. Projects should be ready for active development and open to feedback and collaborative dialogue with MAXlive staff, advisors, and audiences. Applications are due on March 1st, 2026.
MAXmachina Fall 2025 Programs
Check Out Our Most Recent Programming from Nov 1 at MITU580
Current MAXmachina Cohort: Group VI
“It was because of MAXmachina that all this [Princeton Fellowship, BAM premiere] happened. You believed in us early and supported us on this journey when we didn’t know anything yet about the science or technology.”
Modesto "Flako" Jimenez
Obie-Winning Artistic Director of ¡Oye! Group
Guggenheim Fellow for Creative Arts
Vibrating Waiting For You To Touch
A mixed-reality performance that explores the sensorial and emotional experience of scrolling. It is a dance of scrolling thumbs—thumbs attached to hands performed by whole people. Through movement, sound, and absurdist costuming, props, and embodied exploration, the piece investigates how our bodies are disciplined by digital systems and how the intimate act of touch becomes flattened into functionality. This work asks: how do we touch a digital body? And can touch rehumanize the dehumanized scroll?
Vibrating Waiting For You To Touch
Julianna Johnston
Theater MITU
Nov 1, 2025
A mixed-reality performance that explores the sensorial and emotional experience of scrolling. It is a dance of scrolling thumbs—thumbs attached to hands performed by whole people. Through movement, sound, and absurdist costuming, props, and embodied exploration, the piece investigates how our bodies are disciplined by digital systems and how the intimate act of touch becomes flattened into functionality. This work asks: how do we touch a digital body? And can touch rehumanize the dehumanized scroll?
Photography by Hayley Pfitzer (2025).
2024 Machina Cohort: Group V
Celebrating Our Previous Wonderful Cohort
Photo of Doppelganger (Maria Baranova, 2021).
