CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS with Modal
Modal and Gray Area are partnering to offer a new development and exhibition opportunity for artists with sustained engagements in artificial intelligence and the arts.
Generative media, enabled by models trained at network-scale and proliferated by agentic systems, has opened an expansive toolkit for artists. As aesthetic practices evolve, how can artists help us interpret the new realities unlocked through scaling computation?
Against a prevailing narrative where inference equates to automation, homogenization, and slop, we think there’s another story. One where artists harness the inherent creativity of inference to expand perspectives, create novel forms, and suggest alternative ways of sensing the world.
We are looking for culture makers to present new works in a group exhibition at San Francisco’s Gray Area in October 2026. Selected artists will be given ample compute resources and materials support for their proposals. Through this call, we hope to anchor artistic agency in contemporary technology discourse.
■ This global open call seeks proposals for creative projects that demonstrate the intentional use of AI to further artistic expression.
■ We’re looking for new works that consider the role of AI as infrastructure—systems that infer and circulate knowledge, process input at scale, and move across human modalities like speech or text.
■ We hope to find artists whose practices reveal what intentional and imaginative engagement with AI can look like.
■ The guiding question for this call is: What can AI unlock?
■ Selected artists will show their proposed work in a group exhibition at Gray Area in San Francisco’s Mission District in October 2026, and have opportunities to present their investigation into the systems that shape how we make, think, and connect.
■ Selected artists will receive a $2,000 cash honorarium upon selection. For production, artists will receive up to $20,000 value in Modal credits as well as up to $5,000 for materials and production costs related to the proposed artwork.
Modal builds infrastructure for compute, letting you run code anywhere, instantly, at scale. Gray Area has spent two decades exploring art and emerging technology, asking what it means to create responsibly and critically through times of rapid change. Together, we're offering support for work that investigates these ideas in the context of evolving digital and visual culture.
