Call for Applications: Gamemaking Residency | VF26

Where are your guts? 🩸💉⚙️☀️🌐🌱💩🔌🪫⚡🩸

‍

In its fifth year, the 2026 Vector Festival Game Art Residency, curated by Bracy Appeikumoh, asks artists to consider a computer that desires only your waste fluids in order to power itself. A TV that shuts off when it loses contact to the dead skin cells that slough off your body with each gentle movement. A smart phone with a charging port that switches out with a needle - blood for battery life, 1 liter for 45 minutes of charge time.

As the technology that is pushed to the forefront continues to grow in the same cancerous vein as the dystopian imaginings that we were forewarned against in the texts of Octavia Butler, Mike Pondsmith, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, William Gibson, and Philip K. Dick, how do we bring about reconciliations of this tech as well as create symbiotic systems with our tech for the good of our bodies, our ecosystems, and our self-actualizations?

Possible themes to explore through gaming narratives or mechanics may include:

🩸Alternative modes of powering technology
🩸Human-technology symbiosis, e.g. technology fueled by human filth
🩸Technology haunted by the human lives sacrificed for its creation and implementation, e.g. slave labour practices in mining cobalt in Congo
🩸The colonial necropolitics of a smart phone
🩸Creating technology centering indigenous epistemologies, e.g. Indigenizing our tech
🩸Bodily autonomy on the disabled cyborg body in an era of enshittification and forced non-negotiable opt-in AI assimilation
🩸Billionaire techbro biohacking and the colonization of the body
🩸Health as an economy tied to the climate crisis
🩸Climate refugees
🩸Renegade tech for community action and mutual aid
🩸Right to repair and circumventing planned obsolescence
🩸Technology as ancestral link
🩸Building mutual aid networks of tech
🩸Piracy and peer-to-peer file sharing as information sovereignty and knowledge integrity
🩸Rotting USB C cables
🩸"The only company that makes the prosthetic that I need also makes the bombs that are being dropped on an indigenous people defending their homeland from settler colonialism; what do I do?"

‍

The residency includes a year-long membership to InterAccess’s studio, critique and thematic support throughout the game development process from the curator, a public Open Studio supported by Toronto Games Week, and a showcase opportunity as part of Vector Festival 2026.

‍

Timeline

Application deadline: March 23, 2026*
Artist notification: April 2026
Residency dates: May – July, 2026
Showcase dates: Within July 9 – 19, 2026

*Note: This is earlier than the majority of festival program deadlines. 

Type of Submission

Artist applications for participation in an experimental Gamemaking Residency.

Location

In-person events will take place in downtown Toronto and at InterAccess (32 Lisgar Street, Toronto, ON M6J 0C7).

Priority is given to artists local to the festival, but out-of-town artists can be accommodated with online participation through Zoom and Discord. 

Fees

Vector Festival does not charge submission fees or provide production expenses. All artists selected for participation will receive fees in accordance with CARFAC and IMAA fee schedules, as well as support to apply for external funding.

Collaborators

This program is curated by Bracy Appeikumoh and proudly co-presented with Toronto Games Week.

Equity

InterAccess is committed to equity and strongly encourages applications from equity-deserving communities, including artists who are Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, LGBTQ-identified, Gender Diverse, Two-Spirit, and Persons with Disabilities. 

Contact

Please reach out to art@interaccess.org with any questions.

‍

Header image of RANDOM ACCESS MEMORIES, Vector Festival 2025 Game Art Residency Showcase, curated by Bracy Appeikumoh, at the Centre for Culture and Technology. Image courtesy of Liam Mackenzie.

‍