SPAM New Media Festival (Santa Cruz)

SPAM New Media Festival began in 2022 as a grassroots experimental arts platform, bringing together practitioners working on the fringes and frontiers of digital arts through exhibitions, performances, and critical discussions.

SPAM’s organizers and curators are a collective of artists, researchers, and academics who are bugging the system — imagining resistance narratives against capital-driven media through multiplicity, embodiment, and critical practice.

For SPAM’s 2026 iteration we’re gathering October 9–11, 2026, at Indexical in Santa Cruz, CA to share the work of artists we love with the greater San Francisco Bay Area community through performances, workshops, and artist talks.

The 2026 lineup features regional projects by Dorothy Santos & Abram Stern, Ava Koohbor, Jean Carla Rodea, and EPOCH, alongside the touring projects of Sunken Cages and Rohan Chander.

SPAM 2026 is organized in collaboration with Indexical and SrcMaterial. Indexical is generously hosting the event, supporting the performances, and creating a space for gathering and relationality. SrcMaterial is curating Allaboration, a workshop series focused on technological literacy — with an emphasis on AI, collaboration, and connection in an era of increasingly asynchronous workspaces.

SPAM is an ongoing project of regrowth and persistence. We are committed to creating discourse from the margins, developing pathways of interconnectivity for our future selves.

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Venue: Indexical

Address: 1050 River St. #119 Santa Cruz, CA 95060