Building on the momentum of last year’s theme Break the System this year’s focus Man & Machines examines a world defined by complex, interdependent systems. While the first two Industrial Revolutions marked humanity’s great mechanical leap forward; they also ushered in a new era of systemic environmental crisis. As we scaled from hand tools to horsepower, and from steam to combustion, the ecological impacts are impossible to ignore: resource depletion, industrial pollution, and climate change are pushing biodiversity and global ecosystems to the brink.
The Georgetown Steam Plant—once a triumph of industrial electrical and mechanical engineering—is the perfect stage for this exploration. These steam-driven machines brought the modern electrical grid to Georgetown by consuming fossil fuels to pulse life into streetcars, factories, and homes. However, the plant’s reign as a primary power generator was short-lived. By the 1920s, the rise of hydropower rendered these mechanical giants financially too expensive for daily use, shifting production to the distant rush of dammed rivers and long-distance transmission lines, while the Steam Plant was transitioned into a standby/peaking facility until officially decommissioned in 1977.
In contrast to streetcars, factories, and homes, many of today’s most powerful machines feeding off the electrical grid are abstracted behind screens and software. Contemporary computational systems—data centers, neural networks, and AI infrastructure—are intensely physical, resource-hungry machines. Their demand for electricity is staggering and growing rapidly, straining the modern grid; global data-center power consumption is projected to exceed 1,000 TWh annually by 2030—more than double current levels.
This trajectory is redefining how—and where—energy is produced and consumed. To sustain this growing energy demand, our computational systems are moving us toward a Type I civilization on the Kardashev Scale—one capable of harnessing full mastery of our planetary energy flows. Beyond that lies the speculative horizon of a Type II civilization, capturing the full radiant output of the sun.
The 2026 Georgetown Steam Plant Science Fair extends this trajectory—tracing our industrial evolution from the mechanical spectacle of the 20th century, through the computational revolution of the 21st, and toward the urgent adaptation required to navigate a rapidly changing world.
“This is the age of integration. Will our modern machines become our partners, our tools, our extensions—or our replacements?”
Man & Machines invites artists, scientists, designers, engineers, technologists, and thinkers to submit works that explore the evolving relationship between human agency and the systems we build. We are seeking projects grounded in the evolution of technology—past and present—that speculate on futures already taking shape, and our constant need for more power.
This open call welcomes work that blurs the line between science fiction and the emerging present, creating a space where what was, what is, and what wants to be, exists simultaneously. We encourage submissions that examine tools, infrastructures, energy systems, or hybrid ecologies. We are looking for projects that ask not only how technology extends human capability, but how it redistributes power, reshapes our landscapes, and challenges us to decide where we are going next.