Currently 5 active paid grants, fellowships and residencies taking place in Austria, across AI, arts, film, journalism, research, tech and cross-disciplinary practice. Many are open to applicants of any nationality; check each entry for residency and citizenship requirements. Hand-curated and updated weekly. Browse the list below, or use the interactive desk for filtering and shortlisting.
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The European AI & Society Fund is launching Building Narrative Power, a EUR 2 million funding and learning programme to counter Big Tech's dominance over how AI is understood, and to help people and communities shape new ways of thinking and talking about the technology they want. The Fund's strategy is to build the power of the public interest community to shape the direction of AI in Europe; narratives are central to creating the conditions for a greater say over how AI is adopted and used. THREE THEMES where research shows the public already feels strongly: (1) DATA CENTRES: as the EU aims to triple data centre numbers in the next five to seven years, pollution, energy prices and compromised grid access have mobilised communities across the political spectrum; proposals should explore narrative questions that move communities beyond resistance towards engagement in shaping data centre expansion. (2) AI AND JOBS: 57% of the public in a recent study expressed concern about how AI will change employment, more pronounced among lower-income people, and the concern is not only displacement but the quality and nature of work, autonomy and dignity; proposals should move the debate from generalised anxiety into a mobilising issue that shapes the future of work. (3) YOUNG PEOPLE: beyond the strident social media ban debate, young people encounter AI in education, friendships and future careers, and their wider views are rarely heard; proposals should build narratives that help young people shape the technologies that will influence their lives. LEARNING PROGRAMME: grantees join a community of practice, sharing experiences across issues and places, supporting each other through delivery and reflecting on which strategies and stories have most salience, with findings feeding back to the Fund and other funders. ABOUT THE FUNDER: the European AI & Society Fund is a pooled fund with 18 funding partners that mobilises a public interest community in Europe to fight for AI that serves people, society and planet; it takes no EU, government or Big Tech money. ELIGIBILITY: this call is only open to organisations in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Republic of Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland; applications from the UK, the Western Balkans and other non-European countries are not accepted. Guidance for applicants and a full application-form preview are published so you can prepare a draft before submitting. HOW TO APPLY: create an account on the Fund's application platform Optimy (link in the guidance documents) and submit the first-stage application before 31 August 2026. KEY DATES: call launched 16 July 2026; information sessions 22 July, 29 July and 24 August 2026 (11:00 to 12:00 CET); first-stage deadline 31 August 2026; unsuccessful applicants notified 16 October 2026; shortlisted applicants invited to submit a detailed proposal on 19 October 2026, due 16 November 2026; funding decisions notified 14 December 2026; grants start February 2027. Questions to info@europeanaifund.org; an FAQ covering eligibility, coalitions, non-profit status and what the grant can be spent on is published at the bottom of the programme page.
In Listening is the renamed successor to the CTM Radio Lab, after more than a decade of collaboration between CTM Festival and Germany's public radio Deutschlandfunk Kultur, with support from Austria's ORF, zeroing in on sound-focused experiences. This open call is for works strongly grounded in experimental sound practices and audio art and driven by conceptual approaches or sonic narratives, exploring the blurred edges between sound, noise, music, storytelling, poetry, and documenting, where sound is the main medium. Works should respond to the CTM 2027 theme 'Process...ing', with active listening informing the proposals. Applications should describe how the work could be developed for two complementary outputs: a LIVE EVENT at CTM 2027 and a RADIO BROADCAST on Deutschlandfunk Kultur and Oe1/ORF. At CTM, works are presented in the silent green Kuppelhalle with an intimate setup, the audience seated around the performer(s) and surrounded by a 6.1-channel PA (creative use of fewer channels, stereo, or mono is welcome; minimal lighting and scenography or performances in the dark are suitable, but video and complex scenography are out of scope). For radio/podcast, proposals should consider the individual listening experience (a recording of the performance is not sufficient); the broadcast is a 40-55 minute piece aired in a late-night slot to a largely German-speaking, non-specialist audience. Works premiere at CTM 2027 (22-31 January 2027, Berlin), are broadcast in Deutschlandfunk Kultur's Klangkunst programme in Spring 2027, and presented via ORF (Oe1 Zeit-Ton or Blaue Stunde / Kunstradio) and/or ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst in Graz (Autumn 2027), then available for streaming for at least one year. BUDGET: two selected works each receive EUR 6,000; winners give up to two performances at CTM. Group proposals are possible but should keep a modest travel budget. JURY: Jan Rohlf (CTM), Marcus Gammel (Deutschlandfunk Kultur), Anna Soucek (ORF Oe1), and one independent artist. TIMELINE: deadline 6 September 2026 at 23:59 Berlin time; winners announced mid-October 2026; remote production late October 2026 to January 2027. APPLY (in English, PDF, max 20MB) with a project description including rough budget (max 4 pages), technical requirements, and CV; questions to in_listening@ctm-festival.de. No application fee.
VBKÖ, the Austrian Association of Wom*n Artists founded in 1910, invites proposals for its annual programme running March 2027 to February 2028. The call reads the present moment through the resurgence of authoritarianism, fascism, militarisation, colonial violence and extractive capitalism, and the parallel privatisation of care and criminalisation of solidarity. Drawing on María Galindo's framing of feminism as a project of social transformation and Sara Ahmed's account of feminist work beginning with refusal, the programme treats alternative ways of living as something rehearsed collectively through organising, creating, caring, listening, remembering and struggling. VBKÖ seeks a programme of practices that nurture communal care and build a platform for collective rehearsals: proposals that allow for tenderness, that are not afraid of ugly feelings and different truths, and that explore how contemporary queer and feminist perspectives resonate across artistic, social and political movements. FORMAT REQUIREMENT: only exhibition formats bringing together multiple artists, collectives or collaborative practices are accepted. Solo exhibitions, individual presentations and projects centred on a single artist's work are explicitly not supported. Proposals that activate the exhibition through public programming (screenings, performances, workshops, lectures and other events) are encouraged. Regular opening hours are Fridays and Saturdays 2pm to 6pm; any additional hours must be arranged and staffed by the selected group. The association acknowledges that its own history is marked by violence, exclusion and discrimination on the basis of religion, class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity, and states that it actively opposes all forms of discrimination including trans-exclusionary radical feminism. APPLICATION: a single PDF (max 5MB) with a programme description (max 2 pages, images welcome, English or German, including preferred dates and duration), a CV and biography for every participant (max 1 page each), a financial plan (Fair Pay encouraged), technical requirements, and contact details including email, mobile number and main residence; three high-resolution images of work or exhibition sketches sent within the email or via a download link, labelled with artist name, work title, year and proposal title (video links may be included in the proposal). Send to opencall@vbkoe.org with the subject line 'Open Call + your proposal title'. Incomplete applications will not be considered. A shortlist is compiled by the VBKÖ team and final selections are made by the VBKÖ board with an external jury member experienced in contemporary art, activism and community building; shortlisted applicants may be asked to present to the jury. Results are announced at the beginning of October 2026. Deadline 10 September 2026, 23:59. Free to apply.
Waag Futurelab invites artists, theatre makers, choreographers, dancers, game designers and other creative practitioners to engage directly with seven experimental generative AI Enablers being co-created with technologists and dance, theatre and gaming professionals. The call is an invitation into the development process: selected artists get access to the technologies, datasets, interfaces and assumptions that shape these systems while they are still being built. Rather than testing whether the systems work, artists are asked to interrogate why they work the way they do, who they are designed for, what forms of creativity they enable or constrain, and what assumptions about culture, intelligence, authorship, labour, bodies, audiences and society are embedded in them. Waag is looking for individuals and collectives willing to move beyond adoption into investigation, and welcomes proposals that are speculative, critical, poetic, provocative, humorous, performative, constructive or disruptive, including work that challenges, misuses, reimagines, hacks, subverts or plays with the tools, exposes hidden biases, questions environmental costs, or imagines alternative technological futures. THE SEVEN AI ENABLERS, each requiring an on-site visit to its technology partner: the Generic Procedural Content Generation Enabler (text-to-3D assets and avatars, CERTH, Greece); the Data-Driven Cultural Content Adaptation Enabler (audience-aware creative content ideation with ranked candidate ideas, CERTH, Greece); the Cross-Domain Audience Engagement Analytics Enabler (turning heterogeneous cultural participation data into interpretable engagement signals, The Audience Agency, Warrington, UK); the Dance Style Analysis and Generation Enabler (dance video into virtual 3D choreography, dissected into body, effort, shape and space components, Centre of Excellence for Research & Innovation, Cyprus); the Immersive Design Integration Enabler for Dance & Theatre (NLP-driven XR environments with speech-to-3D scene editing, Cyprus); the Music-to-Movement Translation Enabler (audio into a time-aligned feature set spanning genre classification, emotional valence-arousal analysis, rhythm extraction and latent-space projection, feeding motion generation, spatial audio and visual choreography, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece); and the Adaptive Narrative Enabler for Games & Theatre (an evolutionary AI trained on creator-written story elements that generates infinite story variations, explicitly rejecting LLMs because of their dependence on copyrighted or public-domain corpora that encode 19th and early 20th century sexism, racism and imperialism, CAUSA Creation, Austria). ELIGIBILITY: artists, designers, creative technologists, theatre makers, dancers, choreographers and game designers, as individuals or collectives; applicants must hold a European VAT number. An info session with live demonstrations of the AI Enablers runs 31 July 2026, 10:00 to 11:30 CEST (meeting ID 995 7016 2341). Applications go through Homerun using the official Application Template, uploaded as a PDF; read the Guide for Applicants, which contains the full Enabler descriptions, before applying. Questions: zoenie at waag dot org. The AI Enablers and this call are part of the Horizon Europe project HAMLET, which aims to make generative AI accessible to cultural organisations of all sizes. Closes 30 September 2026, 23:59 CEST. Free to apply.
The European Media Art Platform (EMAP/EMARE) is a network of leading European media-art organisations offering fully funded two-month production residencies for artists working with digital media, including media art, bio art and robotic art. Each residency provides a EUR 4,000 grant to the applying artist (including subsistence), a EUR 4,000 project budget, host-provided accommodation, travel covered according to EU ceilings, and access to technical facilities and media labs; a collaborating artist receives an additional EUR 2,000 (EUR 6,000 total for a duo). Residencies take place at one of 15 host institutions across Austria, France, Slovakia, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Croatia, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Greece, Latvia, Germany and Poland. ELIGIBILITY: applicants must be EU residents or taxpayers in an EU member state, or residents/taxpayers of one of the eligible non-EU countries (Netherlands-based artists qualify). Undergraduate and Master's students are not eligible; PhD candidates and emerging artists of any age and academic background may apply. IMPORTANT: applicants must apply as a duo or collective, or propose a collaborative project, rather than as a purely solo applicant. The 2027 open call runs from 3 September 2026 to 6 November 2026 at 14:00 CET. Apply online at call.emare.eu. No application fee.