It’s been an exhilarating and impactful year for CETI with an exciting breadth of programs—creative research, generative ideation and design sessions, inspiring institutes, collaborative creative weekends, two collaborative art-tech exhibitions celebrating 100 years of quantum and wondrous augmented storytelling experiences infused around the city.
Creative and Emerging Technology Institutes
We expanded our advanced learning in emerging technology: incredible workshops, collaborative experiments, demos, inspiring speakers, skill-sharing and performances in evenings and weekends to support lifelong and professional learning.
Sensory SPA
We held our third annual SPA (Spring Break Adventures in Learning) with over 20 sessions and 128 participants—an intensive week focused on interactive, smart, connected, sensor technology filled with experiment sessions, talks, hands-on workshops, and opportunities for collaborative learning and creations.
Enchanted Technology Festival of Institutes
We conducted our annual summer Enchanted Technology Festival of Institutes—exciting weekends of workshops, generative design and ideation sessions, and collaborative experimentation in creative and emerging technology for over 200 students, educators, artists, technologists, professionals, and community members. We held our first AI symposium and designed our first citizen science participatory research project to launch soon.
Certificates will be offered in 2026.
CETI Lab
We supported and engaged a diverse community in our cutting-edge lab, a gathering space to learn and experiment staffed by professional experts volunteering time—trainings, emerging tech study groups, hack days, student and educator tours, and project support.
Augmented (XR) Storytelling, Culture, and Placemaking
Each year, an interdisciplinary collective of the CETI community and partners collaborates on projects and innovations focussed on a urgent relevant issue carrying out creative research, generative ideation and experiment sessions, and critical dialogue to create something unique together—a lovely model for skill-sharing, experiential learning, and powerful imaginative creation and socially impactful innovation. This year, we focused on environmental justice and community history and continued sharing two series of experiences.
XRchive: (Hi)stories and Visions of Block 14 at Lone Fir Cemetery
XRchive: (Hi)stories and Visions of Block 14 at Lone Fir Cemetery was on view at the Portland Chinatown Museum through May 2025. We’re turning this impactful project into an augmented book experience to be launched during the Qingming festival in April 2026. And we received an OCF Creative Heights grant to carry on our XRchive series to work on Power in Place: (Hi)stories and Future Visions of Old Town Chinatown in 2026.
Postcards From Our Climate Resilient Future
Through a series of interactive augmented spatial experiences placed around Portland, Postcards From Our Climate Resilient Future in partnership with Multnomah County’s Office of Sustainability, supported by an NEA Our Town Creative Placemaking grant depicts imaginative, joyful, and hopeful visions of a just climate future in Multnomah County.
We are currently working on a new series of climate postcards to launch in June 2026. We would love for you to go for a “walk” to start the new year with friends, family, and colleagues, engaging in a conversation about what you would create and the change you’d like to see. We’d love your ideas and creative help.
Environmental Soundscapes
We’re beginning our first “citizen science” participatory research project, Environmental Soundscapes. Join us for a year-long engagement of data “walks” to carefully observe the environment—a collective data gathering, to interpret, analyze, and craft stories about the sounds we hear in our regional environment and what we can glean from that about our health and climate future.
Through this year-long effort, we hope to create a detailed sound data map of the region, look for patterns, and provide a valuable open-source resource.
We Are All Bound Up Together
A team from the CETI Collective augmented and enhanced an art exhibition in April 2025 created by 12 women at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility at the Wilsonville Public Library, created as part of the PSU Higher Education in Prison Program. We Are All Bound Up Together was extended through May and will show in PSU’s Lincoln Hall in spring 2026.
We plan to continue this line of creative inquiry, exploring impactful and imaginative uses of new technologies to tell hidden community histories, to educate and mobilize around climate resilience and environmental justice, to imagine possible futures and to tell stories with data—painting the cityscape with these magical experiences.
Collaborative Experimentation and Creation
Our collaborative creative weekends and shows are a powerful joyful and unexpected form of deep learning and skill-sharing.
This year, as part of our participation in UNESCO’s International Year in Quantum, our exhibitions focused on the ideas from quantum physics. Held in the Lloyd Center this year, our exhibitions had almost 5000 visitors combined.
Constellations: Uncertainty
Our spring exhibition explored the absurd and powerful ideas and implications of quantum that have transformed our understanding of the universe and interpretation of reality. Uncertainty featured over 50 creators collaborating on over 20 magical installations and experiences.
Constellations: Entanglement
Our fall exhibition, Entanglement, explored the unexpected and unpredictable connectedness in the world and our anxieties with the lurking algorithms and power that seems to control our future. 30 amazing and interactive installations by over 40 creators made for an immersive and unforgettable experience.
Numbers in 2025
100+ programs
2 weeks
6
1,200+ open lab hours
800+ visits to the lab
50+ installations and creations
6,000+ visitors
Thank you
All of this amazing work takes effort and resources. Many of you have contributed to CETI in numerous ways—ideas, advice, participation, effort, in-kind donations of food and tech, and most importantly your enthusiastic support. For those who are able, we would be so appreciative of financial donations that allow us to support all the creators and contributors to our work.
We lost several federal grants for these projects and would be grateful for funding to continue this important and powerful work.
If you wish to make a donation, we would be so grateful and delighted. CETI is a 501(c)(3) organization and all donations are tax deductible. And you are welcome to choose to allocate it to fund a project or event or the tech lab as you wish.
