Summer School 2026: Innovation, Tech & Culture
Products that change the narrative. Worldbuilding for Creators and Entrepreneurs.
Innovation, Tech, & Culture
Imagine a world where the boundaries between art, technology, and entrepreneurship are dynamically intertwined. The Summer School of Onassis ONX and ACE returns for its third year, inspiring creative professionals and businesses to develop visionary products and experiences that captivate audiences, ignite creative dialogue, and make a global impact.
The Summer School: Innovation, Tech, & Culture is an intensive ten-day program that seeks to bridge the worlds of Culture and Digital Arts with Technology, Product Design, Artificial Intelligence, and Entrepreneurship. Its purpose is to harness artistic and creative thinking to highlight and address social, environmental, and business challenges.
Upon completion, participants will have the opportunity to compete for funding and incubation support to bring their projects to life.
Program Highlights
1–13 July
10 days intensive program
ACE — Athens Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Trias 2, Athens 113 62English
Professionals in the fields of arts, culture, design, and technology
Undergraduate and postgraduate students in these fields
Worldbuilding, Going beyond Product, Narratives, Visual Storytelling and Creative Branding
Can a narrative shape the way we interact with our products? And, conversely, can our interplay with our products formulate a narrative of its own? How can art attain a sustainable status while becoming a launching pad for creative dialogue?
This year's program explores the concept of worldbuilding and its following integration into creative practice and design through storytelling and digital technologies. By harnessing worldbuilding methodologies, it invites creators and trailblazing entrepreneurs to develop innovative ideas that not only succeed commercially but also spark meaningful conversations, demonstrating the uncontainable potential of imagination and innovation.
Keynote Speakers
The keynote speaker will be Jiabao Li, an artist, designer, and technologist whose practice explores how technology, markets, and biopolitical mechanisms shape our perceptions of the body, care, the environment, and the future. Through works that combine XR, biotechnology, performance, installation, and speculative design, Li poses questions such as: What happens when artists use the language of startups to "sell" impossible futures? What does it mean when motherhood becomes infrastructure, breath becomes climate data, perception becomes a commodity, and care becomes a programmable service? What happens when corporations turn their absurdities into art before the market has the chance to do so?
In her works, Li does not approach technology as a neutral tool, but as a mechanism that mediates reality itself: from "TransVision," where vision becomes a commodity and perception acquires "real estate value," to "Carbon Farm," where human breath, climate guilt, and greenwashing are transformed into material, bioplastic, and rituals of consumption.
Dr. Cooper Galvin is an Alaskan biophysicist, entrepreneur, and investor who builds at the intersection of molecular science and population health. He has founded companies across radically different funding models: a nonprofit that has sustained itself for more than a decade, and venture-backed startups through which he has raised multiple multimillion-dollar rounds. He advises founders that capital is not one-size-fits-all, and has developed heuristics for matching the founder, industry, speed, and type of capital.
He is the co-founder of Endless Health, a US health-tech company building wrap-around preventive care, and of EndlessDX, a blood-testing platform designed to make diagnostics radically more accessible. Earlier, he founded Future Advancers of Science and Technology (FAST), the San Francisco Bay Area's most extensive STEM outreach program for low-income high-school students. As an active investor and operator in US health-tech and biotech, he weighs when speed is an advantage and when it's a trap.
Dr. Galvin holds a PhD in Molecular Biophysics and an MS in Bioengineering from Stanford. He was previously an Associate at McKinsey & Company and a post-doctoral researcher in population health in Taiwan and the United States.
Summer School 2026
Applications for the Summer School 2026 have now closed, and all applicants have been informed of the outcome of their application. We thank everyone for their interest and look forward to sharing the work, ideas, and experiences that will emerge from this year's program.
Explore the full program