The Generative Web:
Open Call
21, 22, 23 October, 2026
Alessandria, Italy
Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale
Over the past three decades, the Web has been structured around a set of familiar operations and infrastructures: publishing and linking, indexing and ranking, searching and browsing, platformization and API ecosystems. Today, generative AI systems, in particular LLMs and multimodal models, are being woven into web interfaces and web back-ends alike: answer engines and conversational search, writing assistants embedded in browsers and editors, agentic tools that navigate the Web on our behalf, synthetic content at web scale, and retrieval-augmented architectures that treat the Web simultaneously as knowledge base, training corpus, and distribution channel.
This new configuration raises fundamental questions for Web Studies. If the Web is increasingly encountered through model-mediated interactions, what becomes of the Web’s usual ways of showing where information comes from: links, sources, documents, and traceability? If prompting becomes a dominant access mode, how do we understand the shift from querying to instructing, from navigating to delegating, from search literacy to prompt literacy? How do we assess authority, provenance, bias, and uncertainty when answers are synthesized, personalized, and conversational? What happens to the link ecosystem, web publishing incentives, and the visibility of smaller sites when traffic is mediated by generative summaries? How do regulation, platform governance, licensing, and dataset construction reshape what the Web is and what it can be?
WS.5 calls for contributions that interrogate the fast-evolving relationship between generative AI and the Web, how this relationship is transforming the ways we access, produce, authenticate, preserve, govern, and value information. We invite submissions for the following presentation formats:
Full papers: typically articles from 4 to 6 pages (or 3500 words), including references.
Short papers: typically articles from 2 to 3 pages (or 2500 words), including references.
Posters: one-page paper (or 500 words).
Demos and prototypes: one-page paper (or 500 words).
Panels and roundtables: one to two page paper with the abstract of each intervention (or 500-1000 words).
Workshops & tutorials: one to two page paper with the abstract of each intervention (or 500-1000 words).
Artistic, design, and practice-based contributions: one-page paper (or 500 words).
- Generative AI for the Web: architectures, pipelines, and system design
- Conversational search and answer engines: interaction models, UX patterns, and user studies
- Agentic browsing and web automation: delegated action, reliability, and guardrails
- Web-scale corpora: crawling, filtering, documentation, representativeness, multilingual data
- APIs, web services, protocols, and standards
- Sustainability: compute costs, energy impacts, green AI, green Web intersections
- Accessibility and inclusive design for AI-mediated web experiences
- Human–AI collaboration in web writing, moderation, community management, and support
- Prompting vs searching: shifts in information-seeking strategies and cognitive models
- Provenance and citation in generated answers: new norms for attribution and traceability
- Journalism, education, libraries, and research practices under generative mediation
- The look and feel of the AI-mediated Web: interface aesthetics, conversational UI, design patterns
- Visual regimes of credibility: how UI/visualization shapes trust and authority
- AI-generated images & video on the Web: circulation, remix, authenticity, and reception
- Net art, browser-based art, interactive installations, and web performances
- Generative art and creative coding for/on the Web; prompt-based art practices
- Electronic literature, hypertext, interactive narratives, procedural storytelling
- Data art and critical visualization as inquiry
- Curatorial and archival practices for born-digital and AI-generated works
- Documentation, preservation, and replay: capturing ephemeral web/AI experiences
- Critical making, speculative design, design fiction, and prototyping as argument
- Tool-building as scholarship (datasets, probes, plugins, instruments, browsers, bots)
International Co-Chairs
- Mark Bernstein
- Everardo Reyes
- Giancarlo Ruffo
- Imad Saleh
Contact and organization
- Prof. Giancarlo Ruffo
- Prof. Everardo Reyes
- Dr. Carlos Isaac González
Scientific Committee
- Daniel Binns, RMIT University, Australia
- Miguel Carvalhais, University of Porto, Portugal
- Federica Cena, Università di Torino, Italy
- Dana Diminescu, Telecom-Paris, Institut polytechnique de Paris, France
- Astrid Ensslin, Universität Regensburg, Germany
- Federica Frabetti, University of Roehampton, UK
- Mirko Lai, Università del Piemonte Orientale “A. Avogadro”, Italy
- Sarah Labelle, Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry, France
- Inés Laitano, Université Paris 8, France
- Lia Morra, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
- Ilan Manouach, Université de Liège, Belgium
- Stuart Moulthrop, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA
- Laura Shackelford, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
- Anna Sapiena, Università del Piemonte Orientale “A. Avogadro”, Italy
- Lauren Tilton, University of Richmond, USA
- Scott Rettberg, University of Bergen, Norway
- Isaac Rudomin Goldberg, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico
- Mirko Tobias Schäfer, Utrecht University, Netherlands
Paper Submission of abstracts and papers: June 5, 2026
Notification to authors: June 12, 2026
Camera-ready papers due: Late September, 2026
Early registration for authors: early October, 2026
Congress: 21, 22, 23 October, 2026
More information on the website.