We are excited to announce the official artwork for Nix Vegas 2026, once again by Kenz Tobias, an artist from Vista, CA. The piece is heavily inspired by the work of Art Deco artist Erté.

You can follow Kenz on Twitch and Instagram!

Theme

DEF CON's theme this year is Agency: "self-determination. It's about making choices that increase yours, AND helping others to control theirs." Our answer is Escape Your Fate, and this year we're taking cues from Greek mythology:

• The charioteer is Nyx, the primordial goddess of night and chaos, driving her chariot across the sky. (We couldn't resist.)
• The giant hand is the hand of fate: the Moirai, the Fates who spin, measure, and cut the thread of your life. Ours spins algorithmic feeds and SaaS that shifts under your feet, all with an unblinking eye in its palm, watching you while it steers. It spins locked down devices that spy on their users, begging to have an open system installed.
• Look at Nyx's hand: she holds a thread of fate, taken back from the Moirai. That's what Nix hands you: a system whose every package and service is declared, pinned, and reproducible. Your world, spun from a thread you hold, with 140,000+ tools for you and your agents to use.
• As Nyx's daughters, the Fates are supposed to be her agents, not the other way around. It's time for a reminder of who's in charge. We think it's time to use the world's largest package repository for you to reclaim your own agency.
• Fate isn't handed down from on high; it's made. And what is made can be remade. Look at all the Linux sandbox escapes like copy.fail and dirtyfrag for great examples. Maybe breaking Nix's build sandbox itself is part of becoming ungovernable.

Ideas

The CFP is open until July 15, 2026, and our challenge to you is the one the artwork makes:

• Starve the beast: how can you use Nix and NixOS to reclaim your digital agency?
• Feed your community: how can we support others doing the same by rolling our own tools and build infrastructure?
• Resources, time, and energy: how can we use Nix to connect ordinary users with the developers who made all the software they depend on?

We're excited to see everyone this year again at DEF CON.

<3, The Nix Vegas Team