Pluriversal Futures

The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the longest running media arts prizes in the world. Ars Electronica and the Hong Kong Design Institute jointly organise a selection of Prix Ars Electronica artworks at the HKDI Gallery of Hong Kong Design Institute. From November 2025 to April 2026, the exhibition Pluriversal Futures offers a glimpse into the multifaceted aspects of our increasingly complex world through the artists’ unique perspectives on its myriad challenges. The featured artworks will provide profound insights into the contemporary world and its pressing issues.

Artworks

Superbe (BE)

From0

Prix Ars Electronica 2025
Honorary Mention – Digital Musics & Sound Art

From0 is an interactive sound and kinetic installation that explores the unstable and musical nature of language. This unique experience begins with visitors recording words, phrases, or sounds. The installation divides these inputs into twelve fragments, which are then broadcast by pendulums vibrating at their own unique rhythms. Since each pendulum moves at a different speed, it creates a distinctive harmony reminiscent of sliding sounds, and the sequence of words gradually shifts into chaos.

Visitors can use button controls to isolate sounds, freeze sequences, or create custom music loops. After a few minutes, the system returns to coherent words once again. The name From0, formed from “From” and “0”, evokes the starting point, the cycle and unity. By playing on repetition and sound evolution, From0 highlights the gap between meaning and form, offering a sensory and emotional immersion in the musicality of language.

Ioana Vreme Moser (RO)

Mineral Amnesia

Prix Ars Electronica 2025
Award of Distinction – Digital Musics & Sound Art

Mineral Amnesia explores the evolution and decay of early erasable programmable memory through sound. Encapsulated under quartz windows, EPROMs, now obsolete microchips, lose data when exposed to light.

In this installation, 8K-bit to 1 Mbit EPROMs replay recorded sound under UV light until it disappears. Some EPROMs from the ’70s transform programs into sounds, and some disclose voice tales. Invented in 1971, EPROMs marked a turning point in computing history. Their widespread use fueled rapid technological growth but also led to data becoming lost in old hardware bodies, now dumped to form toxic wastelands across the earth’s geological layer. The work questions digital permanence and highlights the fragility of memory as loops dissolve into noise and silence.

Diane Cescutti (FR)

Nosukaay

Prix Ars Electronica 2024
Golden Nica – Interactive+

Nosukaay is an interactive installation, a machine that combines a West African loom and a computer. With it, the viewer can use a manjak woven fabric as a keyboard to explore a video game blending texts, 3D images, and images shot in Dakar, Senegal. Nosukaay, the machine deity, narrates stories—an alternative history of computation, shedding light on the connections between computers, Manjak weaving knowledge, and mathematics.

From computation, vernacular sciences, and algorithms to the preservation of traditional crafts: Nosukaay presents one forgotten branch of computer history, one that extends to the time before the discovery of electricity. At its core, Nosukaay is about system thinking. As audience we experience our own agency through interaction with the art piece. “You are part of a system that your presence closes” is both a metaphor and literally how the interactive keyboard works. It relies on human conductivity to function; as someone presses it with two hands, it closes the open electric circuit and the piece becomes functional, rendering the audience necessary.

Thomas Kvam (NO) and Frode Oldereid (NO)

Requiem for an Exit

Prix Ars Electronica 2025
Golden Nica – New Animation Art | activated for 11’ once an hour

Requiem for an Exit is a large-scale robotic installation. At its center stands a four-meter-tall robot — armless, immobile — its presence defined by a hyper realistic projected face and a voice generated through AI synthesis and human performance.

The work suggests that violence may not only be cultural, but biological — etched into our DNA. Its monologue draws on historical atrocities—from ancient genocides to the Holocaust and contemporary displacement—asking whether such violence is a tragic exception or a recurring pattern in human history. It questions the myths of progress and the ethics we assign to technology, suggesting how responsibility is increasingly outsourced to systems and code. Evidently, machines remember what we prefer to forget.

The work excels across all of the criteria that guided this year’s jury. It extends animation’s frontier by welding together disciplines that rarely share the same studio: industrial robotics, CGI, large-language-model scripting, generative voice, hydraulic choreography, projection-mapped sculpture, and site responsive sound.

Lau Wai (HK)

The Cast of the Invisible

Prix Ars Electronica 2025
Award of Distinction – New Animation Art | 4K Single-Channel CGI Animation, 13’15”

A response to the ever-expanding interference of the digital world, The Cast of the Invisible, a CGI animated short film, prods at the line between one’s virtual and physical existence. Inspired by how the identities of motion-capture actors are lost beneath digitally imposed animation, the film stars W.A.I., a motion-capture-suit-clad virtual clone of the artist. 

The Cast of the Invisible follows several days in the life of W.A.I., as they descend into existential confusion. Plagued by the consequences of a vocation endowing them with purpose by stripping them off their individuality, W.A.I. cannot escape a fundamental demand to exist in mimetic performance as anyone but themselves. Evocative of a Goffmanian “total institution,” W.A.I.’s ubiquitous uniform pervading their private life speaks to the metaphysical reductionism that inherently cages any digitally reproduced being within a stunted identity.

Thus, The Cast of the Invisible is a direct reference to the liminal role of motion-capture actors who symbolise being both “in-between” the real and virtual worlds yet never fully present in either one. Elaborating on motifs of an infinitely mutable identity in the contemporary digital context, Lau questions the role of humans as technology progresses.

Gabriel Massan (BR)

Third World: The Bottom Dimension

Prix Ars Electronica 2024
Award of Distinction – Interactive Art+

Third World: The Bottom Dimension is an experimental exhibition, video game and web3 tokens led by artist Gabriel Massan with Serpentine Arts Technologies. The project convenes and platforms a vital generation of interdisciplinary, queer, Afro-diasporic Brazilian artists.

Massan combines storytelling and world-building techniques to create virtual ecosystems and digital sculptures that simulate and narrate stories from Black Brazilian experience. Driven by a desire to “reveal rather than replicate systems of inequality” while instigating change, their work investigates how the so-called “Third World”—an offensive and imposed classification for non-industrialised, developing nations—is imagined by the West.

Third World: The Bottom Dimension arose from the artist’s own concerns regarding the fragility of the future. It has been in development since 2021, amidst a period that saw a huge political shift in Brazil, with the fall of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro regime, and the re-election of center-leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Across its various parts, the project gathers responses to what Massan calls our contemporary “state of emergence” and uses digital technologies to nurture and distribute a constellation of perspectives and foster change.

Pui Yi CHIH, Kin Man AO, Kai Cheung WONG, Chi Shing YU

PLANT BLINDNESS

HKDI x Ars Electronica Student Talent Award 2025

In the relentless rhythm of Hong Kong, nature often whispers where the city roars. Local flowers—such as Plumeria Rubra L., Jacaranda Mimosifolia D.Don, and Rhododendron pulchrum Sweet var. phoeniceum (G.Don) Rehder etc. — are silent witnesses to a metropolis in motion, their beauty easily overlooked amid glass and concrete.

This work reimagines these native blooms through the use of advanced digital technologies, translating their organic colors and shapes into fluid, evolving visual forms.

By merging digital artistry with natural aesthetics, the piece explores the tension between permanence and transience, chaos and harmony. Each composition becomes a living canvas, echoing the resilience and fragility of urban nature.

This work invites viewers to pause, rediscover, and celebrate the unnoticed poetry of Hong Kong’s flora—transforming fleeting petals into immersive digital landscapes that bloom endlessly in the virtual realm.