Beyond the Screens, City Digital Skin Art Festival (CDSA)

In response to Ars Electronica 2025’s theme PANIC – yes/no, this exhibition explores a quieter, ambient panic—one that builds silently across infrastructures, skylines, and ecosystems. Beyond the Screens, the third edition of the City Digital Skin Art Festival (CDSA), presents digital works originally created for monumental urban displays across Asia and Europe. Across five countries, nine cities, and eleven iconic screens, these media facades become not just surfaces, but reflective spaces that echo back environmental unease and systemic tension.
At a time when change accelerates and certainties dissolve, these works do not attempt to fix or soothe. Instead, they pause the world just long enough for us to feel it—its fragility, its momentum, its unspoken questions. Panic is a signal: a subtle, flickering alert from within the digital skin of our cities. These images, projected onto architectural surfaces, offer no easy answers—but insist we pay attention.
The works are deeply immersive—monumental in form, restrained in rhythm, urgent in message. If panic is the body’s response to what can no longer be ignored, then this is not alarm—it is recognition. A counter-panic that invites reflection over our reaction.
Featuring award-winning works from CDSA 2024, their relevance has only grown. If Ars Electronica asks PANIC – yes/no?, these artists answer: we are already in it. What now?