New Animation Art
Artificial Life & Intelligence
Digital Musics & Sound Art
u19–create your world
Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity
Isao Tomita Special Prize
New Animation Art
Expanding Frames toward Inner Journeys
Boris Eldagsen, Ayoung Kim, Ari Melenciano, Everardo Reyes, Liz Rosenthal
This year’s New Animation Art category affirmed just how boundless the field has become. From a record-breaking 1,430 submissions, an increase of 23% over last year, the jury emerged with one Golden Nica, two Awards of Distinction, and twelve Honorary Mentions. These fifteen works are united less by technique than by a shared urgency to treat animation not as a genre, but as a laboratory for thought.
Our criteria emerged from the process itself: as the early works unfolded, five intertwined questions crystallized and went on to guide the rest of our deliberations. Does it expand animation’s perimeter by selecting the medium? Be it a game engine, shader code, a robotic arm, a browser window, or 16-millimeter film, so that form and concept are inseparable? Do image, sound and rhythm feel inevitable rather than decorative, holding our attention and inviting us to return? Is craft evident at every scale, from the architecture of a narrative to the texture of an interface or the timing of a gesture? Will the work remain resonant when today’s hardware is obsolete, touching the human condition with lasting clarity? And finally, does it open a perspective that is emotionally, socially, or politically disruptive without reducing the viewer to a mere target for instruction?
Measured against those interconnected demands, this year’s field revealed an exhilarating and hybrid landscape. Classical computer-generated imagery stood beside algorithmic poetry, virtual-reality diaries, speculative video games, internet-native collages, and a kinetic sculpture that literally animates itself. The projects we ultimately endorsed confront e-waste and extractivism, algorithmic otherness, colonial erasure and uprising, micro-temporal state violence, gendered technogenesis, the subversion of competition, and the enduring ache for meaning, and love and continuity. Their authors show how animation can be both an archaeology of technological desire and an instrument for imagining otherwise, sometimes both within the same frame.
Our deliberation process blended methods and perspectives, alternating among granular inspection, real-time interaction, and lively cross-disciplinary argument. The final line-up arose not from a simple agreement on taste but from a shared conviction that, together, the three top laureates balance technological grammar with emotional register and cultural weight, while the wider shortlist sketches the horizon in the direction the field is moving: works that are materially accountable, politically awake, and imaginatively unbounded. Taken together, this selection shows that animation is no longer a fixed genre but an expansive practice of setting perception in motion.
Golden Nica
Requiem for an Exit
Frode Oldereid, Thomas Kvam
Towering almost four meters high, Requiem for an Exit confronts visitors with a solitary head mounted on a steel exoskeleton, its skin a living projection, its voice an AI-generated baritone that delivers a stark meditation on chaos, suffering, and the limits of human agency. The piece is disarmingly direct—a single figure, a single monologue—yet every layer complicates the next. The face is at once ancient and androgynous, its grief-stricken expressions contradicting the cold certainty of the words; hydraulic sighs and digital glitches expose the labor of the machine even as the projection renders it flesh-like; the narrator’s sweeping verdicts about history and free will rebound onto the very algorithms animating its speech.
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. Every technological choice is integral to the argument: without real hydraulics the head’s weariness would ring hollow; without the projected epidermis its humanity would be too easily denied.
Requiem for an Exit is also the culmination of a decades-long conversation. Its creators are pioneers who first collaborated in the 1990s and have returned after twenty years to fuse their hard-won mechanical expertise with contemporary AI. The result feels both timeless and urgently current, grounding speculative technology in a lineage of philosophical inquiry that stretches from classical determinism to present-day algorithmic governance.
By asking whether it’s possible to escape history, whether free will can survive its own analysis, and whether a machine might mourn on our behalf, the work exposes animation as a space where matter, code, and thought wrestle in public. Viewers may argue with the head’s bleak conclusions, but none will remain untouched by the spectacle of a robot holding a mirror to our species and asking, with grave sincerity, whether an exit exists.
Awards of Distinction
Ito Meikyū
Boris Labbé
Boris Labbé’s Ito Meikyū invites the viewer to step through the looking-glass of his celebrated hand-drawn universe and wander inside it. For his first venture into virtual reality, the director translates his filigree line work into a vast, multi-layered labyrinth whose imagery is woven, both literally and conceptually, like embroidery. Fragmentary scenes drawn from Japanese literature and art history unfurl as interlaced threads: fractal architectures, calligraphed glyphs, bodies at work on gigantic looms, enigmatic machines that spin infinity into pattern.
The piece is as experimental as it is enchanting. A gaze-controlled navigation system replaces the usual VR joystick: where you look becomes where you go, turning exploration into a seamless, almost meditative drift. Eye-tracking, parallax, and subtle depth cues are deployed not as gimmicks but as dramaturgy; every technical choice reinforces the sensation of being woven into the fabric of the poem itself.
Visually opulent, Ito Meikyū rewards prolonged and repeated visits. Allegory, irony, and quiet humor surface in fresh combinations each time, making the voyage feel both personal and unending. By threading exquisite 2-D craft through the spatial loom of VR, Labbé expands the language of animation and demonstrates how immersive media can be both formally daring and emotionally contemplative.
The Cast of the Invisible
Lau Wai
Lau Wai’s one-person tour-de-force begins with a lone motion-capture performer waiting for her digital cue and ends in a hall of mirrors where the copies outnumber the original. Rendered in meticulous CGI and built almost entirely without external support, the film slips a “mocap inside a mocap” gag into a layered meditation on techno precarity: every new take spawns another avatar, dissolving the actress and, by implication, the artist into an expanding cast of selves.
Absurd humor and sharp sarcasm keep the existential vertigo buoyant. “Who am I, and how many?” the protagonist seems to ask as her data double rehearses endlessly for a role that may never materialize. The result is both a complementary vision of the motion-capture industry and a fresh spin on the “dream within a dream” motif, where digital embodiment is at once liberation, labor, and lingering threat.
By folding world-building, performance, and self-critique into a concise meta-narrative, The Cast of the Invisible pushes CGI animation beyond spectacle toward a witty, unsettling inquiry into identity in the age of infinite duplication—an inquiry that lingers long after the render finishes.
Honorary Mentions
Abstract Language Model
Andreas Lutz
Abstract Language Model is an artificial neural network trained on more than 65,000 Unicode characters; artist Andreas Lutz turns this dataset into two forms: a four-screen installation that interpolates through the learned glyphs and a 45-minute live audiovisual performance. In the installation, the characters serve as plastic, moving elements that form textures and compositions echoing seven computational states: Extraction, Analysis, Rearrangement, Processing, Transformation, Learning, and Language. The work offers a stage for latent alphabets to exist and expands animation by using techniques from text-processing algorithms.
ARIA 夢姬
Yu Shien Yang, Jin Keon
ARIA, short for Advanced Resonance Intelligence Algorithm, follows an AI assistant talking with its own operating system in the final moments before it is shut down. The story takes place in 2050, in the fictional city of Dream Harbor, which blends familiar East-Asian influences with a futuristic vibe. By leaning into common stereotypes and gender roles found in parts of modern Asian society, the film asks whether those biases seep into the way we build and portray AI. Appropriately, many of its animation elements were produced with the assistance of generated assets, using the very AI tools the story questions.
Bewegungsapparat
Sven Windszus
Bewegungsapparat is a kinetic video installation that transforms ecological paralysis into poetic machinery. Through three interlinked and rotating elements including a screen showing a figure on a treadmill, an oil pump, and a swinging pendulum tipped with a saw, artist Sven Windszus illustrates the self-destructive inertia of modern life. Ingeniously, the video remains upright while rotating, reinforcing the illusion that the system powers itself. As the saw blade gnaws at the sculpture’s base, the installation becomes a chilling metaphor: a society blindly sustaining the very motion that leads to its undoing.
Coda
Paul Valentin
Coda is a meticulously crafted, hypnotic CG video, exploring waves as profound carriers of information and meaning. Through an immersive experiential setup involving waves as water, sound, and light, intertwined with reflections, interference, and ritualistic repetition, it poetically expresses life as an enigma. The symbolic passage of a figure through laser grids and microphones forms a haunting, evolving melody, bridging quantum physics and artistic inquiry. Timeless and thought-provoking, Coda continuously opens new perspectives, respecting viewer autonomy while deeply engaging us in a haunting meditation on existence, and our endless pursuit of understanding phenomena.
CORE DUMP
Alona Rodeh
CORE DUMP is an aesthetically intentional, captivating CGI short, depicting surreal drone swarms hunting e-waste within a digitally crafted, hyper-realistic desert landscape. Expertly executed using gaming engine technology, the film excels in storytelling and immersive experiential design. Addressing timely, future-proof themes such as e-waste politics, modern warfare logistics, drone technology, and cultural destruction, CORE DUMP expands perspectives on environmental and geopolitical dynamics. Part of the artist’s series CITY DUMMIES, this provocative digital fantasy artfully blends abstraction and realism, creating meaningful social and political resonance.
Earth’s to Come
Rose Bond, inti figgis-vizueta, Massimiliano Borghesi, Melanie Coombs, Roomful of Teeth, PASE
In Earths to Come, Rose Bond demonstrates how VR, when combined with hand-drawn animation and immersive sound, can articulate complex emotional and lyrical dimensions with rare sensitivity. Animated with a delicate, hand-drawn aesthetic that breathes and flickers with life, the piece reinterprets Emily Dickinson’s poetic fragments from an untitled poem “I have no life but this” as an unfolding, immersive landscape of memory, longing, and desire. The experience is anchored by the incredible soundscape created by composer inti figgis-vizueta’s haunting score and the profoundly visceral harmonies of Roomful of Teeth, experienced collectively under a sound dome with exquisite spatial precision.
Los Caídos
Juan Covelli
Los Caídos is an interactive video game that reimagines Colombia’s 2021 social uprising as a digital battleground where protest becomes ritual and resistance dances to the pulse of guaracha. With characters like La Guerrera Misak and La Cuerpa Trans, it collapses history, identity, and spectacle into a speculative, playable archive. Artist Juan Covelli uses the medium to question how algorithmic culture shapes ideology and memory. More than a game, Los Caídos is a decolonial intervention and an act of digital remembrance that challenges dominant narratives and opens space for new, subversive histories to emerge.
NATURAL CONTACTS
Mark Fingerhut, Peter Burr, Bridget DeFranco, Matthew D Gantt
NATURAL CONTACTS is a benevolent form of malware that transforms a user’s desktop into a meditative ecosystem over 24 hours, compressing a full year’s cycle into a day. Around a central decomposing digital corpse, seasons pass, birds scatter, files drift like leaves, and decay gives way to renewal. Inspired by John Cage’s prepared piano, the artists recast the computer as a “prepared desktop,” where spreadsheets coexist with flies and cursor movements disturb the peace of a virtual wilderness. Blurring the boundaries between software, sculpture, and time-based art, the work invites users into a slow, unsettling reflection on life, death, and digital nature.
Oto’s Planet
Gwenael François
Oto’s Planet is a brilliantly crafted VR fable that explores human coexistence, the emergence of borders and the responsibility of belonging to a shared ecosystem. Set on a miniature 3D diorama planet, inhabited by a slacker, his dog, and an uninvited astronaut visitor, the story is brought to life through a beautifully designed rotation mechanic that allows viewers to shift perspectives, deepening connection to both the narrative and the characters. The stylized animation is vivid and polished, with every movement and transition carefully reinforcing the story’s darker undertones. Oto’s Planet stands out for its narrative ambition, technical refinement, and evocative, immersive world-building.
Sixty-seven Milliseconds
Fleuryfontaine
Sixty-seven Milliseconds is the interval between two frames in which a bullet was captured in flight by a surveillance camera. Narrated through multiple voices and perspectives, the film retraces the true events that unfolded in February 2020 in the southern suburbs of Paris. French duo Galdric Fleury and Antoine Fontaine employ CGI and a range of visual-footage styles to immerse viewers in the precise moment when an unarmed 19-year-old was shot in the eye by a police officer. The bullet’s invisible path is suggested through the young man’s trajectory, a depiction inspired by Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographic studies of movement.
Supper
Erick Oh
Supper is an evocative audiovisual piece that invites viewers to a surreal and transcendental feast, where symbols of mortality and meaning such as a fish, an apple, an hourglass, a diamond, and a heart, are delicately arranged on an altar-like table. These elements are not just props but metaphors, prepared for consumption by a monumental cosmic figure. With a cinematic yet abstract sensibility, Erick Oh conjures an atmosphere where sound and image move beyond narrative, guiding us into a contemplative space. The piece’s dreamlike rhythm and striking symbolism allow for deeply personal interpretation, while its visual clarity and formal restraint anchor it in a sophisticated aesthetic. It is at once intimate and grand, meditative, and mysterious.
World at Stake
Total Refusal (Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim, Jona Kleinlein)
World at Stake subverts the logic of sports and spectacle within video games to explore powerlessness in the face of global crisis. A golfer fails to strike, a soccer team plays itself, a rally co-driver questions his role, while the audience remains frozen, unable to intervene. Through these loops of inaction, the film dismantles binary notions of victory and failure, revealing the paralysis that defines contemporary political life. Created by media collective Total Refusal, this machinima work reclaims virtual space to stage a haunting allegory of spectatorship, sovereignty, and the quiet dread of watching the world fall apart.
Artificial Life & Intelligence
Staying with the Trouble of Technology
Clemens Apprich, Tamar Clarke-Brown, Charlotte Jarvis, Špela Petrič, Simon Weckert
Applications for this year’s Artificial Life & Intelligence category ask how artistic methods can be used to map the complex relationships between technology, bodies, cultures and politics, and how critical creative practices can disrupt and challenge widely accepted ‘truths’.
During the jury meeting, we discussed the manifold artistic explorations of artificial life and intelligence, treating these emerging forms not as actual phenomena but as conceptual portals—gateways to reimagined futures and reinterpreted pasts. What many of the artworks discussed have in common is that they make conceivable the ‘ephemeral temporality’ of our digital age. They draw inspiration from the past and use it to create new and unknown futures. The artworks thus serve as both speculative instruments and reflective surfaces, enabling us to perceive our present condition with new clarity and critical depth. Rather than offering simplistic answers or utopian projections, the artists invite us to inhabit the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities that artificial life and AI evoke.
In addressing pressing questions about our bodies, desires, realities, histories, and futures, a common thread running through many of the artworks is their ability to ground themselves in the principle of situatedness. We therefore wish to acknowledge works that are self-aware and embedded in the technologies, rituals, materialities and communities with which they engage. By confronting their own position within these systems, these artworks resist the illusion of neutrality and detachment. Instead, they either ‘stay with the trouble’ that new technologies have brought to our lives and minds, or they bring new trouble to already established technological settings, platforms, and narratives. They linger in complexity, defying easy resolution and challenging their audiences to confront uncomfortable questions and unexamined assumptions.
Through this embedded lens, the works chart the dense and intricate webs that connect technology to bodies, culture to code, memory to machine. They unravel the ways in which our lives are increasingly shaped by automated systems and ask how these systems encode, erase, or amplify certain ways of being, knowing, feeling, and desiring. In doing so, they aim to disrupt dominant narratives—those that frame technological progress as linear, disembodied or inevitable—and instead foreground the multiplicity of truths, temporalities, and perspectives that often go unacknowledged.
Golden Nica
Guanaquerx
Paula Gaetano Adi
This year’s Golden Nica in the Artificial Life & Intelligence category goes to Guanaquerx by Paula Gaetano Adi. By re-enacting the historic 1817 Crossing of the Andes, which marked the beginning of Chile’s liberation from Spanish colonial rule, with an insurgent robot, its army of artists, engineers, local baqueanos, and their 58 mules and horses, the artwork not only puts a finger in the wound of the colonial entanglements of our present moment, but also points beyond. Promoting new forms of knowledge, togetherness and social change, we wish to honor the extraordinary scope and ambition of this work, which envisions robotics as a technology of liberation and invites us to poetically engage with our past in order to create a different, pluriversal future. In its critical engagement and visionary scope, this work offers not only a beautiful cinematic experience, but also a meaningful performative act and powerful cultural intervention. It gestures towards new horizons, relationships and forms of life—artificial or otherwise—that might emerge from the cracks of our current systems.
Awards of Distinction
Anatomy of Non-Fact, Chapter 1: AI Hyperrealism
Martyna Marciniak
The first Award of Distinction is awarded to Anatomy of Non-Fact, Chapter 1: AI Hyperrealism by Martyna Marciniak, a complex and multi-layered analysis of what we consider to be an image today. As the first chapter of an ongoing exploration of image-based disinformation, the work takes the figure of the fake Balenciaga Pope as a starting point to map out a vast and entangled web of art historical, pop cultural, and media theoretical references. Interwoven throughout the 18-minute video, these references confront the audience with their own entanglement into the ‘social authority’ of technological media and provoke a rethinking of the century-old relationship between image and truth. In doing so, the artist points out a practice that dwells on and exploits the difficulties and inconsistencies, arising from a critical and timely research that is deeply engaged with the present moment and the fallacies in what we receive as truth.
XXX Machina
Erin Robinson, Anthony Frisby
The second Award of Distinction goes to XXX Machina by Erin Robinson and Anthony Frisby, a bold exploration of our erotic desires as they are increasingly shaped by AI technologies. Functioning as an ‘autonomous desiring machine’, the piece generates an endless stream of pornographic images, which in turn are fed back into the machine, creating a body of distorted and unreal properties. While current debates about AI porn and deep fakes usually revolve around faces, most of which are used illegally, Robinson draws our attention to the statistically calculated bodies themselves. By literally giving them a face—in this case the artist’s own—Robinson critically engages with a machine-driven fantasy that draws on vast databases of disenfranchised sexual imagery. Reminiscent of early body art, it is a practice that does not speak from the outside, but from the inside of our sexual drives and desires. The jury spent many hours discussing this work and we would like to acknowledge the impact it had on us.
Honorary Mentions
Artificial Archive: SCRYING INTIMACIES
Rodell Warner
Rodell Warner uses AI to reveal and attend to archival omissions, restore the record, and prompt images and memories of what could have been. By generating a speculative photographic archive from mid-to-late 19th-century Caribbean history, the artist offers a powerful counterpoint to the era’s official photographic records. Photography has here a unique relationship to truth: an image (always taken and always constructed) establishes itself as an evidential record and forms the basis of belief. The unique prompts Warner uses, such as “What would the photographic record have looked like if these people had been the beneficiaries of their centuries of labor?”, create alternative imaginaries. These speculate on what the photographic archive could have looked like if the African and Asian people of the Caribbean had access to photography and could record their lives from their own perspectives. This project addresses the interiority and liberation of these people from limited historic representations and under-imagined lives.
Atlas of Queer Anatomy
Kuang-Yi Ku
The Atlas of Queer Anatomy is both a critical object and an academic proposition. The project offers an invitation to celebrate queer bodies by subverting (or perhaps liberating) a format that has traditionally marginalized them. By illustrating disease associated microorganisms with equal prominence to human body parts, the project disrupts human-centered hierarchies, binary categorization systems, and the oppression of disease based stigma. The illustrations are engaging and the workshops have provided further opportunities to open out discussions and debate around ‘other’ bodies and their omission from the medical cannon. The jury was particularly impressed with the Atlas as a beautiful demonstration of the strengths and advantages of post-disciplinary collaborative research.
Cedar Exodus
Iyad Abou Gaida, Em Joseph, Jumanah Abbas, Ecorove
Cedar Exodus is a skillfully poetic three-part video work about the political ecology of the Lebanese cedar, a tree whose silhouette adorns the Lebanese national flag. By juxtaposing the historical myth of the plant with its present day ecological precariousness, it offers an urgent insight into living through a polycrisis: the fates of people and the land they inhabit are codependent, reinforcing, and intertwined. The diffracted storytelling of the culturally (over)codified plant in its symbolic, material, and ecological relations through deep time, set against the current war-torn reality of the region, reads as a demand for justice for all—human and non-human—whose lives continue to be endangered by the political and economic interests of the privileged classes.
CripShip: Disability Saves Society from BigTech
Joseph Wilk
CripShip is humorous, generous, and joyful. The game uses roleplay as an empathetic and critical tool, providing players with a means to comprehend and engage with the lived experiences of communities and people who are too often marginalized and undervalued, but also to dissect the technological systems that oppress them. Players engage in diverse rich narratives, tell ‘other’ stories and become alternative heroes. CripShip provides us with a palpable demonstration that the world is better when it’s inclusive. It facilitates players in envisioning and therefore creating the futures we want. CripShip is play as activism.
Dynamics of a Dog on a Leash
Takayuki Todo
In this deceptively simple artwork, we encounter a Boston Dynamics-style ‘robot dog’, chained but constantly lunging at the audience until it finally overheats and collapses, only to be replaced by its double that is waiting patiently in the background. Its affective potency—the sense of discomfort it evokes—creates a tension that requires us to reflect on the work’s many layers of context and meaning: from the military origins of robots and their current use in conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine, to the way in which we project living agency (if only for a split second) onto the machine, to their role as a ‘surrogate humanity’ that allows for the continued, guilt-free relationship of subjugation. As the artist suggests, the robot dog in this installation is indeed held back by a thin and unreliable ‘chain of ethics’.
Fluid Anatomy
Ioana Vreme Moser
Fluid Anatomy by Ioana Vreme Moser uses air and water to create a new kind of computation. This installation uses technologies from the mid-20th century to show how circuits can be made from pressure, flow, and resonance. It has tubes, pulses, and murmurs that visitors can see, hear, and feel. This makes computation visible and audible. The work is special because it looks at the past and challenges ideas about technology. Instead of making us feel nostalgic, it shows us a different path for technology. One that is slower, softer, and more connected to the real world. For its critical engagement with alternative technologies and for inviting us to rethink what computation can look and feel like, Fluid Anatomy is commended by the jury in the Artificial Life & Intelligence category.
Flying Cream
aniara rodado
Through the project’s research proposition, to remix and therefore reimagine the fabled ointment used by European witches during their gatherings, aniara rodado’s Flying Cream is a rich and nuanced material manifesto against the erasure of knowledge, foregrounding the pleasure of and care for bodies that continue to be made invisible—trans and peri-/postmenopausal women and non-binary people. By applying (herbal) knowledge from marginal epistemes while involving renowned scientific institutions and the commercial cosmetics industry, the cream against vaginal dryness is also a subversive act of epistemic contamination that helps us imagine what contemporary witchcraft might look like within contemporary power relations.
Plato’s Prisoners
Cody Lukas
Plato’s Prisoners places lab-grown mini-brains, cerebral organoids, at the center of a sensory and ethical exploration. In the installation, these living clusters of human cells respond to speech, control light and sound, and create the impression of a dialogue between human and organoid. The work highlights how closely these disembodied brains resemble the early stages of human cognition—while receiving little to no ethical protection. It confronts us with an urgent question: At what point does cellular life become worthy of ethical consideration? The jury was impressed by Plato’s Prisoners powerful staging of a largely invisible but urgent issue.
Fine-Tuning Human Sense 2.0 from the Sensory Datascape Series
Hoonida Kim
In the Sensory Datascape Series, Hoonida Kim explores how digital technology not only mediates our perception, but actively reshapes it. Version 2.0 transforms the act of sensing into a deliberate practice—requiring viewers to blink, pause, and recalibrate as they confront AI-generated predictions layered over blurred vision and spatial sound. The work turns passive seeing into an active negotiation between human senses and machine interpretation. By positioning digital tools as “implants” that fine-tune rather than simply extend perception, the project offers a nuanced reflection on how we co-evolve with technology. It challenges the assumption that more information leads to clearer understanding, instead revealing how mediation can both enhance and obscure. The jury recognizes the Sensory Datascape Series for its thoughtful engagement with the complexities of sensory perception in the digital age, and for encouraging viewers to question the terms under which they see, hear, and know.
The Post-Truth Museum
Nora Al-Badri
The Post-Truth Museum addresses timely questions within postcolonial debates regarding the restitution of plundered artefacts in Western museums and institutions. Using various AI techniques, including deepfake technology, Al-Badri explores the issue through a series of disarmingly honest ‘official’ statements delivered by ventriloquized European museum directors (the leaders of the Prussian Heritage Foundation (Berlin), the Louvre (Paris), and the British Museum (London) counterbalanced with perspectives from the reanimated objects themselves. The somber, yet somehow absurd and synthetic quality of these institutional confessions serves to amplify the often hollow, complicit nature and cognitive dissonance entangled within such institutional performances.
Tinder_gun_boys_@Brussels_
Loïs Soleil
Tinder_gun_boys_@Brussels_ offers humor and resilience. The project collects Tinder images of heterosexual men posing with weapons as their dating profile picture. These images are then made into mats used in self-defense classes. Finally, and presumably after suffering another form of attack, the artist has run talks and workshops dissecting the legality of using these images in her work. The project functions as a razor-sharp calling out of the necropatriarchal power regime, in which male bodies have a sovereign monopoly and right to violence. Tinder_gun_boys_@Brussels_ also provides a lens through which to observe how many technologies and systems propagate patriarchy. The work is a brilliant piece of activism—conceptual, physical, and pragmatic.
YOU CAN’T HIDE ANYTHING / ARE YOU SOULLESS TOO?
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
Artist and game designer Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley creates participatory experiences centered on archiving and amplifying Black Trans experiences. YOU CAN’T HIDE ANYTHING/ARE YOU SOULLESS TOO? is a multiplayer democratic game that challenges players to examine their role within systems of power, control, and societal accountability. Installed within a kind of amphitheater, this multiplayer video game implicates its players in an unfolding experience set in the final moments of a transformed society. Inspired by horror, speculative fiction and retro video games, the artist plays with the choice architecture of games to encourage reflection on and engagement with the limiting rules and political oppressions that restrict life and which we uphold every day through our silence. It reflects our current political landscape and the increasingly precarious democracy of our times, as well as the asymmetry of our current systems, which interpret and sometimes overrule collective decisions.
Digital Musics & Sound Art
Towards new Versatilities
Miriam Akkerman, Dietmar Lupfer, Kamila Metwaly, Ali Nikrang, Nao Tokui
Digital Musics and Sound Art is a dynamic artistic field that has always been highly reactive to developments in digital technologies and trends within the mediascape. This becomes particularly evident in view of the developments of the last years, in which technologies such as AI and machine learning are not only mutually influencing artistic practices, but above all everyday life while questioning fundamental social issues: How do these new technologies influence our current—and future life? How can we use the technologies—and what threads might they pose? What position do we take with regard to these technological developments? These questions come together with other pressing challenges: How do we relate to current circumstances such as climate change and social justice? How can we integrate traditions and the knowledge of our ancestors into modern society? And what role can art play in all these processes? The relevance of these questions is mirrored in the topics of the submissions for the 2025 Digital Musics and Sound Art category. Covering a wide range of themes and critical engagements with the current political, social and environmental situation, and a likewise huge spectrum of different formats including performances, sound sculptures, audio-visual works, musical instruments, musical compositions, radio art, an outstanding number of excellent sound installations, as well as combinations of the aforementioned, the works reflect both a strong engagement with the most recent technologies and a fundamental interest in reflecting common worldviews. We enjoyed seeing the elaborate manner of both technical production and reflective approaches across submissions from all kinds of formats, providing ground for vivid discussions on the presented works, oftentimes on the verge of us being carried away by digging into the ideas and contents of the artworks for the pleasure of the arts as well as the context of an artwork. On the one hand, an extensive examination of the relationship between humans and technology can be observed, and, on the other hand, socially relevant themes increasingly find their way into the artistic works. We would like to particularly acknowledge the diverse approaches to social topics, appearing, e.g., as a means of expressing a world view, as a medium for observing phenomena such as climate change, and as thematic reflections on social spaces and structures. We looked through a growing number of submissions of an above-average artistic and technological level, and it was important to us to highlight works that bring together the elaborate implementation of most recent technology with an artist’s ongoing artistic practices. How do these elements relate when brought together? Why is it interesting to bring these perspectives together? And how does this combination advance an artistic practice? Is there a reflection on the use and presentation mode of current technologies, e.g., is AI support actively considered and reflected in its use and effect, and what does using those specific technologies mean for the artwork? In parallel, what particularly characterizes a work itself was carefully examined: What makes a work stand out on a technical, thematic or reflective level? Which technologies are implemented and why—or how is a position taken on new technical developments? Which themes are reflected in the artistic works, and if current social issues are addressed, how are those implemented conceptually and aesthetically?
Amongst all the submissions, the performance-installation Organism (Golden Nica) stood out. It combines digital and analog computing concepts with analog and electronic sound—organ pipes, found objects, and live electronics—creating a bridge between traditional and experimental performance and installation settings. The installation Mineral Amnesia (Award of Distinction) presents a very different perspective on technology, using simple digital technology to explore the topic of memory, digital impermanence, and content loss. By contrast, the interactive performance
Bla Blavatar vs Jaap Blonk (Award of Distinction) explores new possibilities for human vocal expressions in tech-based live performances. Another kind of approach to sound can be found in the works of evala, who invites the audience to individually explore multi-sensory installations in order to create their own listening experiences (Isao Tomita Special Prize). Honorary Mentions have been given to works that support, with their individual approaches, this overall impression of artistic richness with regard to themes, technologies, but also audience engagement and the aim to develop new forms of artistic expressions.
With the works selected for the Golden Nica, Awards of Distinction and Honorary Mentions, we want to not only honor these outstanding artistic productions and ideas, but also to acknowledge and promote the heterogeneous appearance of current digital music and sound art works from different regions, age groups, genders, stages of careers, artistic, cultural and social backgrounds. Within this wide spectrum of different approaches and formats, each work stands out for its individual qualities, while the very diversity of the field challenges the audience to question perspectives and to engage in working on and developing a more comprehensive view of the world—an aspect of artistic works that should not be underestimated—especially in the current global situation.
Golden Nica
Organism
Navid Navab, Garnet Willis
Organism: In Turbulence
Navid Navab (performance)
Organism + Excitable Chaos
Navid Navab, with Garnet Willis (installation)
In Organism (In Turbulence/performance + Excitable Chaos/installation), Navid Navab and Garnet Willis invite us into a living, sonic ecology—an environment in which sound becomes an emergent, relational force. A century-old Casavant pipe organ—long associated with rigidity, control, and Western sacred music—is re-animated through a choreography of kinetic gestures in the attempt to deconstruct the socio-historical tonality of this instrument. Robotically prepared and intimately entangled with a chaotic triple pendulum, the instrument no longer obeys the dictates of a human performer but slowly deconstructs new timbres and sonic nuances.
The work unfolds as a continuously evolving encounter between a historical artifact and nonlinear material objects found today. Sound is not composed in the traditional sense but arises through friction, drift, and transductive resonance. The pendulum’s gravitational system triggers delicate sonic responses—shimmering, unpredictable, and emergent—inviting the audience into an experience of instability, chance, and emergence.
The philosophical and technological precision of the work, and by its openness to chaos—not as noise, but as a generative collaborator, became a key aspect for the jury’s decision.
Organism foreground a new form of listening: one that welcomes indeterminacy and entanglement, allowing material intelligence to speak in its own time and voice.
When thinking of the historical context, the work subtly taps into the colonial legacies of the pipe organ—an instrument historically ejected into public spaces through the spread of Christianity. As a tool of both spiritual authority and sonic domination, the organ was used to regulate time, to structure behavior, and to suppress indigenous musical traditions. By promoting European musical aesthetics, colonizers aimed to overwrite local cultures, installing the organ as a mechanism of cultural assimilation. It seems that, Organism become a subversive apparatus—an act of sonic reclamation. Through the radical recontextualization, the artists dismantle the organ’s fixed authority and repurpose it to a state of responsive, chaotic life. This is not simply a reinvention of an instrument, but a re-imagining of time, space, and historical memory. The jury recognizes the work as a profound and poetic gesture—an invitation to listen differently, and to reclaim what was silenced through resonance, care, and embodied presence.
Awards of Distinction
Bla Blavatar vs Jaap Blonk
Jonathan Chaim Reus
The jury found Bla Blavatar vs Jaap Blonk to be an exemplary demonstration of the symbiosis between artistic practice and technological development. Throughout the entire AI pipeline, from data creation to model training, artists’ perspectives were deeply involved, shaping the process at every stage. This collaboration did not aim to replicate human abilities for the sake of imitation, but to expand the range of artistic expression, particularly in the field of performance. The project showcases how AI technologies can open entirely new artistic possibilities, serving as a tool for extension rather than substitution. The project stands out as a strong example of how artists can actively and creatively influence the development of AI, not only by using the technology but also by contributing fundamentally to its design and purpose. The jury recognized the project’s articulation of a future in which technological systems function as collaborators in artistic practice, expanding the scope of human expression rather than displacing it. Furthermore, the jury recognized its articulation of a future in which technological systems function as collaborators in artistic practice, expanding the scope of human expression rather than displacing it.
Mineral Amnesia
Ioana Vreme Moser
*Mineral Amnesia * explores the rise and decay of erasable, programmable silicon memory through sound. Obsolete EPROMs—microchips sealed under quartz—gradually lose data. In this installation, 8K-bit to 1 Mbit EPROMs replay recorded sound under UV light until it disappears. Romanian artist Ioana Vreme Moser reflects on the digital dark age via this forgotten technology. Invented in 1971, EPROMs marked a turning point in computing history. The work questions digital permanence and highlights the fragility of memory as loops dissolve into noise and silence. The audience experiences this acoustic erosion live—as memory fades and machines forget. The jury was particularly impressed by the theme of “the erasure of memory” and its powerful artistic execution, especially the use of obsolete storage systems and a custom sound-light setup that makes the concept physically and sensually tangible. The work is highly relevant. The relevance of the work is alarming. In times when truth is manipulated and humanistic values eroded, it reflects societal decline. Fragile achievements like democracy, peace, and remembrance are vanishing. Painful history loses meaning, while populist rhetoric drowns out facts and memory. When the memory storage of truth is ultimately deleted, the system status ”Error 404 – Democracy not found“ will appear.
Honorary Mentions
ANIMAL [for body and sound]
Ash Fure
In her solo performance ANIMAL [for body and sound], Ash Fure creates a likewise sonically powerful and visually aesthetic experience by using a sheet of plastic to control filter sweeps for the audible frequencies of a fixed media track by physical actions in real-time. The sheet of plastic becomes hereby an interactive instrument for both the resulting sound and light situation, reflecting sound and light in correspondence within the movements. This results in a well-refined dramaturgy, carefully building up the tension and carrying the audience through the composition. Ash Fure releases impressive energy through the appearing sounds and her direct physical interaction with the audible, and the powerful performance also includes an artistic statement—for the physical presence of the human being in music performances, in contrast to AI models and algorithms.
Before the Red
Yixuan Zhao
The jury found Before the Red to be an impressive example of how a solo acoustic instrument (double bass) and its specific performance techniques can be combined with modern AI, gesture recognition, live electronics, and generative visualization. Exploring the symbiosis between a self-trained AI system, contemporary musical performance, and audiovisual artistic expression, the project articulates novel forms of artistic practice that emerge from the interplay of these domains. The jury valued the thoughtful integration of technological innovation with traditional craftsmanship, expanding the expressive possibilities of contemporary classical music and creating a rich, multilayered artistic experience.
Bora: Bora
Zhao Zhou
Bora: Bora offers a sensual breathing break within the intensity of the created environment. Rather than just relying on visual spectacle, the installation communicates through air and sound. A walkable tunnel of aluminum frames becomes an untouched zone where 96 speakers housed in transparent boxes generate moving air and layered sound, creating a tactile, immersive atmosphere. This multisensory space shifts attention from sight to touch and hearing, unsettling and grounding visitors at once. Programmed air vortices and an unlocalizable soundscape invite surrender to sensory fluctuation. Drawing from atomic vortex theory, the work values impermanence and invisible forces, turning turbulence into a material. Bora: Bora reveals the hidden energies that constantly flow around us—often unnoticed, but deeply felt. The jury was impressed by this opportunity to experience sound art playfully in the open air without any barriers to entry and to perceive nature with a form of sensuality.
From0
Superbe
From0 is an interactive sound installation exploring the instability of language and the malleability of memory. Visitors speak into a microphone—offering a word, phrase, sound, or a noise of sort —which is then broken into fragments and distributed across twelve pendulums. Each pendulum swings at a slightly different rhythm, stretching, repeating, and distorting the input into a haunting, playful, and ever-evolving sonic patterns. As words lose their original form and meaning through repetition and recombination, the piece reflects on how language unravels, slips, and reforms. From0 deconstructs the voice to reconstruct it within a new field of audible intelligibility—an act that might become a cyclical, nonlinear nature of memory and perception. The work embraces loss of control as a generative force, allowing something unanticipated and novel to emerge.
KINDASA
Nurah Farahat
KINDASA is a work inspired by the philosophies of 12th-century engineer and polymath Ismail Al-Jazari. It explores new methods of real-time audio/visual processing, reimagining his legacy through contemporary performance. Al-Jazari created what is considered to date the first automated humanoid robot—a water-operated, programmable drum machine that used wooden pegs and levers to control percussion, allowing musicians to play different rhythms and patterns by rearranging the pegs at hand. His “robot band” could perform over fifty facial and body gestures during a single musical piece. Nurah Farahat readapts this method to create a real time operated performance sequence inspired by Al-Jazari’s mechanical imagination as a compositional model. Like his automata and clocks, her processes avoid timelines, BPMs, and traditional grids. New algorithmic rules are set to generate a “musical-visual automaton” in real time where each scene unfolds dynamically through these rules—simulating rhythms, visuals, movement, and progression, often in recursive feedback loops. Over his lifetime, Al-Jazari designed more than 100 mechanical devices, laying the groundwork for modern mechanical engineering. Drawing on Egyptian, Greek, Persian, Indian, and Chinese innovations—transmitted through the vibrant cultural and scientific Translation Movement—he invented water clocks to mark prayer times, perpetual flute machines, automata, hand-washing devices, water-lifting machines, crankshafts, early flushing mechanisms, combination locks, and more.
MONTE
Luciano Piccilli
The sound sculpture MONTE explores the relationship between identity and memory with regard to the Paraná rainforest at the border between Brazil and Paraguay, an area that is at the same time one of the most biologically important ecosystems, as well as one of the most endangered rainforests in the world. Using recordings of voices from migrants, that emblematically stand for the traces of the area’s history, the artwork confronts the audience with a practically and contextually interlinked phenomenon: the playback of the sounds through the mirror interferes with the mirror’s image, causing a distorted reflection of the surroundings in the mirror, which again resonates within the audible. Retrieving traces of the territory hence becomes a process of interacting with memories colored by the current environment, creating a situation that throws the audience back on themselves and their own reflections.
New Ruins
Abo Abo
New Ruins, an audio-visual performance by Abo Abo (Daniele Carcassi) and Tania Cortés Becerra, exemplifies the impact of new AI and machine learning technologies on live electronic music performance. Their utilization of RAVE real-time timbre morphing models and the Somax2 machine listening and improvisation system developed by IRCAM adds organic and pleasantly unpredictable elements to what is otherwise a conventional setup using modular synthesizers and a turntable. The artist’s physical interaction with these devices paradoxically highlights the hidden presence of machine intelligence.
ON AIR
Peter van Haaften, Garnet Willis, Michael Montanaro
ON AIR is a complex sound sculpture featuring a latex balloon, French horns, an elastic membrane, light beams, lenses, and mirrors. Visitors speak into the horns, metaphorically filling the balloon with their voices. When the sound reaches a certain threshold, it is released through digital signal processing. The processed sound then travels through space as light beams, allowing audiences to interact by interrupting the light paths. The resulting sonic and visual rhythmic patterns create a mesmerizing environment. Though conceptually simple, the technically sophisticated execution fills viewers with a sense of wonder and awe.
OSMIUM: An electro-mechanical live performance ritual
Osmium
In OSMIUM, the four composers and musicians Hildur Guðnadóttir (halldorophone), Rully Shabara (extended vocals), Sam Slater (feedback percussion), and James Ginzburg (bass monochord) create a thriving performance that crosses borders between genres and aesthetics, each using a custom-built system that likewise enhances the individual possibilities to create sound and challenges each musician to adapt and react to the inconsistencies deriving from their instruments. On a conceptual level, the integration of the self-built instruments refers to the musicians’ reflection on the relation between human and machine; on a practical level, it emerges as an impressive sound collage of beats, drones, and noise variations paired with lingering vocal utterances. The result convinces through a compelling energy rooted in both the audible sounds as well as the interaction of the group members within the performance.
The Call
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst
The Call successfully merges multiple state-of-the-art AI models with the cultural heritage of music (choral folk music), creating a distinctive and original artistic work. It stands out not only for its innovative use of technology but also for its engagement with pressing societal issues such as copyright and intellectual property in the context of AI. By bringing together diverse communities (fifteen choirs around UK), the project highlights the collaborative potential of AI in the context of the arts, societies, and communities. The Call demonstrates how contemporary artistic practices can critically reflect on the evolving relationship between cultural heritage, society, and emerging technologies.
Transplanetary Frequencies Station
Gabriela Munguía
The Transplanetary Frequencies Station is a participatory sonic project that invites people to engage in sound walks, deep listening, and sonic actions. It explores sound as vibrant matter, connecting Earth and cosmos through improvisation. Amid ecological and social crises, Transplanetary Frequencies Station fosters awareness, radical imagination, and ancestral knowledge. The project features collective readings, site-specific actions, and speculative tools for interstellar communication, reflecting on planetary coexistence. Realized in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru, Transplanetary Frequencies Station culminates in a participatory performance where sound and voices are transmitted into the night sky via a high-powered laser—a poetic act of collective resonance and hope, imagining new forms of ecological and cosmic connection without knowing an existing receiver. An exemplary form of community building.
UNDER BOOM
Louis Braddock Clarke
The jury recognized UNDER BOOM for its innovative fusion of artistic expression and artistic research, bringing awareness to the “ever sounding surface of earth”, to geological activities, environmental change, the passage of time, and the invisible waves caused by human presence. By confronting the limits of human temporal perception, the project offers a powerful reflection on processes that extend beyond immediate experience. The project’s sonic and presentational qualities create an immersive and thoughtful artistic experience, translating complex phenomena into an emotionally resonant form. The jury valued the artist’s ability to make unseen transformations perceptible through sound and artistic interpretation.
u19–create your world
Brainrot and Making Goat Cheese
Vivian Bausch, Clara Donat, Jan G. Grünwald, Katharina Hof, Conny Lee
Screen time, media addiction, doom scrolling are all phenomena of our time. We swipe through the images, videos, and posts in which dance choreographies are lined up next to makeup tips, cooking recipes next to conspiracy theories, vacation impressions next to AI-generated fake news, kitten videos next to livestreams from the Gaza Strip. This type of media consumption was the dominant theme of the submissions in the u19–create your world category this year. What the next generation is often accused of—constantly being on their phones—weighs heavily on young people. And this new kind of stress is addressed in numerous projects in very different ways. For example, through direct engagement with internet culture. A new manifestation of this culture is “Brainrot”: a syrup full of references, partly decodable, partly Dadaist. In their podcast *MEMES – Alles nur BRAINROT? * (MEMES – Is it all just BRAINROT?), Ivan Pejić and Lukas Šokić manage to inform their listeners through their humorous approach, without any lecturing or moralizing. Their initial question, whether memes are art or a practice of dumbing down, appropriately remains unanswered. However, circling around this question offers many unobtrusive educational opportunities: What are memes? What is brainrot? What’s the deal with NFTs and crypto? And all of this in authentic language, humorous conversation, and with plenty of background knowledge.
The short film Mal Treffen (Let’s Meet) by students of HAK St. Pölten addresses the isolation that often results from too much screen time. The young people in the film play games together online and then decide to meet up again—only to be faced with the problem that there is nothing for them to do outside in public spaces. The film reflects on the lack of infrastructure for young people in cities like St. Pölten and explains why they prefer to use technical means to keep themselves busy and spend time together. Outside there is only a desolate look at a gray city. There is more space for each car than there is for the youths. The film holds a mirror up to the adults without directly attacking anyone.
Also humorous, but considerably more absurd, is the short video Handy Stopp (Cell Phone Stop) by Class 2D at BG Seekirchen, which addresses the question of how to reduce time spent on smartphones. A fictional commercial features a gadget that slaps users’ fingers when they use their phones excessively, in order to reduce their media consumption.
The principle of brainrot and the condensation of diverse themes is taken to the extreme in the project Das Ziegenkäsemachen aus der Sicht der Ziege (Making Goat Cheese from the Goat’s Perspective) by Aleksa Jović and Nico Pflügler, which is being awarded the Golden Nica this year. In their experimental video, the duo demonstrates a visual urgency that is particularly contemporary. The content addresses a variety of topics that were also found in other submissions, but here they are particularly skillfully condensed: doom scrolling as a lifestyle and brainrot as a mindset. Without, however, overexplaining or lecturing about these aspects of adolescent life reality.
In this video, the male body becomes a site of negotiation. Somewhere between mental instability and sexual fantasy. The body horror elements are reminiscent of David Cronenberg: A penis dentata as an incel counterpart to the vagina dentata? An udder on the protagonist’s belly, which seems to serve as a source of pleasure, ever present, ever outwardly visible. A meta-commentary on literature and film permeates the soundtrack: A voice throws quotations into the room, for example, from William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer or from the film Forrest Gump. The ambivalence of the video, which leaves room for interpretation, and its anarchic execution are indispensable testimonies to our (online) culture. It is a post-postmodern film that celebrates the medium so much, dissecting it and reassembling it so much that it’s hard to keep up—and that’s precisely the point. Between slow cinema and meme aesthetics, between body horror and a barrage of quotes, a work emerges that not only shows what is being told, but how it can be told. A film that knows what TikTok is—and yet remains cinema.
Beyond social media, the young people participating in u19–create your world are also concerned with topics such as democracy and participation. The website *somes – Plattform für politische Transparenz (somes – Platform for Political Transparency) by Tim Herbst, Lukas Zöhrer, and Florian Nagy is a participation tool that offers low-threshold access to political data. It thus makes a significant contribution to strengthening democracy—its urgency and relevance are obvious. Information such as voting results in parliament or the speaking time of individual members of parliament can be viewed with a click—presented clearly and easily. And those who want more can start an AI chat with the respective member of parliament. Furthermore, the transparency of the sources underlying the differentiated presentation of data and information demonstrates a responsible approach to user attention and a genuine interest in not influencing people in a particular political direction. The somes platform thus also offers a tool to counter radicalization.
Students from the BRG Hallein explore the potential consequences of radicalization in their video KOMA (COMA). The short film allows us, as viewers, to empathize with the mental strain of a student who considers going on a rampage at his school. This difficult and complex topic is presented in the video with sensitivity, rather than sensationalism—a top priority, especially when dealing with topics that address such real threat scenarios.
The animated film Totennebel (Dead Fog) by Gabriel Berger and Valerian Hobel is also in keeping with this. It addresses the topic of war—a topic that concerns us daily in current global politics. What occurs again and again is the phenomenon of dehumanization in war. People become numbers or functions. In Totennebel, an oppressive atmosphere is created without words in haunting images. The soldiers can no longer be distinguished from one another behind their gas masks. The machine gun rattles, firing at an unseen target. Just as suddenly, out of nowhere, comes the explosion that dissolves everything, without regard for personal stories or individual perspectives. The barbed wire entwines itself into the trench and guides the soldiers’ guns, turning them into puppets with no free will of their own.
The special power of art—especially in the u19–create your world category—also lies in hope. The younger generation neither closes its eyes to the world’s crises and problems, nor does it resign itself to them. It creates counter-narratives, for example in the form of heroic stories. The demand for these is demonstrated not least by the many Hollywood blockbusters in which the world is saved in a few action scenes by a select few with superhuman abilities. This form of escapism is seductive, and also laughable in its simplicity.
The superbly animated B-movie “B-VENGERS” by eight students from Klosterneuburg Special School brings this humorous aspect to life. In style and production, the film is charmingly reminiscent of South Park—snotty, unpretentious, and clever. The “superheroes” (or rather, super-antiheroes?) fight a monstrous Santa Claus and destroy an entire city in the process. The film skillfully plays with the clichés of the superhero genre—every scene, no matter how absurd, is spot-on.
A classic medium for superhero stories is also represented in this year’s projects: the comic series Der rote Rächer (The Red Avenger). The medium of comics is more than just images and text. It follows its own rules of aesthetics, composition, drama, and narrative form. With Der rote Rächer (The Red Avenger), Ilias Christoph Pernsteiner proves that he understands the medium. Using powerful, dynamic images, he tells a superhero story with original villains, demonstrating his own style and clear vision. We need heroic stories like these because they inspire us to go out and take action ourselves. And it doesn’t always have to be about saving the entire world—it can also be about concrete, solvable problems right in our own neighborhood.
For example, the opportunity to play football in the yard—something completely ordinary, as in the project Über’s Redn kumman d’Leid zaum. Fußball spielen im Hof. (Talking Brings People Together. Playing Football in the Yard.) by Mathilde and Lieselotte Prichenfried, Karim Naim, and Dominik Pichler. Playing football in the yard was suddenly no longer permitted. Instead of accepting the ban, four children from a residential complex took action: They went from door to door, collected signatures, held discussions, and organized themselves. The project impressively demonstrates what is possible when young people come together and help shape their environment. It’s not just about a game—it’s about community instead of isolation and about creating and maintaining open spaces for young people. Über’s Redn kumman d’Leid zaum (Talking brings people together.) is a living example of how children and young people can help shape society—if you listen to them. This is the fundamental idea behind the u19 motto “create your world.”
Another community project is * Green Food – Ein nachhaltiger Weg* (Green Food – A Sustainable Path) by the Green Class 2 at Europaschule Linz. It focuses on food security and the health of people and nature. Green Food is a combination of a community project and a pedagogical concept for inquiry-based learning. It combines various technological tools to share knowledge with other children in the school. The project provides a multifaceted approach to the topic of food security—for both children and adults.
All of these collaborative projects create concrete visions for the children and young people for a desirable future. The need for visions of the future is also reflected in the touching music video Damma Zukunft – Ganz ohne Hass (Let’s Create the Future – Completely without Hate) by participants of the ”Dammawos“ project / Schloss Leonstein Social-educational residential facility. In its self-written and rapped verses, it emphasizes the power and necessity of individual and collective dreams and, above all, the pooling of collective strengths. The performers’ need for protection is emotionally stirring not only in the context of the social-educational residential facility Schloss Leonstein and the crisis residential facility SKIP, where this work was created, but also because it can be seen as representative of the need for the protection of all children and their future. Securing and enabling this future should actually be the highest priority of older generations, and yet climate and environmental protection are currently being completely neglected. The argument often used is that things just aren’t that simple.
The Unsere GreenCity (Our Green City)* project proposes a very concrete solution to this problem. Two friends, Levin Du and Chenming Wu, have created a model of an environmentally friendly city. Their idea is based on the simple principle: generate and save electricity. They use mini wind turbines, solar panels, energy-supplying robots, and streetlights that only light up when someone approaches. They tell adults: “If children can build a functioning city out of pizza boxes, then adults should certainly be able to do it worldwide!”
Of course, the world is complex and all decisions must take potential risks into account. But sometimes we lose sight of the opportunities and the goal. This also applies to the current reception of artificial intelligence. A good example of this is the PA1NTING project by Nea Geršak. She likes to paint a lot, often in very abstract pictures. To help us understand how she loses herself in her paintings, she used an AI tool to create a video that visualizes her imagination and her love of nature and art. It is not just the achievement itself that is being recognized, but also the attention paid to the potential of AI. PA1NTING is a work about art, about imagination and about expressing what‘s internal as external, in which AI can be used as a tool.
Another practical application of artificial intelligence is Benjamin Gruber’s Humanoid project, which demonstrates the potential of AI to create barrier-free access. Through the innovative combination of hand, gesture, and facial recognition with voice control, the application relies entirely on intuitive interaction. The idea of making digital content easier for people with disabilities to access through gesture- and voice-based interfaces demonstrates social awareness and vision.
But not only software, also mechanical solutions can facilitate participation. With their project Boards without Barriers, the four-person product development team from HTL Rennweg—consisting of Samuel Brunner, David Chencean, Georg Kotzian, and Michal Sysel—presents a design prototype of an easy-to-use mechanical chess board developed because of a real-life need. A family member had to move into a nursing home but was unable to participate in the chess championships there due to motor impairment. Boards without Barriers demonstrates great empathy—regarding both the need for social participation and for the ergonomic requirements of specific target groups such as people with Parkinson’s disease, MS, or similar conditions.
This year’s u19–create your world projects included several technical constructions for solving problems. In addition to the mechanical chessboard, which caters to individual needs, is another project, the MagLift – Where Innovation Takes Flight by Daniel Ezike, Ben Trumler, Philipp Weissenbach, and Max Zerovnik. This project involves the use of drones in remote areas. Due to poor road conditions, for example, medical supplies must be transported there using autonomous fixed-wing aircraft that require a boost to take off. This is simplified by MagLift. It uses induced magnetic fields as a launch system instead of the cables commonly used in drones. This reduces the acceleration distance required to bring the drones to the required takeoff speed.
Another technical solution is the WWS Power Cube by Leopold Kastler. After a stay on a mountain pasture, he thought it would be practical to generate electricity from wind, water, and the sun simultaneously. The idea is creative and simple to implement.
Innovation is not only found in the technical devices, but also in the video game Beat Assault by Nina Diewald, Lucas Hinteregger, Lina Mottl, Mariella Pranjic, and Leonard Dirnhofer. There are many different versions of video games that integrate music into gameplay. Beat Assault, however, truly combines the elements of music and gameplay in a new way. It’s not just about collecting different instruments and playing a note at the right moment, as you know from other games, but also about hitting enemies with the notes, with each instrument behaving differently. The combination of music and PvP gameplay, along with the harmonious graphics and consistent design, results in an interesting and innovative game. A good idea meets professional implementation.
This also applies to DETAIL IN LIFE by Sophie Kurz. She combines photography, text, and fashion to encourage reflection. Architecture and locations from all over Austria are featured on her self-made, wide-sleeved shirts, which symbolize the lightness of everyday life. She develops her own aesthetic and presents it in an interdisciplinary portfolio.
Artistic works often address role clichés and toxic gender stereotypes in the form of a serious plea or appeal. Wenn’s Sein Muss (If you have to) by students of the Bundesrealgymnasium (BRG) Hallein on the other hand, attempts to convey the message without a wagging finger, but with plenty of humor. A soccer match as a scene of toxic masculinity—albeit in reverse, featuring female players. They spit, swear, attack each other, and during the break they talk about male acquaintances as conquests or objects whose appearance they judge. When several young men enter the room, visibly uncomfortable with the situation, they are debased and laughed at. Nevertheless, they ask if they can play and, in the absence of alternatives, are grudgingly allowed to, with the words: “If we have to.” Through the tried-and-tested method of reversal, this short film not only creates comedy, but its escalation also highlights the absurdity of the behavior, the absolute senselessness of toxic masculinity.
The project Lines We Draw by Joy Grasser, Elina Kaufmann, Alica Hintermayer, and Maya Neidhart focuses on direct physical contact and the violation of personal space. The importance of respecting the boundaries of others is difficult for many people to grasp. The project uses an interactive installation to illustrate where the boundaries of the exhibited figure are being violated, acoustically through heartbeats and visually through projections. The project is based on an online survey. The experience of personal boundaries being violated potentially affects everyone—especially young people—even if the mannequin used, with its waist, breasts, and standardized figure, can be interpreted as female.
The installation * Die moderne Hausfrau* (The Modern Housewife) by Barbara Reiter, Luna Hörstlhofer, Lucia Kottar-Trimmel, and Rosa Gottwald is dedicated to a different kind of female norm. The constructed role of the housewife is questioned pointedly and in many different ways—both historically and in terms of content. At its center is a kitchen cabinet, flanked by an advertisement from the 1950s: the ideal image of the housewife as it was disseminated through the media and commercially exploited. Three drawers structure the installation: kitchen utensils as symbols of reproductive labor; feminist protests, historical resistance, and influential figures; and a look at the present—at “tradwives” and the reactivation of classic role models in the digital space. Without moralizing, the work succeeds in opening up a differentiated and sensitive space for reflection. Die moderne Hausfrau (The Modern Housewife) creates a precise bridge between historical enlightenment and conceptual art. With intellectual precision and emotional depth, the work creates a multi-layered context that invites you to critically reflect on gender images, social attributions, and individual positioning.
In all of the submitted projects, the urgency of perceiving a world at a potential tipping point is unmistakable—from the exuberantly emotional portrayal in Das Ziegenkäsemachen aus der Sicht der Ziege (Making Goat Cheese from the Goat’s Perspective) to the clear, sober stance in somes – Plattform für politische Transparenz (somes – Platform for Political Transparency).
In between, we encounter entertaining and subversive ideas and projects that aim to make the world—or at least the shared space we directly experience—a little better. We see inventions that solve concrete problems; technologies that allow barrier-free access and thus enable participation for specific groups of people; artificial intelligence as well as mechanical, haptic design—depending on what is needed at the time.
The young people in this country have many things on their minds, in their heads, and in their hands. They desire a thoughtful coexistence and are tired of constantly waiting for the older generations or having to explain everything to them. The projects in the u19–create world category are an invitation to walk this path together with them.
Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity
Statement of the Jury
Regina Rusz, Katalin Tünde Huber, Thomas Kloiber, Veronika Liebl, Gerfried Stocker
This is the fifth year that Ars Electronica and the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs jointly present the Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity, which highlights the profound intersection of art, technology, and human values. As jury members, we recognize the essential role of artistic reflection in navigating the complexities of our digital transformation. Art and culture offer unique and critical insights into what it means to be human in the 21st century.
The importance of this reflection lies in its capacity to challenge dominant narratives, provoke ethical debate, and propose imaginative futures. This year’s submissions addressed a wide range of urgent concerns—ranging from algorithmic bias and grief to memory loss, feminist agency, and the construction of identity in a technologically mediated world. Across all projects, there was a shared desire to use technology not for its own sake, but as a medium for preserving dignity, promoting diversity, and advocating for justice and solidarity.
The jury was especially compelled by artistic explorations that combined a socially constructive application of AI technologies with a critical reflection on its implications and limitations. Many of the submissions foregrounded the voices and experiences of marginalized communities while questioning the power structures embedded in data, design, and access. These projects reflected a digital humanism that prioritizes empathy, inclusivity, and ethical responsibility—and that insists on placing human rights and social values at the core of technological development.
The 2025 Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity is awarded to Synthetic Memories by Domestic Data Streamers, while the Honorary Mention goes to AI Nüshu. Despite their differing artistic expressions, both projects explore the profound themes of memory, language, and identity—concepts that lie at the core of human experience. Each work engages artificial intelligence not merely as a tool, but as a medium for asking fundamental questions about who we are, where we come from, and how we wish to evolve in the digital age.
Synthetic Memories stood out to the jury for its deeply human-centered approach to AI. By transforming fragile or undocumented memories into collaboratively generated visual reconstructions, it enables emotional reconnection and preserves personal narratives at risk. AI Nüshu, meanwhile, presents a powerful speculative narrative rooted in a unique historical and cultural practice to explore how AI might give rise to a feminist, non-Western language.
The jury found the shared focus of both projects particularly striking. While one works through the personal and therapeutic, and the other through the symbolic and subversive, both engage with AI as a means of cultural preservation and innovation. By balancing constructive, socially meaningful uses of AI with critical reflection on its limitations and risks, Synthetic Memories and AI Nüshu invite us to consider where humanity and AI intersect—and where we want that intersection to lead. In honoring these projects, the jury affirms the power of art not only to interpret technological transformation, but to shape it in ways that are ethically grounded and profoundly humane.
Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity
Synthetic Memories
Domestic Data Streamers
Synthetic Memories is a socially engaged heritage preservation project that uses generative AI to reconstruct personal memories at risk of being lost—especially those never visually recorded. Through guided interviews, participants recount experiences, which are translated into AI-generated visuals that evolve through collaborative refinement. This intimate process supports individuals affected by displacement, trauma, or neurodegenerative diseases, allowing them to reconnect with their personal histories, restore a sense of identity, and dignify their lived experiences. By operating at the intersection of storytelling, technology, and emotional healing, the project reimagines how memory can be preserved and honored in the digital age.
Launched in 2023 by Domestic Data Streamers and expanded in 2024 with the Citizens’ Office of Synthetic Memories at the Design Hub Barcelona, the initiative has evolved into a prototype for memory-based municipal services and public archives. The project’s participatory model fosters intergenerational and cross-cultural dialogue while engaging with the ethical tensions between subjective memory and AI interpretation. With over 10,900 visitors and 300 memory reconstruction sessions during its exhibition period, the project demonstrates the potential of AI as a tool for collective remembrance and therapeutic support. It continues to grow through academic collaborations, artistic exploration, and partnerships in the fields of mental health, migration, and human rights.
The jury recognizes Synthetic Memories as a powerful and constructive example of how AI can be used not to replace memory, but to engage with it for reflection, healing, and intergenerational exchange. It takes a comprehensive and ethically sensitive approach to the culture of remembrance—highlighting how technology can support identity formation and emotional well-being, particularly among vulnerable communities. In doing so, it reframes AI not as a neutral tool, but as an active participant in shaping how we recall, process, and share the stories that define us.
Honorary Mention
AI Nüshu (Women’s Script)
Yuqian Sun
AI Nüshu is a fantastic interactive art project that merges computational linguistics with the cultural legacy of Nüshu—a unique, centuries-old language developed and used exclusively by women in Hunan Province, China. Deprived of formal education and written language, these women created Nüshu as a secret form of communication and solidarity within a patriarchal society. Drawing inspiration from this historical act of resistance, the project uses AI agents to simulate how these women may have invented their own linguistic system, envisioning a new language that emerges organically from machine learning processes.
In contrast to pre-defined, rule-based artificial languages, AI Nüshu evolves through the agents’ observations and interactions with their environment. It does not follow predetermined linguistic models like Morse code or constructed languages, but rather mirrors the organic, contextual development of human language. By integrating cultural narratives into an AI framework, the project challenges the conventional hierarchy in which humans create and teach language to machines.
The jury recognizes AI Nüshu as a visionary contribution that critically examines the nature of language, agency, and machine learning through a culturally rich and historically resonant lens. At a time when Chinese AI models are accelerating rapidly, this project provides a compelling counter-narrative—rooted in Chinese history and feminist resistance—that interrogates the epistemologies underpinning large language models (LLMs). The project not only highlights the power of marginalized voices but also repositions culture as an essential force in the future development of AI. AI Nüshu exemplifies how art can leverage history, gendered perspectives, and computational innovation to reflect critically on technology, using cultural memory not just as inspiration, but as a transformative tool to shape more inclusive and ethically conscious AI systems.
Isao Tomita Special Prize
Statement of the Digital Musics & Sound Art Jury
Miriam Akkerman, Dietmar Lupfer, Kamila Metwaly, Ali Nikrang, Nao Tokui
Isao Tomita Special Prize
ebb tide
evala
In his sound installation ebb tide, Japanese sound artist evala demonstrates that the simple act of listening can be a transformative experience. He invites visitors to sit on a structure with intentionally minimal visual elements and allows them to be absorbed by the sound. The piece has no designated listening spot, no beginning, and no end. By defying traditional definitions of music and offering a new sensory experience, evala reflects his long-standing dedication to elevating auditory senses in our vision-centric world—emphasizing the importance of slowing down and being present. This ethos is perfectly captured in his series title See by Your Ears.
This piece was one of several installations presented at his solo exhibition at NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo, which drew an unprecedented number of visitors for a sound art exhibition. The jury found great value in how it democratized sound art, aligning with Tomita’s vision of bringing novel music and sound to the general public.
Isao Tomita was known for his interest and passion in surround and spatial music. It stands as a testament to his legacy to give an award bearing his name to an artist dedicated to creating auditory experiences that are only possible through multiple audio channels and space.
