2025 Jury

2025 S+T+ARTS Prize Jury

All submissions are judged by a jury to decide on the two prize-winning projects and up to ten honorary mentions.

2025 S+T+ARTS Prize Advisors

The advisors are renowned international consultants with expertise in this field. They recommend projects and encourage a wide range of potential participants to submit proposals. In addition, they ensure a balance in terms of gender and geographical origin of the participants.

A Spark of Light in the Darkness

Statement of the STARTS Prize’25 Jury
Francesca Bria, Veronica D’Souza, Thomas Gegenhuber, Irini Papadimitriou, Asako Tomura

While considering this year’s STARTS prize entries, being aware of the fact that the spirit of the competition is to support and champion work that brings together much needed exchange between science, technology, and the arts, while also addressing urgent societal challenges, we can’t help but remind ourselves that this selection process comes at particularly shaky times.

Today’s reality is that not only do we continue to face socioeconomic, geopolitical, ecological, and technological challenges, we are witnessing a wave of global political disruption, ongoing conflict, and a deepening ecological crisis. Progressing to times of growing economic turmoil and inequality, climate catastrophe, and threats of nuclear war, while unregulated tech and blind faith in AI endure, the need for research and work that open up new narratives and help us re-focus, is bigger than ever. Similarly, the importance of the STARTS initiative, encouraging and advocating for such work cannot be underestimated.

In the midst of a political turn that looks to blow up the world order and democracy, while disinformation campaigns undermine civic trust and cause dismay when reasoning is needed the most, in this year’s submissions the jury has found critical work and voices that can make a much needed difference, bring clarity and a spark of light in the darkness. In this context, we deem it necessary to highlight extraordinary critical and collaborative approaches that challenge and reframe our relationship to technology, society, culture, and nature; projects that not only address the urgent need to continue to act and build on space for resistance, diverse voices, and critical ideas, but work and initiatives that can actually open paths to environmental and community-driven innovation, social justice narratives, and care-based infrastructures.

In this year’s Honorary Mentions and Nominations we see best practice examples that significantly contribute to our understanding of the ethical, social, and political implications of techno-solutionism, the impacts of colonial and industrial extraction on communities and environments, or urgent issues of gender-based violence. But here we also have innovative work and approaches that show how digital infrastructures and AI can connect to ecological regeneration and coexistence; and how alternative digital futures and synergies between technology and ecology are indeed possible. In this selection, the jury also wants to emphasize collaborative practices and work that make abstract scientific concepts tangible, and projects that show how technology and AI can come to the service of truth-telling, care-based data ethics, and therapeutic practices.

While we are still grappling with the impact of technologies such as AI as it continues to shape our society, reality, and imagination, we are witnessing the emergence and spread of quantum technologies that are poised to radically reshape computing, communication, and our philosophical understanding of the world. Without access to education, cultural interpretations, and debates in this emerging field, knowledge and control will remain in the hands of a few specialists creating further gaps in technological literacy, powerful knowledge, and skills essential to understand the opportunities, but also implications of this technology. Recognizing the importance of the work of LAS Art Foundation, engaging with the transformative implications of quantum mechanics and commissioning art that translates abstract quantum concepts into sensory, immersive experiences accessible to all, the jury awards this forward-thinking arts organization with the STARTS Grand Prize for Innovative Collaboration. LAS Art Foundation’s initiatives and work play a crucial role in democratizing abstract and complex scientific advancements such as quantum mechanics into experiences that people can see, feel, and reflect on. As quantum technologies shift from theory into practical application, LAS Art Foundation emphasizes the need for early cultural engagement, and in doing so, it not only enhances scientific literacy but also encourages inclusive participation in shaping the ethical and societal frameworks around emerging technologies.

Thinking back to the extremely precarious and challenging times we live in, and the urgent need for critical understanding and reflection on the relationship between technology and conflict, the jury awards unanimously the Grand Prize for Artistic Exploration to the AI War Cloud Database. An essential project integrating artistic research, open-source intelligence, and critical analysis of AI systems in military applications that deserves recognition for its critical role in illuminating the hidden entanglements between commercial AI tools and the machinery of modern warfare. The AI War Cloud Database plays a great role in shaping public debate when it comes to such a critical topic. When artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in everyday life, this project dares to confront the ethical and political implications of this integration and in particular the devastating human cost borne disproportionately by vulnerable populations.

If AI War Cloud Database shows us where we have been led by a sector dominated by obfuscation, proprietary secrecy, and techno-solutionist hype, it also forces us to think where we want to go next and what choices we make as users, developers, and investors of AI systems.

Grand Prize: Innovative Collaboration

Awarded for the innovative collaboration between industry or technology and the arts (and the cultural and creative sectors in general) that opens new pathways for innovation.

Sensing Quantum

LAS Art Foundation

As Europe steps up investments in quantum technologies, from the Quantum Flagship and EuroHPC to key industrial initiatives in chips and cloud computing, Sensing Quantum reminds us of something essential: technological sovereignty is not just about hardware, speed, or scale. It’s also about how we imagine and shape the future together.
Curated by the LAS Art Foundation, Sensing Quantum opens up the complex world of quantum science to society at large. It is a powerful example of how art and culture can make emerging technologies more transparent, more democratic, and more human. While Europe builds the physical and digital infrastructure of the future—AI factories, quantum labs, supercomputers—this program offers a vital addition. It transforms critical technologies, and abstract concepts into stories, complex systems into emotions, and scientific infrastructure into shared experience.
At the heart of this program is We Felt a Star Dying, a poetic video installation by Laure Prouvost. Created in dialogue with quantum physicists and AI systems trained on quantum data, the work translates the death of a star into a powerful meditation on fragility, impermanence, and our deep interconnections. It shows that quantum ideas, like uncertainty, entanglement, and superposition, are not just scientific theories, but metaphors that help us understand today’s global, digital, and ecological challenges.
In a time of mega-infrastructures—from data centres to quantum sensing networks—Europe must ensure that these systems serve the public good, are ethically grounded, and open to democratic participation. Sensing Quantum makes this vision tangible. It invites artists, scientists, and citizens to explore new ways of thinking about our technological future, not as passive users, but as active co-creators.

The jury celebrates Sensing Quantum as a bold model of cultural-scientific collaboration. It reflects a Europe that leads in innovation, while staying rooted in democratic values and planetary care. This program ensures that public understanding and aesthetic experimentation evolve in tandem. It is not enough to sense the quantum, we must also sense the political, emotional, and planetary implications of what we are building. This work allows us to do both.

Grand Prize: Artistic Exploration

Awarded for artistic exploration and art works where appropriation by the arts has a strong potential to influence or alter the use, deployment, or perception of technology.

AI War Cloud Database

Sarah Ciston

As Artificial Intelligence becomes central to both everyday life and modern warfare, AI War Cloud Database by Sarah Ciston offers a vital and timely investigation into how these systems operate, and the consequences they carry. The work reveals how the same machine learning tools that power recommendation engines, chatbots, and predictive algorithms are also used in military decision-making, raising urgent questions about accountability, transparency, and responsibility.
Focusing on real-world systems like Palantir’s MetaConstellation and Israel’s Lavender, AI War Cloud Database shows how vast amounts of data are processed to make life-and-death decisions at speed. It highlights how these technologies are often tested on vulnerable populations in conflict zones, before being deployed domestically on the very citizens whose countries built them.
By tracing the links between commercial AI and military infrastructure, Ciston exposes a hidden feedback loop—where tools of convenience become tools of control. At a time of growing geopolitical tensions, AI arms races, and rearmament efforts across Europe and globally, this work underscores the need for democratic oversight, ethical governance, and civic awareness in shaping our technological future.

Still in the early stages of development, AI War Cloud Database is a research-driven artistic project with exceptional promise. The jury recognizes its contribution to a rapidly evolving debate on the societal and political stakes of AI. It encourages further collaboration, deeper investigation, and broader public engagement moving forward. In the spirit of the STARTS Prize, this work exemplifies the power of art and research to illuminate complex systems—and to invite us all to take part in shaping them.

Honorary Mentions

Brain Processing Unit –
The Future Where Biology and Computer Integrate

SoftBank, Daito Manabe, The University of Tokyo – Special Exhibition

Beyond classical computing, which values logical optimization and reproducibility, and even beyond rapidly advancing quantum computing, this project explores a new frontier of creativity using the Brain Processing Unit (BPU)—a biological processor made from lab-grown brain organoids. Led by artist Daito Manabe with the University of Tokyo and SoftBank, this industry–academia–art initiative explores the roots of human creativity by introducing music and rhythm into interactions with the BPU. Particularly interesting is that, as living tissue, organoids can show fatigue or errors—responses that, as well, may challenge conventional notions of correctness and suggest alternative, possibly evolutionary, forms of intelligence. By posing essential, uncompromising questions, the artist productively disrupts the conventional research process, opening new directions and accelerating discovery. This project is a powerful example of how artist-led contributions to fundamental research can expand emerging technologies and inspire new societal visions.

Breathing Architecture

Filippo Nassetti

We live in an age of hyper-specialization. Take the medical field, for example: making meaningful progress often requires years of rigorous training and deep immersion in a specific area of expertise. Researchers must master what has come before in order to build upon it—to find better ways to understand, treat, or cure disease. And as knowledge continues to expand, specialization deepens further. Yet innovation—the act of creating something both novel and valuable—often demands a shift in perspective. It calls for a willingness to cross disciplinary boundaries and to invite in unfamiliar ways of thinking. Breathing Architecture embodies this shift. It shows how collaborations between scientists and artists can create fertile ground for analogical thinking—the kind of thinking that bridges ideas across seemingly unrelated domains. In this case, imagination met inquiry, and new therapeutic possibilities began to emerge.

Coexist

Emergence Delft

When you talk to people who start to dive into quantum technology, you often hear: “The more I learn about it, the less I understand.” What is clear: We need to embark on a journey to enhance our understanding, because one thing is clear: This technology is highly relevant and can be highly disruptive, for instance, if quantum computing can offer a computing power that can dwarf the power of supercomputers for certain problems. There are many things to appreciate about the Coexist project. It fosters a unique cooperation that brings together bright minds from universities, the arts, and ecosystem partners — not only to explore and challenge one another but also to deepen our understanding of this new technology. One outcome of the collaboration is this installation. The jury applauds the collaboration and the efforts to make the abstract concepts of quantum technologies more tangible for a broader audience.

Computational Compost

Marina Otero Verzier and Donostia International Physics Center / Prototype
Locument (Francisco Lobo, Romea Muryń, Marina Otero Verzier) / Film

Computational Compost reimagines digital infrastructure as a life-generating system, turning the waste heat from high-performance computing into energy for vermicomposting. It is a bold response to Europe’s urgent need for sustainable, sovereign, and ecologically grounded technologies. This real-world prototype, embedded in an active data centre, merges advanced physics with regenerative design. It challenges the extractive logic of today’s digital systems and offers a new model: computation that is materially aware, ecologically integrated, and democratically governed. The project aligns powerfully with the European Green Deal, the Digital Decade, and the EuroStack vision showing that climate goals, democratic data governance, and technological innovation can—and must—go hand in hand. From its use of indigenous knowledge systems like the quipu, to its architectural vision of post-extractivist infrastructure, Computational Compost offers a poetic yet practical roadmap for a digital future rooted in planetary care.

Coral Sonic Resilience

Marco Barotti 

Some of our planet’s most valuable ecosystems, coral reefs, are vital for providing shelter for thousands of marine species, but also for protecting coastal communities from erosion and storms, while being sources for medicine, food, as well as supporting businesses as spaces for recreational activities. As is the case though with other marine ecosystems, coral reefs are disappearing at an alarming rate, being threatened by both natural factors and human activity. Can art and science collaborations enable innovative ways to not only address these urgent issues, but also to provide creative solutions to restore these diverse and important ecosystems? The jury thought so when it comes to Coral Sonic Resilience, a brilliant example of art and science joining forces to repair and revitalize damaged coral reefs. Coral Sonic Resilience uses 3D printing, solar power, and soundscapes from vibrant coral reefs that help attract marine life to declined colonies. But more importantly, the underwater 3D-printed sound sculptures, created as part of this project, are installed as part of a coral reef restoration project in the Maldives, providing a new habitat to marine life, while also reviving threatened coral reefs.

Data Against Feminicide:
AI tools, transnational community, and data activism

Isadora Cruxên, Catherine D’Ignazio, Silvana Fumega, Helena Suárez Val 

While data shapes our institutions and decisions, gender-based violence remains tragically underreported, misclassified, or ignored. Data Against Feminicide responds to this silence with care and urgency. Founded by Isadora Cruxên, Catherine D’Ignazio, Silvana Fumega, and Helena Suárez Val, the project supports activists who transform missing statistics into feminist counterdata—naming lives erased by institutional neglect. Through ethical tools, shared standards, and global collaboration, it creates a network where stories, not just numbers, matter. Bridging civic tech, activism, and memory, the project reclaims data not as extraction, but as connection—a way to mourn, to resist, and to insist that every life counts.

Kataula

Ana Mikadze 

The most consumed resource on the planet and the most widely used human-made material, cement is found everywhere we turn; roads, ports, buildings, floors, the list goes on. But while being a resource we relentlessly consume, cement also has a huge impact as one of the biggest CO2 emitters, as well as causing significant environmental destruction in its production process, devastating landscapes, but also communities. It is one such story of environmental and human destruction that Kataula is very eloquently trying to tell. Kavtiskhevi village and a site of limestone quarries in Georgia has been transformed by decades of mining and extraction. Heidelberg Cement, a large multinational German company, and the world’s second largest cement producer, has been central to Kavtiskhevi’s destruction, while attempting to manipulate the narrative by positioning itself as a sustainable company. Kataula repurposes cement and quarry waste, creating artefacts that present the life and environment erased by extractivism, while telling stories Heidelberg Cement tries to suppress.

Seeing Echoes in the Mind of a Whale

Marshmallow Laser Feast

While oceans and marine ecosystems are crucial for our survival, human activities including overfishing, shipping, extractivism, and pollution, are heavily affecting the health and biodiversity of these important environments that we mostly perceive as endless resources to be exploited. And despite our significant dependence and connection with the ocean, we often ignore or feel disconnected from the life and creatures that inhabit this world that is so intertwined with ours. Some of these creatures, cetaceans, apart from their important role in reducing CO2 amounts in our atmosphere and acting as indicators of the health of our oceans, are complex, highly intelligent creatures with great cognitive skills.
Seeing Echoes in the Mind of the Whale is a beautiful, immersive experience taking us into a journey alongside three cetacean species: a humpback whale, a bottlenose dolphin, and a sperm whale. In an attempt to bring us closer to these extraordinary animals, while also urging us to reflect on how our activities impact their lives and environment, the project bridges scientific research, marine biology, and storytelling, and with the use of real-time computing, marine data, and recordings that result in stunning visualizations responding to acoustic data in real-time, allows humans, in accessible, engaging ways, to experience underwater worlds through the eyes and perspective of these amazing creatures, whose very existence is threatened by our actions.

Synthetic Memories

Domestic Data Streamers

In the 1995 film Ghost in the Shell, the fully cyborg protagonist reflects: “There are countless ingredients that make up the human body and mind, like all the components that make up me as an individual with my own personality.” Memory, the physical body, a sense of the future, and connections to vast networks of information—all shape our identity. Synthetic Memories is a sincere and compassionate initiative that seeks to preserve personal identity and dignity when memory is at risk—due to dementia or other unfortunate life events. Using interviews and contextual data, AI helps reconstruct individualized narratives, enabling people to reconnect with their past. This fosters emotional well-being and restores a sense of self. By addressing the often-overlooked realm of mental and emotional health, the team at Domestic Data Streamers highlights a vital dimension of what it means to be human. Already implemented in public services, their work shows how design and technology can collectively serve the common good—offering scalable models for collaboration and the nurturing of meaningful global communities.

The Nebelivka Hypothesis

Forensic Architecture, David Wengrow

Although cities are often seen as monuments to power, hierarchy, and extraction, ancient sites like Nebelivka suggest another beginning. Hidden beneath the fertile black soils of Ukraine, this 6,000-year-old settlement reveals a vast, organized society—yet with no palaces, temples, or ruling elites. In collaboration with archaeologist David Wengrow, Forensic Architecture explores this forgotten urbanism through soil analysis, agent-based models, and spatial reconstruction. The Nebelivka Hypothesis invites us to rethink what a city is and could be: not a center of domination, but a site of cooperation, shared life, and ecological balance. Bridging archaeology, technology, and storytelling, the project opens a space where ancient futures re-emerge.