2016 Winners

Is the mind separated from the body? #FindingSomethingBondingSound addresses this ancient philosophical question by using state-of-the-art technology to hack the brain & the body and translate their activity into sounds and images related to the deepest feelings, emotions, and motivations.

Apostroph is a prototype of a robot designed to study the intrinsic behaviors of living organisms. Standing up and counteracting gravity is characteristic of living organisms.

How will AI deal with moral dilemmas? Can artificial agents such as androids solve moral dilemmas we can’t solve ourselves? It is possible that we may be influenced by and follow the example of the ‘morally and ethically unaware’ android we have created.

A community-based smartphone project that invites citizens who are blind or partially sighted to share their own experience on the difficulties and facilities they find in their day-to-day lives.

Casa Jasmina is a two-year pilot project in the field of domestic electronic networking, or “the Internet of Things in the Home.” The aim is to integrate traditional Italian skills in furniture and interior design with emergent skills in open-source electronics. The project is a showplace inside a large industrial building already shared by Toolbox…

Crowdcrafting is a crowdsourcing, citizen science or microtasking platform developed by Scifabric and powered by PYBOSSA our open source technology, where researchers or citizens can create a research project in a matter of minutes without having to develop a single line of code, since we provide the templates and tools that will help them kick…

D-CENT is a Europe-wide project that has brought together citizen movements and grassroots organizations that have revolutionized democracy in Europe in the past years, and is developing the next generation of open source, distributed, and privacy-aware tools for direct democracy and economic empowerment.

Environment Dress is a smart dress that measures the aggressiveness of the environment to analyze how it affects people’s mood and behavior.

The experimental music video for Floating Points (the name under which English musician and neuroscientist Sam Shepherd performs), portrays an abstract oscillating light that evolves through the music in different life forms. All lights are in-camera produced effects that are made by a self-developed light paint machine.

Floraform is a generative design system inspired by the biomechanics of growing leaves and blooming flowers which explores the development of surfaces through differential growth. We created a simulation of a differentially growing elastic surface that functions as a digital garden. Within the system, we can explore how biological systems create form by varying growth…

HACKberry is an open-source 3D-printable bionic arm (i.e. motorized hand that a person missing a hand can control intuitively via muscle signals in their residual arm). All the technical data including 3D CAD file, software code, circuit diagram, and bill of materials are disclosed as open-source under Creative Commons license.

Although plants lack nervous systems, they can, much like animals, become electro-chemically stimulated by their surrounding environment. Measuring this, we begin to understand the stimulus-response mechanisms that make up their primitive intelligence. Networked together we’ve harnessed their collective intelligence, exploring new forms of bio-cooperative interaction. The result is half garden, half autonomous vehicle a cybernetic…

Instruments are created to transform contamination into valuable materials, by employing plants and engineered bacteria. Instead of mining material from geological sources and using fossil fuels that lead to environmental harm, could future generations use the contamination and pollution we leave behind to build their future world? Can they build balanced relationships with the natural…

This is a music video of “Cold Stares”, a collaboration between Los Angeles-based artist and beatmaker Nosaj Thing, who is actively working around the world, and rapper Chance The Rapper. A dance piece by two dancers was produced to express the message in the lyrics their mental situation and conflict searching for reason of being…

The Processing Foundation’s mission is to promote software literacy within the visual arts, and visual literacy within technology-related fields. Our goal is to empower people of all interests and backgrounds to learn how to program and make creative work with code, especially those who might not otherwise have access to these tools and resources.

Project Nimbus (2015) achieved the inaugural projection of moving images onto clouds from aircraft. The image (Horse in Motion – Muybridge 1878) is a shared cultural reference between art & science. Beyond the spectacle, genuine collaboration was underpinned by art as research, involving aviators, technologists, and cultural specialists, driven by the power of idea and…

Located at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C., Sentient Chamber is a free-standing pavilion integrating innovative near-living technologies developed by the Living Architecture Systems Group. Sentient Chamber is composed of a flexible meshwork canopy, housing a network of kinetic mechanisms that use dense arrays of microprocessors and sensors.

Time Displacement – Chemobrionic Garden explores a relationship between hydrothermal chemistry, the passage of time, and the evolution of sound. The project consists of several small chemical garden formations in a water glass (sodium metasilicate) solution, to provide an insight into research on the origin of life and on chemical processes.