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Prix
The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
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 Will the work remain resonant when today’s hardware is obsolete, touching the human condition with lasting clarity?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.