Lumen Prize Announces 2025 Finalists
99 Artworks Charting the Future of Art in the Age of Digital Agency
With 2,243 submissions from 71 countries, 2025 was a record year for The Lumen Price, now in its 14th year.
Later today on the No Proscenium Podcast, Lumen Price CEO Gillian Leitten joins us to talk with us about the prize which celebrates artists forging new systems of meaning through technology’s evolving creative frontier, with special emphasis on the Hybrid and Experiential categories.
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The Lumen Prize Announces 2025 Finalists, 99 Artworks Charting the Future of Art in the Age of Digital Agency
With a record-breaking 2,243 submissions from 71 countries, this milestone year for The Lumen Prize celebrates 99 visionary works forging new systems of meaning through technology’s evolving creative frontier.
New York, 15 August 2025 — The Lumen Prize, the world’s leading award celebrating art created with technology, announces the 99 finalist works across nine categories for its 14th annual Prize. Marking a milestone year, the 2025 awards received over 2,200 submissions from 71 countries, reflecting an unprecedented diversity of artistic approaches, technologies, and thematic explorations.
Upholding Lumen’s rigorous two-stage judging process, each submission was reviewed by a minimum of two members of the International Selectors Committee (ISC). This year’s ISC (Lumen’s largest to date), comprised over 85 experts from globally renowned institutions, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate, the Onassis Foundation, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, NVIDIA, Google, and many more. Following this initial review, finalists were selected in each category and presented to an esteemed Jury, who will determine the 2025 award winners.
Reflecting the growing complexity and intersectionality of contemporary arts technologies, the 2025 Prize expanded its category offerings. Artists were invited to submit work across nine distinct categories, including:
Still Image Finalists:
Finalists in this year’s Still Image Award explore a diverse range of visual languages and technologies, from simulated ancestral memory to critiques of surveillance and the uncanny presence of synthetic nature. Many works deliberately reject ‘hyper-polish’ in favor of emotional and technological vulnerability, embracing raw textures and fragmented aesthetics. Across the board, these works showcase a push towards using stillness not as a limitation, but as a charged space for reflection, tension, and resonance. The 14 finalist works in the Still Image category are:
Esteban Amaro — In The Past Hides The Future
Gretchen Andrew — Facetune Portrait — Universal Beauty, Nigeria (gown)
Aphic — After Walker Evans 2
Ana María Caballero — The Sylphs
Danielle Ezzo — An Incantation in Twelve Prompts
Kevin Esherick — I’m With You
Kevin Esherick — Hyperportrait I
Susanne Fagerlund — Specimen #1 — #6
Ellii — Polyamour mon Amour
Chikai Ohazama — Anomalia (AK10)
Liat Segal — Hyperreality
Jessica Tucker — Candid
Pindar Van Arman — Reflection
aurèce vettier — we will make you bow to the delicate
Moving Image Finalists:
Entries in the Moving Image category lean into non-linear narratives, generative systems, and machinic or algorithmic vision. Traditional storytelling gives way to loops, moods, and memory-scapes, with grief, identity, and fractured time acting as central motifs. These works often use AI, gaming engines, and found footage to displace human authorship and shift the cinematic lens. The 15 finalist works in the Moving Image category are:
Andrea Balestrero — Broken Mirror
Sofia Crespo — Structures of Being
Anna Giralt Gris — Membrana
Jeremy Kamal — Mojo: The Floods
Muwen Li — BITFLIP
Monica Menez — SPECIMENS OF CREATIVITY — THE MUSEUM OF DEAD PROFESSIONS
Entangled Others — self-contained
Yuko Suzuki — meta-landscapes
Niceaunties — Goddess
David Sheldrick — Inconvenient Realities
Ivona Tau — A Life Passed By (My Grandmother’s Memories)
Carlos Velandia and Angélica Restrepo — This is not your Garden
Zhongyao Wang — Pixel Metabolism, Interface Ulcer
Yufan Xie — Are We Gazing at the Same Moon?
YZA Voku — SUTURA.
Performance & Music:
Artists in the Performance & Music category challenged and expanded traditional genre boundaries, imagining hybrid forms at the intersection of sound, movement, and code. These works merged bodies into interfaces and compositions into systems through motion capture, biosignalling, and generative audio. Rather than simply performing with technology, these artists perform through it, creating live, responsive dialogues that redefine what performance can mean in a computational age. The 12 finalist works in the Performance & Music category are:
Guy Ben-Ary — Revivification
Thijs Biersteker — Memories of the Melted
Eva Davidova — Audience As Virus
Maria Finkelmeier — Hourglass
fuse* — Onirica ()
Lisa Jamhoury — Maquette
Cha Jinyeob — Body-Go-Round
Yichu Li — YICHU 1.0
Laura Mannelli — Umweltraum((a))
Nicholas Medvescek — Ritual / System
Vadim Mirgorod — Subtle States
Ben Neal & Kerryn Wise — Replica
Fashion & Design:
Submissions to the Fashion & Design Award imagine garments and spaces not as static creations but as living, adaptive systems. Designers engage with speculative materials, digital dress, and bio-responsive textiles, crafting environments and objects that breathe, sense, and speak. Fashion becomes a carrier of memory and provocation, architecture a medium for emotion. These works fuse body, technology, and environment, offering poetic and political visions of wearability and space. The four finalist works in the Fashion & Design category are:
CuteCircuit — The SoundShirt
SCAD Awards — Custom Knit
Yiming Cheng — The Bleaching Skin
Zixiong Wei — 3D printed footwear- SCRY Vault
Hybrid (Digital/Physical):
Entries in the Hybrid category straddle between digital and material worlds, crafting tactile, multi-sensory ecosystems that collapse binary boundaries. Artists create layered experiences that invite audiences to feel data, embody stories, and encounter meaning in breath, light, texture, and motion. The 13 finalist works in the Hybrid (Digital/Physical) category are:
Arvida Byström — Biblically Accurate Babe
Marco Conti Šikić — REPLICATIO
Akinori Goto — In motion
Yunso Jung — Mind in Motion
Entangled Others — liquid strata
Lundahl & Seitl — River Biographies
Paula Sello — Auroboros — Biomimicry
Bjørn Staal — Entangled
Lachlan Turczan — Lucida (I–VI)
Carlo Van de Roer and Taika Waititi — Toru
aurèce vettier — la traversée de la forêt (crossing the forest)
Ziwei Wu — Mimicry
Yoki Yao — Whisper
Experiential:
This year’s Experiential entries invite audiences to go beyond watching or listening. Artists expose audiences to haptic storytelling, responsive environments, and immersive sonic landscapes, grounding the body in the digital space. Many operate as living systems that adapt and react, transforming passive spectators into co-creators. Sensation, memory, and emotion are rendered as architectural elements, turning narrative into something spatial, embodied, and deeply participatory. The 16 finalist works in the Experiential category are:
Sophia Bulgakova — OTHERWORLDS
Sofia Crespo — Perpetual Present
Emil Dam Seidel & Dorotea Saykaly — Telos I
evala — Sprout ‘fizz’
Yashika Goel — Machine Yearning
Ji He — Artemis — An Artificial Ecosystem Composed of Bionic Automata
Daniel Iregui — FORTUNES
Daniel Iregui — NEST / SONAR
Gabor Kitzinger — The Memory of Folds
Cody Lukas — Plato’s Prisoners
Daniela Nedovescu — DEUTSCH / NICHT DEUTSCH
Murphy Nile (Ziling Zhou) — CONTROL CLUB
Piet Schmidt — Towards Matter, Particularly
u2p050 — Faux Positif
Robert Walton — Flashover
Yuxuan Weng — InsectSync 2.0
Literature & Poetry:
This year’s Literature & Poetry entrants reshape narrative storytelling, moving beyond the page into interactive, performative, and algorithmic forms. AI co-authorship is presented alongside intimate digital confessionals and multi-lingual poetic systems. These works explore language as code, as ritual, and as a living, evolving organism. Technology becomes one with voice, rhythm, and memory, offering radical new ways of writing and reading in the digital age. The eight finalists in the Literature & Poetry category are:
Jakub Koźniewski — SHADOW OF DOUBT
Andreas Lutz — Abstract Language Model
Wen New Atelier — Miniscriber
Kian Peng ONG — Cloud Scripts
Pham Phan Nhan — Dự án tiếng Việt (Our Vietnamese Project)
Nathaniel Stern — Generation to Generation: Conversing with Kindred Technologies
Sasha Stiles — WORDS BEYOND WORDS
赵昶然 (Zhao Changran) — Space Chronicles
Nature & Climate:
Submissions to the Nature & Climate Award shift from representing nature to collaborating with it. Artists visualize the unseen forces of ecological crisis, crafting works that speak not about but with forests, weather systems, and vanishing species. Climate anxiety, data grief, and environmental storytelling converged in speculative ecosystems that reframe catastrophe as transformation. These artists explore what it means to feel with the planet and to imagine new forms of kinship in a time of flux. The 10 finalist works in the Nature & Climate category are:
Louis-Paul Caron — Incendies
Andrey Chugunov — a space for encapsulation
Sofia Crespo — Perpetual Present
John Ingle — Surge
Jeremy Kamal — Mojo: The Floods
Cesar & Lois — Being hyphaenated (Ser hifanizado)
Sissel Marie Tonn — The Sentinel Self
Entangled Others — self-contained
Zhang Tianyi — The Plant Intelligence Plan
Konstantine Vlasis — 2124
Identity & Culture:
The entries for this year’s Identity & Culture Award explore the complexities of selfhood in a digitized, diasporic world. Memory, trauma, heritage, and hybridity emerge through AI, sound synthesis, and generative storytelling. Rather than treating identity as fixed, many artists propose it as a fluid code — unstable and ever-adaptive — that reveals digital space not as a neutral medium but as a terrain for reclamation and resistance. The seven finalist works in the Identity & Culture category are:
Tiri Kananuruk — Cumulus
Amy Karle — The Golden Archive, Amy Karle, 2023–2024
Linh My Truong — Mapping the Journey
Niceaunties — Aunties In Dis Place
Navid Navab — Organism
SPEKTRA — Scatteredscapes
Tengchao Zhou — Southern Wind Algorist: Merging Nine Algorithms with Nine Gay Stories Written in Classical Chinese
“This year’s finalists represent a profound shift in how artists work with technology, and how we think about the arts as a whole,” said Gillian Leitten, CEO of Lumen Prize. “These artists are building entirely new ways of making meaning. They are creating work that feels deeply personal and human by forging new creative modes that respond to our rapidly changing world, while actively engaging with that change. Their work doesn’t just respond to our shifting reality; it helps us understand it.”
Key highlights of the 2025 Lumen Prize include:
The highest entry year to date with over 2,200 works submitted (a 31% Increase YOY) and over 71 countries represented
This year also introduces four new award categories, reflecting an expanding intersectionality within the digital art ecosystem: Performance & Music, Literature & Poetry, Fashion & Design, and Hybrid (Digital / Physical). These additions acknowledge the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of digital practice and the fluid boundaries between mediums.
A distinct shift in tone emerged in this year’s Lumen Prize applications. In contrast to previous years when artists largely approached technology as responders or curious explorers, 2025 sees practitioners actively composing new modes within it. Artists shape the technology, asserting agency over the tools integral to their creative process.
This year marks a significant milestone for The Lumen Prize, as it prepares to release its inaugural publication on the evolving landscape of digital art, informed by data from the 2025 application cycle. The Liminal Review: New Signals in Arts Technologies draws on insights from over 2,200 submissions and promises to illuminate dimensions of the digital art world that have, until now, remained largely uncharted.
Upcoming events:
V&A Museum Showcase: Select Lumen Prize finalists will be featured during the V&A’s Digital Design Weekend, taking place from September 19–21, 2025. Following its London debut, the showcase will travel to New York, where the screening will be presented and celebrated at Onassis ONX the following week.
The Lumen Prize Celebrates Its First-Ever Trend Report: To celebrate the launch of The Liminal Review: New Signals in Arts Technologies, on September 24, The Lumen Prize and Onassis ONX will host a special evening featuring curated screenings of finalist works, conversations with leading industry voices, and a celebratory reception. The milestone event marks the release of The Lumen Prize’s first annual publication examining the evolving landscape of art made with technology. Developed in collaboration with Sónar+D and with support from Metaversal and Onassis ONX, the review draws on insights from over 2,200 submissions to the 2025 Prize, mapping the emerging themes, technologies, and practices shaping the field.
Lumen Prize Award Ceremony at Kunstsilo: This year’s Lumen Prize Award Ceremony will be hosted in partnership with Kunstsilo at their remarkable museum in Kristiansand, Norway. The celebration will span an entire weekend of curated events, including a featured artist conversation, panel discussions, and a new site-specific installation by Lumen alumni artists Lab212. The festivities will culminate in the 2025 Lumen Prize Award Ceremony, where this year’s winners will be formally announced.
To date, The Lumen Prize has awarded over $125,000 in prize money since 2012, celebrating more than 900 finalists and winners.
For more information about The Lumen Prize, finalists, and upcoming events, visit www.lumenprize.org.
About The Lumen Prize
The Lumen Prize celebrates and promotes artists working with technology globally, providing the pre-eminent platform for showcasing artists pioneering new visual languages at the intersection of art and technology. Past winners include artists Refik Anadol, Sougwen Chung, Mario Klingemann, Malitzin Cortés (CNDSD), Iván Abreu, Operator, and Casey Reas.
The Lumen Prize partners with some of the industry’s leading innovators, hailing from such organisations as The V&A Museum, The Whitney, LAS Art Foundation, M+ Hong Kong, PHI, Goldsmiths, and The Royal Academy of Arts, to name but a few.
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