Valenium Digital Art Prize 2025

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Valenium Prize 2025

The Valenium Digital Art Prize continues to evolve, reflecting the dynamic nature of digital art. In 2025, the Valenium Digital Art Prize was awarded in two categories:

Anna Ridler & Sofia Crespo
Artists of the Year

Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler were selected by the jury for their continued exploration of past representational gestures, their confrontation with AI tools, as well as their commitment to the environment, nature and their quests to better understand the world around us. Their cohesive collaboration, the strength of their works, the theme represented, the expansion and connection of their practice, and its maturity pushed the jury members to select the two artists in this category.

The Artists of the Year was awarded 15,000CHF and will be provided with visibility opportunities. The Bank will also organise a Solo Show or a special exhibition in a cultural institution within the following 12 months.

Cezar Mocan with “World Upstream”
Emerging Artist

Cezar Mocan’s piece “World Upstream” was selected by our jury after a call for applications, open to all artists who had previously created on-chain digital artworks

The piece is an inquiry into leisure that also questions technology and the future, tackling a fictional future that takes for granted the embodiment of AI and the utopian promise of freedom through automation. The work exists in a game engine and is presented as a film which edits itself in real time. A never-ending loop.

The Winner was awarded 5,000CHF and will be provided with visibility opportunities. His piece will also be added to the Valenium Digital Art Collection.

“World Upstream is an inquiry into leisure that also questions technology and the future, tackling a fictional future that takes for granted the embodiment of AI and the utopian promise of freedom through automation.”

Photos of the winners with our jury members: Sebastien Montabonel, Rani Jabban, Eleonora Brizi, Mimi Nguyen and Marlène Corbun (missing : Alejandro Cartagena) in Basel during the ceremony.

The 2025 Finalists of the Emerging Artist Category

“Inventory Numbers #44 explores physical and spiritual entanglement across time and space, blurring boundaries of identity and chronology to form a shared, dynamic archive.”

Andreas Rau

Inventory Numbers #44

A multimedia installation combining silhouettes from the Finnish National Museum with the artist’s own archive, exploring physical and spiritual entanglement across time and space. Through overlapping bodies, shifting arrangements, robotic inventory readings, and data-driven music, the work blurs boundaries of identity and chronology to form a shared, dynamic archive.

“Vanishing of the Genuine: Bone Flag is a liquid meditation, guiding viewers through undulating synthetic and organic forms created from photographs of everyday objects.”

Bard Ionson

Vanishing of the Genuine: Bone Flag

A liquid meditation, guiding viewers through undulating synthetic and organic forms created from photographs of everyday objects, highlighting their significance in our consumer culture and their impact on the natural world. Un rappel poignant de la menace que représente la pollution causée par l'homme. A poignant reminder of the threat posed by human-induced pollution, offering a paradoxical ode to the elegance and vulnerability of the natural world.

“Mass #64 is a fully on-chain 3D relational artwork where shared space fractures into personal, ever-shifting perspectives, reflecting and subverting the architectures of digital connection.”

James Bloom

Mass #64

A fully on-chain 3D relational artwork where shared space fractures into personal, ever-shifting perspectives. Mass logs on-chain actions to generate dynamic visual feedback, then disrupts communication through intentional bugs, breaking coherence. Surveillance, presence, and dysfunction converge in a networked environment that unites and isolates, reflecting—and subverting—the architectures of digital connection.

Leander Herzog

Extraflip

A generative WebGL piece where recursive tree structures evolve into dense point compositions, revealing complexity from minimalist rules. Extraflip explores emergence through millions of computed dots, bridging digital logic and physical form via an aluminum dibond print. Originally created for the MATTER & DATA exhibition in Basel in 2024, and minted on Tezos, the piece reflects on the tension between simple code and overwhelming visual density.

“Substratum explores authenticity and artifice through AI and image reproduction, reflecting on digital imperfection, self-perception, and the playful tension between exactitude and infinite possibility.”

Travis LeRoy

Substratum

A generative work from the Omnia Ludens series, Substratum explores authenticity and artifice through AI and image reproduction. Southworth repurposes printer test images—symbols of precision and impermanence—as prompts for AI diffusion models, blending mechanical control with generative chaos. Rooted in his background as a photo retoucher, the piece reflects on digital imperfection, self-perception, and the playful tension between exactitude and infinite possibility.

aurèce vettier

la traversée de la forêt

A digital study for a monumental tapestry exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, expanding the artist’s visual alphabet developed through explorations of ‘sur-nature’ and ‘sur-reality.’ This shift in scale deepens narrative density and tests new compositional tools for creating contemporary history paintings.

“My body is a surreal machine is a generative video work where glitching visuals expose the tension between the female body and algorithmic ideals, reclaiming presence in a system that demands conformity.”

Ivona Tau

My body is a surreal machine

A generative video work at the edge of collapse, where glitching and stuttering visuals expose the tension between the female body and algorithmic ideals. Trained on biased data, the machine constructs a distorted femininity shaped by deepfakes, social media, and AI. Here, beauty becomes code—iterated, compressed, perfected. But the body resists, breaking the loop with every glitch, reclaiming presence in a system that demands conformity.

“nullMachines++53 is a code-based collaboration blending hand-drawn pixel art and generative logic to create absurd animated machines that endlessly push boxes with no clear purpose.”

Kerim & Loackme

nullMachines++53

A code-based collaboration blending hand-drawn pixel art and generative logic to create absurd animated machines that endlessly push boxes with no clear purpose. Each browser-based iteration is unique, procedurally generated via JavaScript, merging personal experience with mass reproducibility—playfully blurring the line between art, product, and algorithm.

Marcel Schwittlick

Caltech Studies

A real-time generative artwork displayed on a high-resolution e-ink panel, Caltech Studies (realtime e-ink) merges AI and drawing to explore machine perception and artistic intent. Using outlines from the Caltech 101 dataset and a custom software-driven cursor, Marcel Schwittlick creates iterative compositions that reflect a machine’s learning process—systematic, imperfect, and poetic. The result is a quiet dialogue between algorithmic logic and human constraint, rendered in ink-like precision without light or energy consumption.

The finalists were celebrated in Lisbon, in a special exhibition highlighting their pioneering outlook and the selected pieces.

The 2025 Edition Jury

The prize was supported by a panel of experts and curators from the traditional art world and the digital art space, led by Sebastien Montabonel.

Valenium Prize 2025

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