Open Call Winners 2025

CIFRA takes part in POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair 2025, presenting fifteen winning artworks from the fourth CIFRA Award, displayed on sustainable Upframes — innovative display systems built from repurposed monitors. This presentation underscores CIFRA’s commitment to environmentally conscious digital art and highlights new voices in the global media art landscape. The CIFRA Award was established to spotlight works that break through the screen in an age oversaturated with moving images. It recognizes artists who create meaning in an era of infinite playback — works that challenge systems, break silences, and open space for what is often overlooked. Nomadic in nature, the award shifts its format and location with each edition, from LOOP Barcelona to Art Night Venezia and now POSITIONS Berlin. Every year, CIFRA celebrates the most exciting work in media art — from video to AI practices — and selects the winners through an open call. For this edition the main nomination Future Recipes, reflecting on presence, resilience and adaptivity, is dedicated to artists under 35. Additionally, two special prizes extend the scope of the award beyond age and discipline: the Speculative Agency Award, selected by Anika Meier, and the Networked Interdependencies Award, selected by Alessandro Ludovico. The jury of the fourth edition included Nabi Nara, curator and founder of SOMA Art Berlin; Eva Fischer, director of Vienna Shorts / CiVa Festival; and Jacek Sosnowski, a curator and psychoanalyst with over 20 years of experience in art, film, and architecture. In the main category Future Recipes, nine works explore ways of sensing, caring, and coexisting. Annan Shao’s Reptile Cafe stages a virtual bar where reptilian instincts meet the social rituals of drinking; Alexandra Tchebotiko’s Tomorrow I Won’t Be Here captures fleeting hope during a migrant’s tram ride; Zack Nguyen’s The Space Between Becomes Us transforms movement and whispers into a meditative space of empathy; S()fia Braga’s Third Impact follows a quantum computer searching for identity after its mission fails; Eyez Li’s Wandering at the Exit of Deity fractures identity into human and AI doubles in dreamlike landscapes; Maricel Reinhard’s A Meal For The Rest of Your Life reimagines nourishment through biotech and propaganda set in 2071; Ruini Shi’s FuneralPlay reimagines mourning as an online interface; Maximilian Prag’s 333 evokes the fragility of suspended time; and mmii’s Co:beliefs reframes superstition as emotional technology. Two special prizes broaden the recognition. The Networked Interdependencies Award, selected by Alessandro Ludovico — researcher, artist, and longtime editor-in-chief of Neural magazine — went to SENAIDA’s Thread 342: East of Empire, which confronts colonial wounds through AI-driven narratives; Frederik De Wilde’s ADAL, a permacomputing ecology where code evolves with its environment; and Katia Sophia Ditzler’s WE ARE DESCENDED FROM THE SAME EUKARYOTE, a poetic cosmology of shared origins. The Speculative Agency Award, selected by Anika Meier — writer, curator, and co-founder of the curatorial collective The Second-Guess — recognized Ivona Tau’s Summer Diary, an AI-assembled visual diary questioning authorship; Marine Bléhaut’s Clara, which interweaves AI-generated film with therapeutic dialogue; and James Bloom’s Half Cheetah, a live deconstruction of progress through hybrid machine-human forms. Together, these fifteen artworks show how digital art not only reflects contemporary transformations but also proposes new ways of living, connecting, and imagining the future.