2025 Lumen Prize
Winners
This year’s winners represent the most innovative and conceptually rich practices at the intersection of art, technology, and culture, selected from a record-breaking 2,200+ submissions from 71 countries and a shortlist of 99 finalists.
Cumulus
2025 Gold Award Winner
MORAKANA (Tiri Kananuruk & Sebastián Morales)
In a time of fear and deportations, Cumulus monitors the Mexico-US border, tracking clouds via NOAA satellites. Inspired by CubeSats, it contrasts shifting skies with rigid politics, revealing borders as invisible from above but deeply shaping lives below.
The Sylphs
2025 Still Image Award Winner
Ana María Caballero
The Sylphs is from Being Borges, a poetic and (post) photographic recasting of Jorge Luis Borges & Margarita Guerrero's 'Book of Imaginary Beings,' a landmark work of Spanish literature. This series begs the question: What's at stake when language becomes literal via the visual?
This is not your Garden
2025 Moving Image Award Winner
Carlos Velandia and Angélica Restrepo
Rooted in wetlands, páramos and centennial forests at the verge of disappearing, memories and a speculated future collide. 500 years of exploitation, exile and resilience are nourished by a collective pain and a desire to crack through it all.
Umweltraum((a))
2025 Performance & Music Award Winner
Laura Mannelli and Sonia Killmann
Umweltraum((a)) is a nonlinear, immersive sound installation with live performance. Inspired by biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s concepts of Umwelt and Umweltraum, it explores a mutating synthetic ecosystem questioning life, machines, and non human intelligence
The SoundShirt
2025 Fashion & Design Award Winner
CuteCircuit
Feel music and sound on your body as touch sensations. The SoundShirt is the first fabric-based haptic wearable to render the full audio spectrum in realtime, connecting deaf and hearing users alike to music, sports, and performance in emotional, immersive and surprising ways.
Toru
2025 Hybrid Award Winner
Carlo Van de Roer and Taika Waititi
Toru is a three-channel video installation and interactive digital work by Carlo Van de Roer and Taika Waititi exploring mythology and new filmmaking technology to re-engage with early storytelling systems that shaped cultural memory through collaboration and reinterpretation.
Deutsch / Nicht Deutsch
2025 Experiential Award Winner
mots (Daniela Nedovescu and Octavian Mot)
DEUTSCH / NICHT DEUTSCH playfully questions the boundaries of identity and belonging, handing over all decisions to artificial intelligence. The installation invites participants to undergo a process where biased AI models determine if they are 'German' or 'Not German'.
WORDS BEYOND WORDS
2025 Literature & Poetry Award Winner
WORDS BEYOND WORDS
WORDS BEYOND WORDS is an infinite poem that explores, expresses & embodies the evolving dialogue between language and technology, author and algorithm — powered by a custom generative system built to invoke an emergent AI poet & transform the browser window into a dynamic book.
Self-Contained
2025 Nature & Climate Award Winner
Entangled Others
‘Self-Contained' is the mutation of digital images as DNA: crossbreeding, mutating, and splicing random compressed fragments, as a way of exploring encoding/decoding information as image-making. The final mutating artwork into synthesized DNA, stored in a physical capsule,
Organism: In Turbulence
2025 Identity & Culture Award Winner
Navid Navab
Organism is an investigative platform, revolving around a robotically-prepared historic pipe organ, that attunes us to the form-giving tendencies of kinetic chaos and the turbulent dynamics of sonic formation. It has two modes: one as an installation and another as a concert.
Telos I
2025 Nordic Award Winner
Emil Dam Seidel & Dorotea Saykaly
Sponsored by Kunstsilo
Telos I is an immersive, holographic, mixed reality experience that explores a mythical landscape in the digital age. 'After the extinction of humankind an artificial intelligence creates itself a body in search of a new purpose.’
a space for encapsulation
2025 Carla Rapoport Award Winner
Andrey Chugunov
a space for encapsulation' explores Scotland’s coastlines through photogrammetry, generative sound, and poetic narrative, documenting hybrid assemblages of natural and industrial artefacts in transient zones impacted by rising sea levels.
I WOULD LIKE TO BE MIDNIGHT / I WOULD LIKE TO BE SKY
2025 Special Commendation Award Winner
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Informed by an Indigenous (Seneca-Cayuga) view of the sky as a shared, living system. AI inpainting erases human-made structures; interpolation creates dreamlike shifts. Shown at LMCC NYC, NXT Museum, Schiphol Airport, and top international festivals.