2021 Winners

These are the winners of the S+T+ARTS Prize – Grand prize of the European Commission honoring Innovation in Technology, Industry and Society stimulated by the Arts:

Grand Prizes 2021

Remix el Barrio, Food Waste Biomaterial Makers

IaaC Fab Lab Barcelona, The Remixers

Grand Prize – Innovative Collaboration: Awarded for innovative collaboration between industry or technology and the arts that opens new pathways for innovation. Over the last 30 years, plastic production has increased by 620%. In Catalonia alone, every day, 720,000 kg of food is thrown away. This wasted food, totaling 260,000 tons per year, is equivalent…
Oceans in Transformation

Territorial Agency – John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog

Grand Prize – Artistic Exploration: Awarded for artistic exploration and art works where appropriation by the arts has a strong potential to influence or alter the use, deployment or perception of technology. Oceans in Transformation investigates the impact of human activity on the world ocean. The global ocean is changing its circulations, energies, interactions, and…

Honorary Mentions 2021

A Lighter Delicacy

Sorawut Kittibanthorn

A Lighter Delicacy proposes an alternative way to manage feather waste from slaughterhouses by converting its nutrient composition into a new edible product.
Cloud Studies

Forensic Architecture

Cloud Studies brings together eight recent investigations by Forensic Architecture, each examining different types of toxic clouds and the capacity of states and corporations to occupy airspace and create unliveable atmospheres.
Data Garden

Grow Your Own Cloud

Data Garden is an organism-based data centre. This functional carbon negative data infrastructure is capable of storing and retrieving data from the DNA of plants.
ELEVENPLAY x Rhizomatiks “border 2021”

ELEVENPLAY, evala, Takayuki Fujimoto, Motoi Ishibashi, Daito Manabe, MIKIKO, Rhizomatiks

The dance company, ELEVENPLAY, the director-choreographer, MIKIKO, and the collective led by Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi, Rhizomatiks, presented a dance piece border in 2015. We developed and updated our experiment of 2015 to establish a new expression model for both online and on-site experience for the post-COVID-19 era.
mEat me

Theresa Schubert

In mEat me Theresa Schubert draws a radical consequence: if we treat humans the same as we treat animals, we should also be material and food.
On View

Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti

Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti’s seminal interactive performance installation On View (2019), commissioned by the SCAD Museum of Art, examines the generational desire to be the subject of an art experience and that phenomenon’s relationship to addictive interfaces, surveillance capitalism, and data privacy in modern society.
Project Habitate

Yuning Chan, Tom Hartley, Yishan Qin

We designed a living wearable that enables people to become the hosts for endangered organisms, which in return gives them a sense of companionship and belonging, advocating a new concept of participatory conservation.
The Growing Pavilion

Company New Heroes/ Biobased Creations

The Growing Pavilion stands as a necessary and viable solution for reducing the rising impacts of climate change and the use of fossil resources.
The Living Light

Nova Innova

A ground-breaking technology called Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) technology enables us to generate energy from organic waste.
The Tides Within Us

Fraunhofer MEVIS, Marshmallow Laser Feast, Natan Sinigaglia

A cross-sectoral project centered on utilizing high-end MR research results, The Tides Within Us is an ongoing exploration into the world beyond the limits of our senses at the intersection of art, science, and technology.

Nominations 2021

An Olfactory Biopolitics Nairobi

Coltrane McDowell

An Olfactory Biopolitics Nairobi spans the Netherlands to Kenya, linking these geopolitical locations through the thread of scent. The interaction of scent in public space became a means to examine hidden power structures of inequality, using the case study of my home country, Kenya.
Constructing Connectivity

Jessica Smarsch

Constructing Connectivity is a person-centered stroke rehabilitation method that addresses the need to quicken and improve recovery, motivate the patient, and provide connection to support systems.
Extendable Ears

Sheng-Wen Lo

While living with friends, I realized ‘noise’ is subjective: what’s music for me may torture others.
Face Lab

Hakan Lidbo

A series of projects exploring the outer limits of how we use our face as an interpreter of our environment—or for the surroundings to find out what is going on in our minds.
Genetics Gym

Adam Peacock

The Genetics Gym is an ongoing research project, depicting a calculated fiction of modified bodies, edited with hypothetical new and emerging genetic technologies, allowing in-depth exploration to question how the internet is affecting human behavior.
Glacier’s Lament

Jiabao Li

Glaciers are sentinels of climate change. This series of works embodies the stunning beauty, rapid change, fragility, and magnificence of glaciers.
In a Small Room

KyungJin Jeong

In a Small Room focuses on two social issues, the first being the problem of poor living conditions in modern metropolitan areas. The second issue is the dazzling advertising designed to inspire in potential consumers the wish to buy a service.
In Event of Moon Disaster

Halsey Burgund, Francesca Panetta

In Event of Moon Disaster illustrates the possibilities of deepfake technologies by reimagining the moon landing.
Lovewear

Emanuela Corti, Ivan Parati, Witsense

Lovewear is smart underwear that helps people of all abilities to self-explore and enhance their own intimacy and sexuality.
MycoMythologies

Saša Spačal

MycoMythologies is a series researching how fungal ontologies could help humans think, learn, and practice multispecies survival through practices of inclusion and caring.
Para-optic-8

Anastasia Alekhina

The Para-optic 8 project offers a visual experience that literally reproduces the idea of vision through fingers.
Shapes and Ladders: Battles of Bias and Bureaucracy

John Ahloy, Andrea Li, Michelle Lim, Anne Liu

Shapes and Ladders is a video game that shows how systemic racism and sexism can exist through the metaphor of climbing a career ladder.
Silencing The Virus

Lily Hunter Green

Silencing The Virus is an immersive Sci Art installation that mixes a virtual virus environment with performance, science, ecology, and digital arts.
So far the Skies are silent.

Quadrature

What happens if artificial intelligences try to find an answer to one of the oldest mysteries of mankind?
Symbiosia

Thijs Biersteker

Plant Neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso and artist Thijs Biersteker created an artwork that uncovers the invisible tree-to-tree communication in real time to start a conversation about the effects of climate change.
The [Uncertain] Four Seasons

Hugh Crosthwaite, Tim Devine, Adam Grant, Assoc Professor David Holmes , Mel Huang, Joachim Kortlepel, Gerard Mason, Dr Jaehyun Shin

In 2019 we set about reflecting the effects of global warming to date in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, using historical data to inform a musical system that transposed climate changes upon the original score.
The Cleanroom Paradox

Felix Lenz, Angela Neubauer, Eszter Zwickl

Dismantling the deceptively pristine image of the high-tech industry The Cleanroom Paradox unveils the systemic suppression of information on occupational and toxic hazards at semiconductor production sites.
TheirTube

Tomo Kihara

Theirtube is an open-source web service that provides a look into how videos are recommended on other people’s YouTube.