2019 Winners

These are the winners of the STARTS Prize – Grand prize of the European Commission honoring Innovation in Technology, Industry and Society stimulated by the Arts 2018:

Grand Prize 2019


Ciutat Vella's Land-use Plan

Ciutat Vella’s Land-use Plan

300.000 Km/s
TrophyGrand Prize – Innovative Collaboration: Awarded for innovative collaboration between industry or technology and the arts (and the cultural and creative sectors in general) that open new pathways for innovation.

Project Alias

Project Alias

Bjørn Karmann, Tore Knudsen
TrophyGrand 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.

Honorary Mentions 2019

This is grown.
Jen Keane

This is grown. was motivated by a frustration with plastics and a visible disparity between scientific research and design manifestations around natural materials. After all, nature has had 3.8 billion years to perfect the ultimate circular economy: Life. Maybe we can still learn something.

The Murder of Pavlos Fyssas
Forensic Architecture

Shortly after midnight on 18 September 2013, Pavlos Fyssas, a young Greek anti-fascist rapper, was murdered in his home neighbourhood of Keratsini, Athens. Both the killer and others who participated in the attack were members of the neo-Nazi organization Golden Dawn.

SLAP – See Like A Pony
Sabine Engelhardt

With SLAP I want to make robotics not only understandable but truly approachable. Clifford Nass drew the comparison of robots with domesticated animals. They are useful, but also dangerous. But, how do we communicate with animals? Can we feel them? How does it work?

BLP-2000D
BCL – Georg Tremmel and Shiho Fukuhara

An unofficial ‘Black List’ of potentially harmful and forbidden DNA Sequences has been created and is shared amongst the companies—officially for bio-security reasons. Because of the expensive chemicals involved in the process, it was not really feasible to create a DIY DNA Synthesiser—until now.

Anatomy of an AI System
Kate Crawford / AI Now Institute and Vladan Joler / SHARE Lab

Anatomy of an AI System is a large-scale map and long-form essay investigating the human labor, data, and planetary resources required to build and operate an Amazon Echo. The exploded view diagram combines and visualizes three central, extractive processes that are required to run a large-scale artificial intelligence system: material resources, human labor, and data.

SimCath
Fernando Bello, ICCESS & Salomé Bazin, Cellule studio

How do surgeons prepare for an operation, when they know that the smallest mistake could be the line between life and death? That was the question Cellule faced when developing SimCath, a cardiology suite for simulation training.

Arte Eletrônica Indígena
Thydêwá

The Arte Electrônica Indígena (AEI) project was designed and executed by the NGO Thydêwá. It consisted of a series of ten short artistic residencies in indigenous communities in the Brazilian Northeast in order to cocreate works of electronic art. These were exhibited to the public at the Museum of Modern Art, Salvador da Bahia, in August 2018 and have since toured the indigenous communities themselves.

Biocomputer Rhythms
Eduardo Reck Miranda

Biocomputer Rhythms is a piece for prepared piano and percussion. It is a musical duet between a piano and a biocomputer: the biocomputer listens to the piano and produces musical responses during the performance. The responses are played on percussion instruments and on the same piano played by the pianist.

Nominations 2019

Wastelands
Tagny Duff

Wastelands is a playful, yet serious biological art project exploring speculative fiction scenarios and current bioengineering practices applying methanogenic bacteria, archaea and bacteriophage to regu-late methane production through anaerobic degradation.

PatentPandas.org
Jie Qi, Carol Lin, May Qi, Ira Winder

PatentPandas.org is a resource built to explain (scary!) patent law using (not-scary!) panda comics. The website has three core parts: Resources, Stories, Get Help.

Meandering River
onformative, kling klang klong

Meandering River is an audiovisual art installation comprised of real-time visuals and music composed by an A.I. through machine learning. The piece reinterprets the shifting behavior of rivers in the landscape, regarded from a bird’s eye view.

Journey on the Tongue
Ayako Suwa, Evala, Yasuaki Kakehi

Journey on the Tongue is a totally new taste and sound installation which invites you on a spectacular multi-sensory journey. Realized by the three artists Ayako Suwa, the pursuer of "Expressive food," sound artist Evala, the founder of “See by Your Ears,” and media artist Yasuaki Kakehi, who explores new haptic experiences.

30°
Mathias Foot, Janna Nikoleit, Franziska Rast, Stephan Schakulat

The more frequent and more comprehensive studies are being conducted, the more accurate predictions can be made about the future. These predictions directly influence political, economic, and social decision-making processes on a global scale.

Voice of Nature
Thijs Biersteker

Using the real time data coming from a living tree in order to talk about the urgency of climate change, Voice of Nature aims to provoke a new relationship with nature surrounding us.

SoundShirt 2.0
CuteCircuit

The SoundShirt brings music to life in a way that it can be felt physically, live, in real time, on the body, in a tactile language unique to each piece of music being performed, opening new and diverse ways of enjoying music for the audience.

Stop-Motion VR
Denny Koch, Johannes Schubert

With Stop-Motion VR, the project team uses Stop-Motion Animation to transport one of the oldest and most traditional methods of film production into the interactive world of virtual reality.

Stone Web – Expanding Space
Idalene Rapp, Natascha Unger

In Stone Web, Basalt is transformed into a light, stable modular system that can be used for small scale applications such as furnishing or combined to create large, spatial structures or urban furniture.

SPACE WASTE LAB
Studio Roosegaarde

SPACE WASTE LAB is the multi-year living lab with the European Space Agency and Studio Roosegaarde to capture space waste and upcycle it into sustainable products.

Solar Powered Website
Kris De Decker, Marie Otsuka, Roel Roscam Abbing, Lauren Traugott-Campbell

Low-tech Magazine questions the belief in technological progress, and highlights the potential of past knowledge and technologies for designing a sustainable society.

Alterplex
Hakan Lidbo

Alterplex is a strategic board game where the board is invisible, except seen through the pieces. The moving properties of the pieces are decided by the animations of the board, constantly changing, following a hidden pattern.

A-MINT
Alex Braga

A-MINT is a metaphor of a sustainable future, where man and machines work together in perfect symbiosis to cross a frontier that man alone could not dare.

Mitigation of Shock
Superflux

Mitigation of Shock (MOS) is an experiment giving the future consequences of climate change immersive, visceral form. Superflux wanted people to experience what living with climate-related resource scarcity might feel like, and potential adaptations for mitigating the worst of its effects.

ISM Hexadome
Institute for Sound & Music (ISM)

The ISM Hexadome is a platform for installation and live performance, featuring a 52-channel immersive sound system, assembled on a 15.5-meter wide, 7.9-meter high hexagonal structure, holding 6 projection screens. This system enabled artistic collaborations between both sound and visual artists to create immersive audio-visual installations and also perform live.

Hello, Shadow!
Joon Moon

Hello, Shadow! is an interactive art installation implementing a kind of augmented reality mixed with a shadow. I have been developing this kind of AR media from my previous work Augmented Shadow(2010).

Cave of Sounds
Tim Murray-Browne in collaboration with Dom Aversano, Susanna Garcia, Wallace Hobbes, Daniel Lopez, Tadeo Sendon, Panagiotis Tigas, Kacper Ziemianin

Cave of Sounds is a project connecting music’s prehistoric origins with the technological radicalism of the music hacker scene. It emerged from an open-ended process which I began in 2012 as composer in residence at Music Hackspace, London.

Beholder
United Visual Artists

Beholder continues UVA’s investigations into time perception and the relativity of our experiences. It centers around the wonder of everyday phenomena as seen through autistic perspectives, inviting us to re-evaluate our perception of beauty.