S+T+ARTS Prize 2026:
A Compass for Troubled Times
« In a historical moment marked by escalating instability, geopolitical conflict, and increasingly irrational forces—where war continues to shape everyday realities across the globe— STARTS reaffirms its role as a platform for artistic research at the intersection of art, science, technology, and industry. In this context, such practices can offer a critical compass for navigating an increasingly
troubled world.
$Technology has become a central ground for the accumulation of power, with profound consequences for labor, social structures, and political life. As has long been recognized, the early promises of democratization and cultural abundance have gradually deteriorated into new forms of global exploitation, social polarization, and collective anxiety. While awareness has grown around these impacts and their social and environmental consequences, we continue to struggle to define forms of balance and governance. The current moment echoes the technological revolutions of past centuries, yet everything now unfolds at a vastly accelerated scale—socially, economically, politically, and environmentally. We may be more conscious today of the consequences of technological transformation, but we are equally confronted with their unprecedented speed and magnitude.
In the era of post-truth, structures of trust—across media, political systems, and public discourse—are continuously undermined and hacked, while democracies struggle to respond and adapt. Existing institutional structures increasingly reveal their obsolescence, demanding new frameworks, reforms, and imaginaries. And yet, STARTS projects continue to demonstrate that hacking can operate in both directions: not only as a mechanism of extraction, manipulation, and control, but also as a critical and creative practice capable of reclaiming agency, exposing systemic contradictions, and opening pathways toward more collective, inclusive, and sustainable futures.
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Jury 2026. Giulia Bini, Fernando Cucchietti, Ralph Dum, Markus Reymann, Ambra Trotto.
Grand Prizes
Artistic Innovation
Mechanical Kurds
Hito Steyerl (DE)
Hito Steyerl’s video installation Mechanical Kurds combines a single-channel HD film with spatial installation elements. The title refers to the “Mechanical Turk.” The original was an 18th-century fraudulent automaton – a chess-playing machine that appeared autonomous but actually hid a human operator inside. In the early 2000s, Amazon reused the name for its crowdsourcing platform, where companies outsource repetitive digital tasks to an online workforce. The film features interviews with three Kurdish-Syrian refugees living in a camp in Erbil, Iraq. They worked on crowdsourcing projects in which they analyzed and annotated thousands of images by identifying objects, people, and buildings. This micro-labor is essential for training machine-learning systems, particularly visual recognition technologies. As the camera moves through the camp, annotation frames appear on screen, labeling children, roadside objects, and architectural elements. Similar rectangular shapes structure the installation itself, echoing the visual interface of image annotation.
Innovation Collaboration
Office for Tree Migration (OTM)
Agnes Meyer-Brandis (DE)
The Office for Tree Migration (OTM) is a long-term interdisciplinary art and research project by Agnes Meyer-Brandis that investigates tree and plant migration in different climate zones and along the treelines: How they go North, how they climb uphill in the Californian white mountains or how they enter the peatlands. As climate change is progressing faster than trees can naturally adapt, OTM is exploring possible new methods that will enable trees to migrate faster and wander away from climate change. Combining ecological monitoring, phenological cameras, and custom software, the project addresses slow, invisible changes and transforms environmental data into immersive installations, situations and workshops, opening up new perspectives and questions. While working closely with scientists across disciplines, the artist is combining artistic experimentation with the fields of ecology, atmospheric sciences, geoinformatics, meteorology and biotechnology.
Honorary Mentions
Building for Quantum
Marina Otero Verzier (ES), Manuel Correa (CO)
Creative Intelligence: Reimagining Supercomputing through Artistic Research
Barcelona Supercomputing Center (INT)
Drumming for love
Erze Dinarama (XK)
Morphogenic Angels: Chapter 2 (Alchemy of Perspectives) Demo
Keiken (INT)
Ocean Futurisms
Inferstudio (UK)
Origen, a Journey into the heart of the Amazon Raintorest
Emilia Sánchez Chiquetti (AR/BR)
Picoplanktonics
Living Room Collective (CA)
The Call
Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst (INT)
The Future Conditional:00 To Create Love With Dry Eyes
Romi Ron Morrison (US)
The Singing Textiles:
Weaving Life
Paola Torres Nuñez del Prado (PE)
Nominations
BODY AS ARCHIVE:
Woman Life Freedom
Hamdel Futurist Collaborative (INT)
Cortical Echoes:
An Interface for Living Computation
Amy Karle (US), Eduardo Reck Miranda (BR)
Direito à Sombra (The right to shade)
Mari Nagem (BR),
Thiago Hersan (BR)
Drinking Brecht
sister sylvester (IE)
Flynn
Marcin Ratajczyk (PL), Chiara Kristler (AT), Malpractice (INT)
FOSSILIZED FUTURES – IMMERSIVE DIGITAL OPERA Robertina Sebjanic (SI), Marco Barotti (IT)
FUNGI
Anarchist Designers Feifei Zhou (CN), Anna Tsing (US)
Harvesting Climate Action
Ling Tan (SG/UK)
Holy Shit
Caroline Barneaud (FR),
Stefan Kaegi (CH)
Nobody Told Me
Rivers Dream
Superflux (INT)
PET:
Projected Emotional
Technologies
Arvida Byström (SE)
Slop Evader
Tega Brain (AU)
Studies for
evala (JP), Sony Group Corporation (JP)
SymbiOcean
Rasa Weber (DE)
Terp 360: Embodied Al for Expressive Sign Language
Elly Savatia (KE), Branice Kazira (KE), Kenneth Muyoyo (KE), Anthony Marugu (KE), Andrew Olubala (KE), Stefan Kipchumba (KE)
The Data of Coca
Plano Negativo (CO)
THE DELUSION
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (GB)
Untangler
Peace Olatunji (NG)
