The Paris-based German artist and researcher Dana-Fiona Armour has been awarded the primary Sigg Artwork Prize for artwork integrating synthetic intelligence (AI). Armour obtained the €10,000 prize for Alvinella Ophis (2024)—an interdisciplinary 3D-animated video set up exploring the interaction between biotechnology, synthetic intelligence and modern artwork—in a ceremony at Asprey Studio, in central London.
The Sigg Artwork Prize is introduced by the Sigg Artwork Basis, which was based by the Swiss tech entrepreneur and artwork collector Pierre Sigg and has held artist residences at his household property at Le Castellet, close to Toulon, within the south of France, in Greece and at AlUla in Saudi Arabia. The muse says on social media that it sees AI as “a transformative pressure, as profound because the emergence of pictures through the industrial revolution”, one thing that’s “reshaping the illustration of actuality, the development of reminiscence, conventional practices and language innovation on a world scale”.
Entrants to the prize had been requested to submit work across the theme of “Future Desert”. Armour’s Alvinella Ophis is a hybrid serpent imagined as a mixture of a snake and the Pompeii worm—a deep-sea creature discovered on the backside of the Pacific Ocean—exploring a devastated “future desert” following an ecological catastrophe. Warmth sensors detect the creature’s actions and an AI is used to generate visible responses to that information, envelopped in a quadrophonic soundscape. The opposite short-listed artists had been Obaid Alsafi, Léa Collet, Agnieszka Kurant, Harrison Pearce, Aaron Scheer and Sasha Stiles.
Dana-Fiona Armour, Alvinella Ophis (2024). Winner of the 2024 Sigg Artwork Prize Courtesy the artist © Dana-Fiona Armour, 2024
Armour is thought for interdisciplinary work the place she collaborates with scientists, exploring the symbiosis between species. She is a member of the Collectif Poush, at Clichy in northwest Paris, and beforehand labored in residency at a genome-engineering firm, Cellectis, the place she developed Mission MC1R, a mixture of visible artwork and biotechnology that was proven on the Assortment Lambert in Avignon in 2022. She has held two solo exhibitions with the gallery Andréhn-Schiptjenko: in Paris in 2021 and in Stockholm final yr.
“Profitable the Sigg Artwork Prize has supplied me with a outstanding alternative to discover the essential interaction between artwork, know-how and nature,” Armour mentioned. “My venture, Alvinella Ophis, encourages interdisciplinary approaches that deal with urgent ecological points and goals to create a dialogue concerning the connection between humanity and the pure world. In the end, I hope to advertise a deeper understanding of our shared ecological challenges by way of this endeavour.”
One of many jury members was an AI, created by the French Canadian artist Grégory Chatonsky and skilled on an art-centred massive language mannequin, which assessed every entry, qualitatively and quantitatively, expressing its output in Chatonsky’s voice. The opposite jury members had been the curators Dominique Moulon, Anne Stenne, Nicolas Bourriaud and professor Antonio Somaini; the thinker Anna Longo; Joseph Fowler, the top of artwork and tradition on the World Financial Discussion board; Gediminas Urbonas, director at MIT Program in Artwork, Tradition and Expertise on the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise; and the digital artwork collector Seedphrase, additionally know as Daniel Maegaard.
