Lumen Prize 2025 Winners: Full Breakdown of the Most Innovative Digital Art of the Year

The Lumen Prize 2025 Winners have just been announced, marking one of the most significant moments in this year’s global digital art awards calendar. The results highlight how leading artists are redefining creativity through AI art, immersive media, generative systems, and emerging technologies.

This year, winners were selected from a record-breaking 2,200+ submissions from 71 countries and a shortlist of 99 finalists. Digital Original’s CEO Anna Filippova and Head of Business Development Yuliia Berdiiarova attended the awards ceremony, where they had the chance to connect with participants and gain valuable insights.

This visit gave us the perfect opportunity to put together an overview. So, who won the Lumen Prize 2025? Let’s break it down!

Photo: Digital Original

2025 Gold Award Winner: MORAKANA

This year’s Gold Award was given to MORAKANA (Tiri Kananuruk & Sebastián Morales) for their work Cumulus.

MORAKANA is a New York–based studio founded by Tiri Kananuruk (Thailand) and Sebastián Morales Prado (Mexico). Their practice is defined by scientific and artistic inquiry, the development of custom tools, and continuous experimentation.

Cumulus by MORAKANA. Image: lumenprize.org

Cumulus is an installation that observes the Mexico–US border — not for people, but for clouds. It tracks atmospheric bodies as they drift across the geopolitical line, offering a quiet counterpoint to human-defined boundaries. Two electronic paper displays, refreshed every 11 minutes, show the full American continent on one screen and a magnified view of the border region on the other. A custom computer-vision system scans NOAA satellite data to detect clouds in motion.

“The project contrasts the fluidity of nature with the fixity of politics, revealing borders as human constructs, arbitrary and invisible from above, yet deeply shaping lives below,” the artwork’s description states.

Photo: Digital Original

Still Image Award Winner: Ana María Caballero

The 2025 Still Image Award was presented to Ana María Caballero, a transdisciplinary artist whose work probes the tension between physicality and selfhood, between biological processes and their cultural reverberations, and between ecology and the narratives we craft to explain — and attempt to contain.

She received the award for The Sylphs, a project that introduces a new approach to literary translation. It asks: What shifts when language becomes literal through the visual?

Part of Caballero’s ongoing Being Borges series, the work uses The Book of Imaginary Beings by Borges and Guerrero—and its English translation by Norman Thomas di Giovanni—as a foundation for exploring how AI interprets Spanish and English differently. By exposing the biases embedded in large-scale datasets, Caballero illuminates the distortions and possibilities of AI-mediated translation.

The Sylphs by Ana María Caballero. Image: lumenprize.org

By pairing words with the images they generate, The Sylphs invites viewers to experience language as a transdisciplinary artwork, one that resonates beyond established systems of meaning.

Photo: Digital Original

Moving Image Award Winners: Carlos Velandia and Angélica Restrepo

The 2025 Moving Image Award went to Carlos Velandia and Angélica Restrepo for ESTE NO ES TU JARDÍN (“This Is Not Your Garden”), a full-dome theatrical animation that splinters 500 years of colonial violence, industrial extraction, and ecological collapse.

This is Not Your Garden (Este no es tu jardín) - Trailer | FFD 2025. Source: Forum Film Dokumenter

Using 3D scans from surviving specimens and procedural particle systems built in the Unity game engine, the work reconstructs ecosystems on the edge of disappearance and imagines a future in which plants regain agency.

Positioned as a kino-botanical report, the piece exists between experimental 3D animation, scientific imaging, and back-end computational processes.

Performance & Music Award Winners: Laura Mannelli and Sonia Killmann

Laura Mannelli (immersive artist–architect) and Sonia Killmann (sound artist) received the Performance & Music Award for Umweltraum((a)), an immersive perceptual world-space.

Fragment from the performance Umweltraum((a)). Image: lumenprize.org

The installation creates an artificial, ever-shifting sound-marsh that invites visitors to enter the perceptual world—the Umwelt—of another being. Inspired by Jakob von Uexküll’s theories of subjective ecosystems, the work fuses sound art, live performance, and ecological thought.

Interactive and performative, the installation responds to presence. Synthetic creatures made from repurposed electronics react to touch, reshaping the soundscape in real time. During live performances, Killmann treats the installation as a living instrument, continually reconfiguring this hybrid ecosystem.

Photo: Digital Original

Fashion & Design Award Winner: CuteCircuit

The Fashion & Design Award went to CuteCircuit for SoundShirt, a breakthrough in wearable digital art and sensory experience design.

The SoundShirt transforms sound into touch through a network of micro-actuators embedded across the torso and arms. Designed for both deaf and hearing audiences, it translates music, speech, and environmental sound into real-time haptic sensations.

By transforming the body into a resonant chamber for sound, the SoundShirt opens new possibilities for presence, empathy, and accessibility. It challenges conventional boundaries between art, fashion, and function, imagining a future in which garments do more than clothe us—they connect us.

Deaf Football Fans Feel Crowd Atmosphere For First Time | #UnsilenceTheCrowd. Source: Newcastle United

Hybrid Award Winners: Carlo Van de Roer and Taika Waititi

New Zealand artists Carlo Van de Roer and Taika Waititi received the 2025 Hybrid Award for Toru, a three-channel video installation accompanied by an interactive digital experience.

Drawing on the significance of Tokotoru (the Trinity) in Māori culture, the work explores unity through the elements of earth, sea, and sky. Inspired by the story of Tāne retrieving the three baskets of knowledge, each film offers a different interpretation of the same performance.

Online, viewers can control the light themselves. In physical installations, the work appears as a luminous triptych—sometimes accompanied by functioning light switches that invite direct engagement.

Still image of a three-channel video installation Toru. Photo: lumenprize.org

Experiential Award Winner: mots

The 2025 Experiential Award went to mots (Daniela Nedovescu and Octavian Mot) for DEUTSCH / NICHT DEUTSCH, a multi-piece installation interrogating national identity, citizenship, and belonging.

The work simulates a naturalization process across six interactive stations, each powered by deliberately biased AI models that assess participants through absurd pseudo-bureaucratic tasks. The project draws on both the official German citizenship test and the artists’ lived experiences navigating it.

DEUTSCH / NICHT DEUTSCH by mots. Source: madebymots

At the end, participants see their results displayed publicly: digital interpretations of their faces appear on large screens labeled either DEUTSCH or NICHT DEUTSCH. They then receive a signed certificate—affirming or denying their algorithmic belonging.

Photo: Digital Original

Literature & Poetry Award Winner: Sasha Stiles

Sasha Stiles received the Literature & Poetry Award for WORDS BEYOND WORDS, an infinitely regenerative poem that premiered at Art Basel in June 2025.

The project explores the shifting dialogue between language and technology, author and algorithm. Built from a custom dataset, a fine-tuned LLM, and a meta-poetic Processing source (c)ode, the work summons an emergent AI poet that writes new verses with every browser refresh.

Each iteration becomes a unique artwork—an endlessly unfolding folio of kinetic pages blending text, colour, and motion. It stands as a landmark example of AI-driven literature and hybrid creative systems.

WORDS BEYOND WORDS by Sasha Stiles. Image: lumenprize.org

Nature & Climate Award Winner: Entangled Others

The Nature & Climate Award went to Entangled Others (Feileacan Kirkbride McCormick & Sofia Crespo) for their project Self-Contained.

The work examines parallels between biological encoding in DNA and digital image compression, exploring how information mutates through iterative processes. Using crossbreeding techniques that splice compressed image data from diverse datasets, the artists generate a digital genome that evolves like a living organism. The process is akin to grafting plants, where foreign genetic material fuses with existing structures to form something newly alive.

Self-Contained by Entangled Others. Image: lumenprize.org

Identity & Culture Award Winner: Navid Navab

Navid Navab, a well-known media alchemist, antidisciplinary composer, and tabletop cosmologist, received the 2025 Identity & Culture Award for his work “Organism: In Turbulence.”

Organism is an investigative platform centred on a robotically prepared historic pipe organ, designed to attune listeners to the form-shaping forces of kinetic chaos and the turbulent dynamics of sound in formation. It operates in two modes: as an installation and as a concert.

This work traces the non-idealised, pre-mathematical, kinetic origins of today’s generative algorithms—vector synthesis, stochastic music, and AI-mediated composition.

Organism: In Turbulence by Navid Navab. Image: lumenprize.org

“I use digital media to collaborate with excitable tendencies of matters-of-process, suspended in metastable-states, where thermodynamic-reservoirs-of-indeterminacy generate cybernetic-intentionality,” said the artist.

Organism: In Turbulence (performance) destabilises the socio-historical tonality of a 1910 Casavant pipe organ—rescued from impending gentrification at a heritage site in Montréal—to liberate and resound its turbulent materiality, robotically releasing long-silenced timbres after a century of sonic repression.

What the Lumen Prize 2025 Winners Reveal About the Future of Digital Art

The Lumen Prize 2025 Winners collectively show how digital art is evolving beyond medium-specific boundaries and into a fully hybrid, interdisciplinary field. Across categories—from AI poetry and immersive installations to ecological moving-image works, wearables, and hybrid video experiences - this year’s artists demonstrate that digital creativity is no longer defined by tools alone, but by the questions those tools allow us to ask.

Photo: Digital Original

The Lumen Prize continues to be one of the most influential global digital art awards, spotlighting groundbreaking artists who shape the future of new media. As we look ahead, the themes highlighted this year—AI, ecology, hybridity, identity, and sensory immersion—offer a compelling preview of the directions digital art will take in the years to come.