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 offered 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 drive, as profound because the emergence of pictures in the course of the industrial revolution”, one thing that’s “reshaping the illustration of actuality, the development of reminiscence, conventional practices and language innovation on a worldwide scale”.
Entrants to the prize have been requested to submit work across the theme of “Future Desert”. Armour’s Alvinella Ophis is a hybrid serpent imagined as a mix 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 have 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 understood 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 Challenge 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 12 months.
“Profitable the Sigg Artwork Prize has offered me with a exceptional alternative to discover the important interaction between artwork, know-how and nature,” Armour stated. “My mission, Alvinella Ophis, encourages interdisciplinary approaches that handle 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 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 have been the curators Dominique Moulon, Anne Stenne, Nicolas Bourriaud and professor Antonio Somaini; the thinker Anna Longo; Joseph Fowler, the pinnacle of artwork and tradition on the World Financial Discussion board; Gediminas Urbonas, director at MIT Program in Artwork, Tradition and Know-how on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how; and the digital artwork collector Seedphrase, additionally know as Daniel Maegaard.
