IV International Open Call for Digital Arts SMTH + MMMAD
SMTH in collaboration with MMMAD Festival, thanks to the support of Led&Go, launch the IV International Open Call for Digital Artists under the theme ‘Nescience or the state of not knowing’.
We are looking for digital artworks that explore collaboration, exchange and co- creation with artificial intelligences, exploring the uncertain, the boundaries between reality and fiction, the loss of control.
In the first edition of the call we looked for digital artworks that reflect on landscape in the post-digital age, the second edition focused on the shopping mall as cultural space and the third edition speculated on scales that defy the human eye. In this fourth edition we are looking for speculative pieces, fictions of reality, possible futures that influence the way we see the world.
In this edition we have the collaboration of the centres CC Xperience San Boi, CC Xperience Logroño, CC Maremágnum, CC Meridiano, CC Nueva Condomina, CC Príncipe Pío, CC L'Aljub, CC Vallsur, CC Zielo Shopping Pozuelo, CC La Gavia, CC Som Multiespai.
The call will be open from 23 October to 15 December 2024. A jury of experts will select the five best works, which will receive a prize of 1.500,00€ each and will be exhibited on the screens of the shopping centres from January to April 2025.
Through this call we seek to analyse the limits of technology itself, creating new scenarios, narratives or mythologies: to take a text generated by AI, pass it through a text-to-image generator, animate that image through a video model. Like a game of cadavre exquis, where with each iteration, the AI becomes more and more present as human control diminishes.
In this call we want to experiment with creating science fiction narratives from the image through digital artworks in which AI plays a role, whatever it may be, challenging the boundaries of the real and asking questions without the need to provide answers.
IMAGE 2024
In each edition of the open call we commission a digital artist to create a video work that encapsulates the theme of the competition. On this occasion, it was the Spanish duo Boldtron who interpreted the theme, presenting Ghost Frogs, a series of looping video works created with artificial intelligence, inspired by amphibians.
In 1935, L. Ron Hubbard published his first science-fiction novel Buckskin Brigades, but it was not until 150 titles later, with the publication of Dianetics, the trigger and origin of Scientology, that science fiction became real and what could have been just one more of his novels fractured the cultural, economic and social idiosyncrasies of thousands of people all over the planet.
Science fiction constructs possible scenarios through its narratives that can brush against reality, undoing its limits, introducing new possibilities (cyborg, trans- human, post-natural).
Tools such as artificial intelligence help us make visible that which does not yet have a body, but has the power to be; that which has no name, but has a prompt. A materiality that, at first literary, is transformed into vertices, pixels, sounds and data.
THEME
NESCIENCE OR THE STATE OF NOT KNOWING
RULES AND REGULATIONS
IV INTERNATIONAL OPEN CALL
SUBMISSION
SUBMIT YOUR WORK
JURY 1/3
JURY 1/3
BOLDTRON
Boldtron is the artistic name of two brothers, Xavier and Daniel Cardona, Barcelona-born artists specialising in 3D, CGI, VR and AI. After working as an illustrator and art director in Europe and Asia with more than twenty years of experience in the sector, Xavi returned to Barcelona to launch his own studio, PZZZA.
Boldtron’s work is based on experimentation, research and the development of new techniques. Its approach is organic and manual, although his production is purely digital. Boldtron seeks a constant creative and technological evolution by revisiting and reinventing its work, something that allows it to preserve its identity and bring something new to each creative collaboration.
JURY 2/3
CROSSLUCID
CROSSLUCID is an artist collective (est. 2018) that engages in highly collaborative cross-disciplinary projects in co-evolution with technology. Their work and research converges around the exploration of the self as a network; intimacy and the potential for pleasurable actualization through the digital sphere, and the re-imagination of our alliances with technology seen as part of a sympoietic biosphere and universal post-material consciousness. Through explorations spanning filmmaking, poetic Artificial Intelligence, multi-layered techniques of collage, assemblage and experience-led interventions they create scenarios and build experiential formats that instigate prototyping and rehearsing potential futures and progressing metamodern values.
JURY 2/3
CROSSLUCID
CROSSLUCID is an artist collective (est. 2018) that engages in highly collaborative cross-disciplinary projects in co-evolution with technology. Their work and research converges around the exploration of the self as a network; intimacy and the potential for pleasurable actualization through the digital sphere, and the re-imagination of our alliances with technology seen as part of a sympoietic biosphere and universal post-material consciousness. Through explorations spanning filmmaking, poetic Artificial Intelligence, multi-layered techniques of collage, assemblage and experience-led interventions they create scenarios and build experiential formats that instigate prototyping and rehearsing potential futures and progressing metamodern values.
JURY 3/3
JULIA KAGANSKIY
Julia Kaganskiy is a curator and cultural strategist working across art, science and technology. She is passionate about interdisciplinary collaboration, developing new cultural models, and re-imagining cultural institutions as inclusive spaces for artistic experimentation.
Since starting her career in 2008, she has been recognized as a leading voice in art and technology and helped launch several groundbreaking programs in the field, including The Creators Project (VICE/Intel) and NEW INC (New Museum). Her curatorial practice explores the potential of art as a key interlocutor of emerging science and technology.
EXHIBITION SPACES
12 SPACES // 8 CITIES