V International Open Call for Digital Arts SMTH + MMMAD
The fifth edition of the international open call SMTH x MMMAD invites digital artists to explore worldbuilding as a critical and speculative practice. In a present marked by ecological crises, social inequalities, and unprecedented technological acceleration —with the horizon of 2030 as a turning point— digital art emerges as an exceptional space where imagining worlds is not an act of escapism, but an urgent necessity.
We are seeking works that design open, transformative universes, capable of questioning current political, social, and technological structures, and opening new imaginaries for the future.
This edition features the collaboration of the following centers: CC Príncipe Pío (Madrid), CC Plenilunio (Madrid), CC Zielo Pozuelo (Madrid), CC L'Aljub (Alicante), CC Isla Azul (Madrid), CC Boulevard Vitoria (Vitoria), CC Lagoh (Seville), CC Oasiz (Madrid), CC Max Center (Bilbao), CC Nuga (Madrid), CC Palacio de Hielo (Madrid), CC Nueva Condomina (Murcia), and CC L'Illa Diagonal (Barcelona).
The call for submissions was open from October 27 to December 10, 2025. A total of 114 proposals were received. The jury members, including Ada Sokół, Enrique Agudo y Sam Balfus, and an institutional vote (represented by one member from SMTH and one from MMMAD), independently evaluated the submitted works.
On December 20 at 4:00 PM (GMT+1), during a virtual meeting, the jury discussed the evaluations and selected the following 15 finalists (in alphabetical order):
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Alfie Dwyer, United Kingdom
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Alena Saveleva, Russia
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Amon Silex, Netherlands
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Anna Ren, China
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Bernardo Moedas, Portugal
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Carrie Chen, USA
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Diego Diapolo, Argentina
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Duckdoll (Julie & Alexis), Italy
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George Jasper Stone, United Kingdom
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Iuliia Fedorova, Russia
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Johanna Spieker, Germany
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Marcos Ausejo, Spain
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Mariia Timoshenko, Russia
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Mingtong Li - Eyez CG, China
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Roxi Basa, France
The jury highlighted the high quality and diversity of the finalist proposals and, after further discussion, selected the following five works as winners:
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“Light in Darkness” by Alfie Dwyer, United Kingdom
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“Chants of Ocean Gods” by Alena Saveleva, Russia
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“Primavera” by Carrie Chen, USA
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“Stasis” by George Jasper Stone, United Kingdom
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“r3d” by Marcos Ausejo, Spain
These works were chosen for their artistic excellence, diversity of techniques, and the wide range of conceptual approaches within the theme of the call.
Each selected artist will receive a prize of €1,000 (taxes excluded), and their work will be part of the exhibition ‘Worldbuildig’ from January to April 2026. The winners will be contacted by the organizers via email to coordinate prize distribution.
THEME
WORLDBUILDING
From foundational myths to contemporary science fiction, every visual narrative has served both to reflect reality and to propose alternatives. Today, in a present marked by ecological crises, social inequalities, and unprecedented technological acceleration, imagining other worlds is no longer an act of escapism, but an urgent necessity. The horizon of 2030 appears as a turning point in the West — a moment when climate, economic, and political commitments will be put to the test, defining the decades to come.
Worldbuilding is a practice deeply rooted in literature, film, and video games: the creation of complete universes with their own geographies, rules, and mythologies. But beyond this planned construction, digital art allows us to understand worldbuilding as a living, relational process, closer to the concept of worlding — worlds that are made as they are inhabited, open to transformation and uncertainty.
As in the magic circle described by Johan Huizinga, art can generate spaces of exception where the usual rules are suspended, giving rise to new logics, territories, and communities. Works such as Ian Cheng’s narrative simulations embody this idea: digital ecosystems where characters and environments evolve autonomously and unpredictably, proposing worlds that escape the creator’s total control.
Worldbuilding also shares with sandbox environments the potential to experiment without predefined scripts: open spaces to test hypotheses, play with rules, and speculate about possible futures. From this perspective, building worlds through digital art becomes both a poetic and political act — imagining new forms of community, questioning the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, and expanding the limits of the possible.
With this open call, we invite digital artists from around the world to engage in worldbuilding: to create critical, speculative, or utopian worlds that allow us to confront the urgencies of the present and open imaginaries toward what does not yet exist.
From foundational myths to contemporary science fiction, every visual narrative has served both to reflect reality and to propose alternatives. Today, in a present marked by ecological crises, social inequalities, and unprecedented technological acceleration, imagining other worlds is no longer an act of escapism, but an urgent necessity. The horizon of 2030 appears as a turning point in the West — a moment when climate, economic, and political commitments will be put to the test, defining the decades to come.
Worldbuilding is a practice deeply rooted in literature, film, and video games: the creation of complete universes with their own geographies, rules, and mythologies. But beyond this planned construction, digital art allows us to understand worldbuilding as a living, relational process, closer to the concept of worlding — worlds that are made as they are inhabited, open to transformation and uncertainty.
As in the magic circle described by Johan Huizinga, art can generate spaces of exception where the usual rules are suspended, giving rise to new logics, territories, and communities. Works such as Ian Cheng’s narrative simulations embody this idea: digital ecosystems where characters and environments evolve autonomously and unpredictably, proposing worlds that escape the creator’s total control.
Worldbuilding also shares with sandbox environments the potential to experiment without predefined scripts: open spaces to test hypotheses, play with rules, and speculate about possible futures. From this perspective, building worlds through digital art becomes both a poetic and political act — imagining new forms of community, questioning the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, and expanding the limits of the possible.
With this open call, we invite digital artists from around the world to engage in worldbuilding: to create critical, speculative, or utopian worlds that allow us to confront the urgencies of the present and open imaginaries toward what does not yet exist.
IMAGE
THEO TRIANTAFYLLIDIS
To illustrate the theme of the 2025 open call, we have collaborated with digital artist Theo Triantafyllidis, featuring his work BugSim:
“A precious slice of microscopic life preserved within an intensive care terrarium. Through a misted glass surface and amidst lush vegetation stretches an active colony of ants. Slowly and meticulously, they work to transform a fragile purple clay into a structure they can call home. From this structure grows an entire forest of tiny flowering plants. Branching and blooming in all directions, they call to be pollinated by buzzing replicas of honeybees. A fragrant snail and a dung beetle lend their assistance, while a storm mantis and a sugar spider complete the microfaunal ecosystem, praying for a bite. Almost self-sufficient, this closed terrarium system is designed to simulate all the natural cycles required for the fragile community of organisms. The flow of nutrients, hormones, moisture, and temperature is constantly regulated under the hum of insects. A carefully monitored experiment on resilience and entropy, overseen by a mysterious figure who contemplates the paradoxical act of environmental repair.”
JURY 1/3
JURY 1/3
ENRIQUE AGUDO
Enrique Agudo, a Madrid-born artist and creative director based in Los Angeles, navigates the boundaries of art and technology. He trained as an architect at the Architectural Association and IE University, completing both of his Masters at Southern California Institute of Architecture (MArch 2 & MFA in Fiction and Entertainment). In his early career, he worked with Spanish-American Artist Daniel Canogar, who was an important mentor and influence, before opening his own studio in 2019.
JURY 2/3
ADA SOKÓŁ
Ada Sokół is a Polish 3D artist and designer whose work moves between hyperreal digital imagery and dreamlike visions rooted in ecological imagination. Self-taught and with over a decade of experience, she creates precise digital forms that explore the relationship between nature and technology. Through collaborations with brands such as Prada, Nike, and Gentle Monster, as well as through exhibitions and installations, Sokół develops speculative narratives that propose alternative ways of perceiving and existing in synthetic futures.
JURY 3/3
SAM BALFUS
Balfua (aka Sam Balfus, b. 1994 Los Angeles) is a Berlin-based artist and musician. His work incorporates a wide range of digital and analog techniques including drawing, sculpture, live performance, CGI, animation, VR sculpture, 3D printing, and AI. His animated work is often audiovisual, integrating sound effects and musical passages he composes and records with acoustic and electronic instruments.
Interested in world-building, fantasy, and the areas outside of describable experience, Balfua's artwork exists within his own digital spirit world, the Sayssiworld, inhabited by mystical abstract creatures called Slollas.
WINNERS
ALFIE DWYER
ALENA SAVELEVA
CARRIE CHEN
GEORGE J. STONE
MARCOS AUSEJO
ALFIE DWYER
Alfie Dwyer is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, digital media, animation, and film. His practice explores the human body, non-physical space, and perception through dreamlike moving-image works and sculptural forms. His work is characterised by a distinctive animated language that produces dense, illusory compositions reflecting on the nature of reality and how space and time are perceived. Alongside exhibiting and screening internationally, he frequently collaborates with musicians, contributing digital and live-video works for performances, tours, and online contexts.
“Light in Darkness” is a one-minute animated journey through a sequence of dreamlike worlds that emerge and dissolve in a single continuous motion, following the drifting logic of consciousness and memory. The camera slips fluidly between unstable, fragmentary environments—ancient yet synthetic, magical yet computational—where cobbled floors, saints, salamanders, crystalline formations, fleeting grasslands, and strange living creatures coexist within an illusory, ever-unfolding terrain. Developed during a period of deep introspection, the work began as a personal navigation through metaphorical darkness, and its looping structure suggests a cyclical process of descent, encounter, and renewal. Rather than depicting a fixed universe, Light in Darkness proposes worldbuilding as a relational and emotional act, inviting the viewer to inhabit uncertainty, confront inner mythologies, and imagine the possibility of emergence and transformation.
ALENA SAVELEVA
Alena Savaleva is an artist and filmmaker whose practice centres on visual and non-linear storytelling shaped by non-human myths and presences. Her work seeks to decentralise the human perspective and re-enchant nature, with cycles of death and rebirth forming pivotal narrative themes that invite a calm, reflective engagement with impermanence. Drawing on a background in spatial design, ecological thinking, and entertainment design, her moving-image practice combines atmospheric worldbuilding with a refined visual language developed through both personal and commissioned projects.
“Chants of Ocean Gods” is a meditative video work composed of three looped films that explore the cyclical rhythms of nature, where decay and death are integral to the continuity of life. Drawing on mythological symbolism and the repetitive structure of a chant, the piece dissolves boundaries between the human and the non-human, inviting a ritualistic mode of contemplation. Each film is devoted to the ecology of a key ocean species, using repetition and duration to evoke interconnectedness, fragility, and reverence for marine life.
CARRIE CHEN
Carrie Chen is an artist and educator, working across CGI animation, real-time simulation, and installation. Moving between the US and China, her practice draws on non-Western ontologies while critically engaging with intercultural narratives, identity, and digital bodies. With a transdisciplinary approach, she explores what she terms the “productive uncanny,” examining the entanglements of culture and technology through immersive and speculative forms. Alongside an international exhibition and public art practice, she is also active in education, teaching advanced visual communication and 3D arts within media and design programs.
Primavera 春 is a digital simulation in which the artist depicts herself at multiple stages of life coexisting within a blossoming spring landscape, using early AI facial-aging filters combined with archival images of maternal ancestors to generate hybrid portraits that form the textures of fully modeled, motion-captured 3D avatars. These figures inhabit alternate timelines and imagined histories, interacting within a floral meadow through gestures of dancing, running, swimming, observing, and embracing—allegories of childhood, pleasure, beauty, and renewal. Drawing on and recontextualizing archetypes from Renaissance and Romantic art, the work challenges male-dominated Western art-historical narratives by asserting a body and lineage long excluded from view. As a meditation on time, ancestry, and becoming, Primavera 春 proposes life as a cyclical journey in which multiple narratives coexist, echoing across past, present, and future.
GEORGE JASPER STONE
George Jasper Stone is a digital artist. Their practice is often collaboratively based, working with musicians, artists, live performance and contemporary dance. They propose alternative virtual spaces which often call on participation into worlds that interlink fantasy and reality. Their work is often characterised by constructing digital scenes which transcode data from physical environments to digital experiences. They aim to create a dialogue to accessible, detailed and fantastical semiotics.
“Stasis" presents hybrid digital ecologies in which statues, bodies, and botanical forms mutate under ecological and technological pressure, existing in a fragile state between decay and rebirth. Through open-ended, transforming worlds, the project uses speculative worldbuilding to question what kinds of bodies and ecologies might survive in post-2030 futures shaped by extraction and synthetic enhancement. Neither natural nor artificial, these resilient hybrid organisms imagine new modes of adaptation, proposing how life might persist, mutate, and evolve within the accelerating worlds we are creating.
“Stasis"
2025
MARCOS AUSEJO
Marcos Ausejo is a visual artist working primarily with 3D tools and artificial intelligence. His practice explores how technology shapes self-perception and identity, and how digital environments can become spaces for genuine connection as the physical and virtual increasingly overlap. His work is driven by experimentation and evolving digital processes, embracing emerging tools as sites for unexpected outcomes and new forms of communication. Through collaborations and digital art initiatives, he approaches technology not only as a medium, but as a relational space for shared meaning and collective experience.
“r3d” by Marcos Ausejo, Spain
r3d envisions a world in which people are interconnected with one another and with nature, where individuality recedes in favor of the collective values of sharing, care, and collaboration. At the center of this universe is a great star symbolizing unity, from which threads of light extend to each person, their surrounding halos making these connections visible and expressing how cooperation and relationships with the environment transcend the physical. The collective is sustained by each individual’s voluntary contribution to something larger—whether a digital space, a shared experience, or a sense of belonging—while technology functions not as an end in itself but as a bridge that reveals the invisible and strengthens cooperation. Blending organic, architectural, and technological elements, R3D reflects on how digital spaces can embody unity, diversity, and sustainability, inviting reflection on what it means to live together and how the collective can be stronger, more resilient, and more generous than the individual.
