The award is developed in collaboration between Kunstsilo and the Lumen Prize, with the aim of highlighting and strengthening Nordic voices within a rapidly evolving international art field.
Presented in Kristiansand
The Nordic Award is presented during the Lumen Prize weekend in Kristiansand, where Kunstsilo serves as host. Here, artists, curators, and professionals from around the world come together for the award ceremony, exhibitions, talks, and seminars.
Part of Kunstsilo’s strategic focus
The Nordic Award is a central part of Kunstsilo’s long-term commitment to art and technology. Together with initiatives such as Nordic Interface, the award contributes to strengthening competence and networks, elevating new artistic practices, and positioning Kunstsilo as a leading institution for digital art in the Nordic region.
Former winners
2025
Emil Dam Seidel & Dorotea Saykaly (Denmark)
Telos I
As artificial intelligence moves toward superintelligence, humanity may be heading toward extinction. If so, what traces of human nature will remain? Telos I is a holographic mixed-reality installation that explores this question through a mythical digital landscape.
In this speculative world, an AI outlives its creators and searches for meaning beyond its own data-driven existence. Blending film, dance, and visual art, the work creates a spatial, physical experience where the viewer shapes their own interpretation—an example of what can be described as “experiential sci-fi.”
2024
Maren Dagny Juell (Norway), Human Resource the Musical A MetaHuman avatar slips from TED-style talk into Disney-tinged musical, sampling self-help and performance guides while navigating glitches and the uncanny valley. Created with AI tools and Unreal Engine, the piece satirises efficiency culture and the language that turns people into “resources,” balancing optimism with unease about techno-neoliberal promises.
2023
Wang & Söderström (Denmark), Nest of You
An interactive installation uses real-time computer vision and data harvesting to build a “cybernest” for speculative digital insectoids that thrive on information. Visitors’ movements become raw material as the work probes surveillance, ownership and power structures, drawing parallels between data monopolies and biological hierarchies.
2022
Sophia Ioannou Gjerding (Denmark) Homage to Airway
A layered meditation on image, memory and medicine, the work threads together a 1920s photograph of a lab dog named Airway (linked to the development of Guedel’s Airway), a 19th-century satirical sculpture about early anaesthesia, and dual virtual worlds, The Garden and The Plot, guided by an uncanny non-playable character. Gjerding asks how we recode and live with the images that shape our reality.
2021
Pontus Lidberg & Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm (Denmark)
Centaur
An AI system, trained on planetary movements, swarm behaviours, deconstructed Greek tragedy and dancer motion capture, becomes both co-creator and performer. On stage it voices, “thinks,” and composes in real time, confronting what changes when choreography is shared between human and machine.
2020
Søren Krag (Denmark) Deux Mille fleurs / Two Thousand Flowers
Reimagining the medieval millefleurs tapestry tradition, Krag generated two thousand algorithmic, hyper-stylised “flowers,” then digitally wove them into a tapestry. By omitting figures and narrative, the work inverts image hierarchy to centre the “background” itself, merging computational design with historic craft.
