The creative partnership between Anna Ridler and Sofia Crespo has won the Artist of the Year award at the ABS Digital Art Prize.
The winners have been selected by the judges to reflect the artistic journey and impact on digital art that has been created by these two established artists over the course of their careers. They will be offered significant networking and visibility opportunities with a solo show or an exhibition at a cultural institution within the next 12 months.
Congratulations to our Artist of the Year prize winners, Anna, and Sofia. The explosion of creativity we are seeing in Digital Art makes this competition tougher every year, yet their contribution to the space stands out with concepts and execution that are not just visually elegant and emotive but also at the cutting edge of innovation.
Sebastien Montabonel, President of the Jury
The Emerging Artist of the Year category has been won by Cezar Mocan for his artwork World Upstream. The Emerging Artist category, a category created this year to reflect the fast evolution of the digital art space, has seen 120+ applications from 38 countries with a broad range of artworks representing significant diversity of styles, formats and movements. Cezar’s piece will be included in the Arab Bank Switzerland’s Digital Art Collection.
“Congratulations to our Emerging Artist of the Year prize winner, Cezar Mocan. The international entrants and finalists in this category showcased the extraordinary new talent that is shaping the future of digital art, yet with work that creates an intersection of contemporary art, game design, and media theory to ask profound questions about our future relationship with technology, Cezar is a clear winner.”
Sebastien Montabonel, President of the Jury
The prize is the first of its kind to recognize digital artists. It’s all star jury in the digital art world includes Alejandro Cartegena, an international leading curator for digital art; Eleonora Brizi founder of Breezy Art; Marlène Corbun, Head of Contemporary Art for LaCollection; Mimi Nguyen, PhD a lecturer at Central Saint Martins; Rani Jabban, Managing Director of Arab Bank Switzerland and Sébastien Montabonel President of the third ABS Digital Art Prize and a leading curator of digital art working with museums and major collectors globally.
“As a patron of the arts, closely involved in the digital asset space, we are proud to establish a global art prize that supports and promotes digital artists whilst raising awareness of this fast-evolving art sector. The extraordinary quality of the beautiful and thought-provoking work shared with us by the competing artists and the rapidly growing interest in Digital Art from our younger clients all send a clear message: Digital Art is the future of Art.”
Rani Jabban, Managing Director of Arab Bank Switzerland,
About the artists
The winning collaboration between Anna Ridler and Sofia Crespo commenced in 2023 to combine analog photography and AI to explore the interplay between nature and technology. Well-known works include Snapshots: Orchids which employs early photography techniques alongside AI-generated imagery to provoke reflection on our interactions with nature framed increasingly through lenses and screens.
Their work has been showcased at prominent venues, including Paris Photo 2023 and the Frieze Gallery in London, underscoring the partnership’s impact on the digital art scene.
HERE, Frieze Gallery in London exhibited: 2023 Verse: Sofia Crespo x Anna Ridler (UK) (link) metadata: year: 2023 medium: neural networks, polaroid exposures
Anna Ridler is a British artist and researcher renowned for her pioneering work at the intersection of art, data, and machine learning. She is celebrated for creating hand-crafted datasets to train AI, producing visually rich works that examine the biases and ethical implications of these technologies. Ridler’s work has been exhibited at prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Barbican Centre, Centre Pompidou, HeK Basel, the ZKM Karlsruhe, and Ars Electronica.
Sofia Crespo is an Argentine artist based in Lisbon, Portugal, who explores the convergence of AI and biological systems. Her work examines humanity’s evolving relationship with technology across time, drawing connections between historical innovations like microscopes that transformed our understanding of reality, to examining neural networks. She has exhibited globally at prestigious venues including Art Basel, Ars Electronica, the V&A Museum and MAC Lyon; she frequently shares her insights through lectures at institutions like MIT and the Oxford Artificial Intelligence Society.
Cezar Mocan wins the first ever Emerging Artist of the Year award with his work, World Upstream an inquiry into leisure. Set in a fictional future which takes for granted the embodiment of AI and the utopian promise of freedom through automation – World Upstream asks what remains once labour becomes obsolete. The work exists in a game engine and presents as a film which edits itself in real time and never ends.
Mocan is a Lisbon-based artist and computer programmer interested in the interplay between technology and the natural landscape. Using narrative generative systems—animated videos of infinite duration—he creates worlds that recontextualize aspects of digital culture. His work has already been displayed in top tier galleries around the world.
About the ABS Digital Art Prize – Third edition
Arab Bank Switzerland, a long-time patron of the arts, launched the world’s first Digital Art Prize to recognize and celebrate Digital art and creators involved in the emergence of this emerging artistic (r)evolution in 2023. Today, the prize, entering its third year, has expanded to include emerging and established artists with the creation of a new Emerging Artist award to complement the existing Artist of the Year award creating two separate categories to represent these two important groups in the fast-evolving digital art space.
Previous winners of the ABS Digital Art Prize: 2024: The Swiss artist RVig with his work inspired by the poem “Les Fleurs du Mal”. 2023: The Iranian American artist Marjan Moghaddam with her animated painting “Glitch Intaleqi”.
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