Through art and artificial intelligence, these artists explored time, often seen through a Western lens of future and productivity, but now calling for openness to other cultural and ritual forms. Their work invites a rediscovery of synchronicity in everyday life and technology, reconnecting us with living species, artificial entities, and ourselves. Timeline Shift attempts to move beyond the ‘wrong timeline’, enabling the ability to influence the world and technological progress, almost like a collective spell. It also invites a rethinking of obsolete value systems and experimentation with tools to overcome the current condition. The aim is to trace trajectories towards a more inclusive, ethical and sustainable future.
The Main Prize winners were selected by a jury composed of Daniela Cotimbo, Alfredo Adamo, Claudia Cavalieri, Joanna Zylinska, Lorenzo Balbi, Walter Quattrociocchi, Anika Meier, Diva Tommei, Niccolò Fano, Alice Bucknell.
The winner of the fourth edition’s first prize is The Lo-Def Film Factory by artist duo Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson, which presents Concept Drift, an interactive game and video artwork that explores the entanglement of knowledge production, colonial exploitation, and technological power in South Africa. Using AI-generated 3D models, handmade collages, game-engine environments, and archival imagery, the project constructs an archive of South Africa’s networks shaped by algorithms, offering an anti-model of its connections to the computational world order.
The second prize winner is Isabel Merchante, with her project One Day I Saw the Sunset Ten Thousand Times, which reimagines an industrial robotic arm, originally designed for efficiency, as an emotional machine that only observes sunsets. The project explores the digital reproduction of nature, examining how artificial intelligence processes, abstracts, and reshapes human perception, creating a system of creation bound by patterns that reinforce homogenization.
The third prize winner, Minne Atairu, with the project Da Braidr, is a conceptual AI start-up dedicated to scaling the Black hair braiding microeconomy while critiquing technocapitalist AI marketing rhetoric. Drawing from the Minne Atairu lived experience, the project asks how generative AI can help Black women navigate a deeply racialized beauty economy shaped by discrimination.
The other selected finalists are: Federica Di Pietrantonio with the project Net Runner 01, Adam Cole and Gregor Petrikovič with Me vs. You, Amanda E. Metzger with Ever, Esther Hunziker with Screen Tests, Daniel Shanken with The Pit, IOCOSE with AI-Ludd, and Kian Peng Ong with Cloud Scripts.
The APA Prize winners were selected by a jury composed of Paolo Paglia, Claudia Cavalieri, Daniela Cotimbo.
The APA Prize is awarded to Franz Rosati for his project DATALAKE:CONTINGENCY, which presents AI-generated scenarios in which morphing sounds and images evoke the struggle of nature and technology to coexist in a new, organic dialetheic system. Blending fake documentary and hypercharged TV news, the installation floods the viewer with shifting timelines, collapsing portals, and uncertain realities.
The Romaeuropa Prize winners were selected by a jury composed of Federica Patti, Daniela Cotimbo.
This year, the Romaeuropa Festival’s Digitalive prize was awarded to two artists, with the first winner, Valerie Tameu, presenting Metabolo II: Orynthia. The performance explores the relationship between artificial intelligence, natural ecosystems, and cultural traditions through a decolonial and post-anthropocentric lens, using water, symbolizing the African diaspora and histories of displacement, to center Mami Wata, the shapeshifting aquatic deity, and create an Afrofuturist vision where AI and VR become tools for cultural resistance and myth making.
The second winner of the Romaeuropa Festival’s Digitalive prize is Jessica Tucker with her project Improbable Excess. This performance features print, video, and interactive digital renderings of shapeshifting bodies, revealing how algorithmic gazes pursue, parse, reduce, and reconstruct us—manipulating our desire for certainty and control. Through embodied presence, it critiques surveillance, overexposure, and the exclusion of femme and non-white bodies within technocapitalism.
The exhibition of the ten finalists (excluding the Romaeuropa Prize and the APA Prize) will take place at the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in Rome in June 2025. The two winners of the Romaeuropa Prize will be presented during the Romaeuropa Festival 2025, which takes place in Rome in September. The APA prize winner will be displayed across digital advertising boards throughout Rome in June. More information will be announced soon.