Foreword

The Prix Arts numériques (Digital Arts Prize) is an annual award created in 2025 by the Fondation Etrillard in partnership with the Académie des beaux-arts.

The Fondation Etrillard is a Geneva-based family foundation whose mission is to shine a light on the relevance of our European cultural heritage in today’s world. As part of its sponsorship activities, the Foundation has created several awards in the fields of craftsmanship, restoration and artistic creation. After the Prix du Patrimoine Naturel (Natural Heritage Prize) and the ‘Âmes d'Œuvres’ Craft Competition, the Prix Arts numériques Fondation Etrillard - Académie des beaux-arts is its third award.

The Académie des beaux-arts (French Academy of Fine Arts) is one of the five academies that make up the Institut de France (Institute of France), which also includes the Académie française, the Académie des Sciences, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques. As part of its mission to support creative work, the Académie des beaux-arts awards a number of prizes to emerging and established artists.

Purpose

The aim of the Prix Arts numériques Fondation Etrillard - Académie des beaux-arts is to showcase the work of a digital artist by rewarding a recent work of digital art that echoes the disciplines represented at the Académie des beaux-arts, that is painting, sculpture, architecture, engraving and drawing, music, cinema, photography and choreography.

This echo can take the form of inspiration, adaptation or confrontation with one or more of these disciplines, through a dialogue with their history, corpus or techniques.

This collaboration between the Académie des beaux-arts and the Fondation Etrillard is part of a desire to support artists in Europe and to promote digital art as an artistic discipline in its own right, extending the history of the arts into the modern age of new technologies. Interdisciplinarity and the dialogue between tradition and new media are therefore at the heart of this Prize.

Candidate works

The Prize will be awarded to a work of digital art, i.e. one whose creative process makes use of digital technologies (code, programmes, interactive, generative, behavioural or algorithmic technologies) and is intrinsically hybrid, combining different types of knowledge, methods and modes of expression. For example, the work may make use of robotics, internet networks, augmented, mixed or virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and so on.
The work may be purely made up of material elements, or purely digital, or mixed.
Non-artistic digital mediation programs or tools are not eligible.
The work has been created between 2021 and 2024 and shown at least once in a public presentation. Artists may not submit an application with a work still in progress or never shown, nor may they submit several works.
The work may be part of a public or private collection at the time of application, provided that its loan for a future exhibition or presentation is possible. In this case, the applicant must declare the possibility of a loan from this collection in the context of the Prix Arts numériques at the time of application.

Eligible artists

The Prize is open to digital artists or groups of artists of any nationality, resident in Europe, with no age limit.

The countries of residence eligible for the Prize are Switzerland, France, the countries of the European Union, as well as Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Montenegro, Norway, Serbia, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

Artists may apply alone or as part of a group. In the case of a group application:

o The group will appoint a representative (designated member) to act as liaison with the Académie des beaux-arts and the Fondation Etrillard.

o All the artists in the applicant group must meet the European residency criterion.

o An artist who is a member of a collective may not apply individually in addition to the collective's participation.

The applicant must be an established artist with proven professional experience and the author of several works at the time of application.

Evaluation criteria

The jury will evaluate candidate works according to the following criteria:

Artistic quality of the work
Quality of the candidate's career
Relevance to the missions of the Fondation Etrillard and the Académie des beaux-arts.

From all entries, the jury will select 3 (three) finalists. Of these, it will award the Prize to the work judged to be the most outstanding.

The jury is not required to choose a winner for the Prize if it considers that the quality of the entries does not meet the fundamental qualitative criteria required.

The jury may elect only 1 (one) work to be awarded the Prize. Under no circumstances may there be a tie.

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Prix Arts numériques Fondation Etrillard - Académie des beaux-arts. 2025 Edition

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