The Prix Ars Electronica — awarded annually since 1987 and widely described as the most time-honored prize in media art — has announced its 2026 Golden Nica winners, drawn from a submission pool of 4,329 works across four categories: 1,144 in New Animation Art, 1,757 in Interactive Art+, 754 in Digital Humanity, and 674 in u19–create your world. Each Golden Nica carries €10,000, and winners are presented at the Ars Electronica Festival, September 9–13 in Linz.
Watch: Ars Electronica Festival — It’s a Wrap! (YouTube)
The winners
In Interactive Art+, a jury of five international experts awarded the Golden Nica to Forensic Architecture for A Cartography of Genocide — a continuation of the research agency’s long-running practice of using spatial, architectural, and computational analysis as a method of investigation and evidence-building rather than as an aesthetic end in itself. In New Animation Art, Andrew Herzog (US) won for Deer Hunter, a work that combines archival footage, home videos, and generative AI. In u19–create your world, Jannis Berner (AT) took the Golden Nica for Reverse Rendering, which explores how digital blurring and perspective-dependent distortion can be transferred back into analog physical space.
What the winners have in common
There’s a coherent throughline here, and it isn’t formal or technical. Forensic Architecture’s work is evidentiary; Herzog’s turns generative AI on personal and archival memory rather than on invention; Berner’s takes a digital artifact — the blur, the rendering error — and drags it back into physical material. All three treat computational technique as a means of interrogating something real rather than as the subject itself. For a field frequently accused of technique-forward work in search of a reason to exist, a jury slate weighted this heavily toward investigation and testimony is a meaningful signal about where the Prix thinks media art’s center of gravity currently sits.
Why the submission numbers matter too
At 1,757 submissions, Interactive Art+ was the single largest category — a useful counterweight to the assumption that generative AI has become the field’s dominant preoccupation. The scale of the pool overall (over 4,300 entries) also reinforces the Prix’s continued function as a genuine barometer: with that many submissions across four categories, the winners represent an actual selection from the field rather than a small curated slate, which is exactly what makes the pattern across them worth reading closely.