„Von ungewöhnlicher Reife und Resonanz“

Four HfK graduates who presented their final projects at the 1st Digital Media Graduation Festival at the University of the Arts (HfK) Bremen were awarded the Digital Media Graduation Awards 2026, which carry a total prize fund of 5,500 euros. Honourable mentions were also awarded.

First prize goes to Julia Vollmer’s work “to heat (series): to heat a candle with the warmth of you, to hurt for a thought”. The work explores the hidden energy costs of artificial intelligence (AI). “A metal keyboard heats up, and this heat is used to warm a candle, whose wax slowly accumulates on the floor of the art space over time. In this simple chain of cause and effect, the artist demonstrates a remarkable ability to materialise the process of energy consumption in a tangible way. What is normally abstract becomes something we can clearly recognise,” reads the jury’s statement. It goes on to say that Vollmer “successfully visualises complex systems through a minimal object, allowing a candle and a small piece of hardware to convey a message of considerable significance. It is in this minimalism that the beauty of the work lies.” It is underpinned by a profound conceptual intelligence. “By returning to the themes of flame and candlelight, the work evokes the invention of light and fire as a fundamental metaphor for technology, and situates AI’s energy requirements within the context of the long history of human survival.” With its “rare combination of urgency, poetry and conceptual rigour”, “to heat (series)” stands out as a work “of unusual maturity and resonance”.

Second prize goes to Valentina Gaete Urrutia’s work “What the rope taught me about displacements”. Starting from the artist’s own physical engagement with a hemp rope, a “reflection on movement, labour and belonging” unfolds, according to the jury. “A harbour rope is both a tool of arrival and departure; it tells of ports, crossings and the long history of goods and people transported across the water, including processes of colonisation. Gaete Urrutia imbues this single object with an extraordinary density of meaning, so that displacement becomes palpable through the fibres of the material itself. This is a metaphor made tangible, an argument put forward through touch. The work weaves together themes such as migration and feminism with remarkable intelligence.”  

Third place is shared by Hiuyan Lee and Timm Albers. 

The jury describes Lee’s work “Talking to others(--- - .... . .-. ... )” as follows: “Taking as her starting point something as personal and bureaucratic as the twelve digits of her Hong Kong identity number, Lee develops a far-reaching exploration of the tensions between the Chinese language and the Western alphabetic order. Beginning with a single official inscription, the work raises questions of identity, classification and belonging, demonstrating an admirable ability to move from the intimate to the structural.” The jury particularly highlights the installation aspect of the work: “The way in which characters become optical fibres is a truly beautiful gesture that lends a material and luminous form to the abstract notion of language as a signal. In this realisation, the conceptual and the poetic converge.”
Regarding Timm Albers’ “Strategies for an Auction”, the jury noted: “The work takes as its subject the logic of real-time bidding – those automated auctions, taking place in the millisecond range, in which advertisers compete for the right to place an advertisement on the internet – and stages it as a contest between six participants (speakers), each fighting for the right to play a sound.  By translating an abstract algorithmic process into something audible, Albers makes audible a system that normally operates at the level of perception and directs our attention without ever revealing itself. Sound, he argues, is not an ornament here, but an argument: “The transformation of bidding logic into a sonic competition reveals how such systems allocate, exclude and decide on values.” This leads the project to its deeper question – “the distribution of attention itself and how the market is connected to it.”

Honourable mentions were awarded to Alberto Salgado Harres, Mohar Kalra, Boeun Kim and Nicolás Sánchez Noa.

The jury consisted of Natalia Fedorova (artist), Martin Hesselmeier (Professor of Interface Design at the Bauhaus University Weimar), Bruno Moreschi (Associate Professor of New Media at Aalto University in Finland) and Constanza Piña Pardo (artist).