Joe’s hyper-stylised computer art is going on exhibit alongside Saran Glöbel at the Glasgow School of Art from the 9th of June. Read more about Superzone here.

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zabelê by Brazilian illustrator Willian Santiago

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This is specifically a digital art prize, welcoming all forms of digitally created art works including photo-montage and manipulation to iPad drawings, interactive art, web art, digital sculpture, and animation. The only requirement is that the creative process involve a digital device as well as commercial or originally-coded software.

A Stranger to Words by Meng Chih Chiang

The prize is a celebration of the digital genre and the winner will be selected by a panel of distinguished judges in this field.  The event will be further celebrated with the tour which will include workshops and seminars on digital art in order to engage with local digital artists and the public.  As of spring 2015, the Lumen Prize has staged 14 shows around the world, including venues in China, the US, and across Europe. For more about the prize and tour, please see our FAQs.

The Platform of Suffering by Seok-Jun Ha

Garden by Rui Hu

A not-for-profit organisation, Lumen is honoured to be working with a range of education and art partners around the world including the Computer Arts Society,  New York Institute of Technology; Cardiff School of Art and Design; the School of Visual Arts, NYC; and London’s Camberwell School of Arts MA Fine Art Digital programme, CADW, the heritage arm of the Welsh Government and Swansea School of Management.

If you are interested applying visit their website or for updates about the tour you can sign up to the newsletter.

Call for entries opens: 15 March

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The UWS Creative Media Academy and New Media Scotland’s Alt-w Fund have joined forces to offer a new £25,000 digital art commission for Paisley with investment from Renfrewshire Council. The project invites artists to explore, reinvent, and re-imagine Paisley’s rich cultural heritage in support of the town’s ambition to become City of Culture in 2021. They are looking for expressions of interest from artists in Europe to make a new piece of work for the town.

Artists are encouraged to take inspiration from Paisley’s vast historical and cultural heritage. During the Industrial Revolution, Paisley was an important textiles manufacturer and the colourful Paisley pattern became known worldwide. Paisley museums boasts a collection of over 350,000 objects and the town has over 100 listed buildings.

The commission will be run as a pilot scheme for a potential series of Creative Media Academy projects exploring art, technology and research. The final work is to be completed and presented by 30 June 2016.

For more information, please visit New Media Scotland.

Deadline: 12 June

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As an MSc Design & Digital Media student you pick up a lot of new skills over the course of an academic year, particularly in the fields of design and web development. The Digital Media Studio Project is an opportunity to combine skills with fellow masters students in other courses for a semester long art project. In my experience, a group of six came together to create DarkSound, a project that was pitched to us by sound artist Zoe Irvine.

The DarkSound brief was a broad, creative exploration of darkness and night time: to represent elements of these themes in some way using sight and sound, with the specific criteria of only being accessible during the night. With three from my course (myself, Isaac Hinman and Zuo Mingni), a digital research student (Shang Qian) and individuals in the field of sound design (Robert Ewing) and composition (Thomas Hansen), we were broadly set for focusing our tasks among sonic and visual aspects.

We decided that by creating a piece of net-art we could approach the criteria of night only access and hone our sonic and visual skills through a new framework for presenting art, within the HTML5 canvas. As developed artworks in the canvas are still rare, there is scope for experimentation and future development. Isaac built the site, mainly in Adobe Flash CC (the only piece of existing software that can create and assemble canvas applications in an in-depth way that there is also documentation for), ironically spending quite a bit of time undoing some of what the software had compiled or trying to find workarounds to its scope issues.

As this medium could be home to audio and visuals, we thought it fitting to literally create a home that users could explore, to represent the subject. My part in this process was to photograph a building’s exterior and several interiors of people’s flats that would create an intimate environment, especially when set at night. As a new photographer, among other challenging experiences, I had numerous occasions of introducing myself to people right before taking pictures of their entire home and trying not to knock over the tripod more than once in the darkness around their life-long possessions. A lot of experimentation took place in these situations with different levels of darkness and external light from windows at night, and people were welcoming enough to let me into their homes until I’d tried almost every level of lighting in every room, opening and closing various doors in between as additional controls.

From earlier research I took during this project into themes of sleeplessness and creativity, I had interviewed someone to discuss their personal experiences of insomnia. This inspired further discussions with individuals on varied topics of lifestyles at night and a closer look at what affects routine (or lack thereof) at night: night shifts, newborns and social life to name a few. The discussions were recorded over Skype, giving similar tone to a phone call (especially after my part was edited out, creating the sensation for users of overhearing one end of a conversation). Zoe and I compared notes on what we found were salient elements to be edited into sound bites, as due to server size there were only so many clips we could include, that Robert neatly dissected – deciding where gaps in speech, breaths and other audible natural sounds should remain in place.

Isaac chose photographs to build from, that Zuo edited to enhance their stylistic consistency. I listened closely to the clips many times over while exploring the newly built DarkSound building to decide where each clip should be placed and ensure the final selections reflected the overall tone of conversation with each individual: where they could be factual and often amused by recalling or explaining something. I wanted to avoid portraying the conversations as overly dark and let the darkness of the topic speak for itself, even amongst the occasional giggle (which in particular can add impact from the juxtaposition of being overlaid on atmospheric sounds and images).

For me, the interviews are a complementary focal point to the artistry and visuals (which themselves feature no people, leaving just sonic and visual ‘evidence’ of people living) to draw a natural, inquisitive response from audience users. The voices bring attention not only to the night time scenes in the images but the subtlety of the ambient, diegetic sounds that Robert created to belong in each room. The music composed by Thomas, particularly for the building exterior – the first visual when accessing the piece – and party room, with Isaac’s structuring of the components also make DarkSound an enticing piece to explore.

Zuo and Shang worked with marketing materials created by Zuo to promote and record the reception of DarkSound since its launch on 9 April 2015, and gather feedback. As an online piece, Isaac has also been able to respond to feedback and view the DarkSound server’s status, which (as of 23 April 2015) has clocked 2,101 total page views from 745 unique users, from 58 different countries and growing.

DarkSound can be accessed after sunset at www.darksound-interactive.com. Early discussions and additional DarkSound content can be found at our blog.

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The Aesthetica Art Prize is now open for entries from artists working in all media from across the world. The annual award is now in its eighth year, given by the international art and culture publication Aesthetica Magazine. The prize is a celebration of excellence in art and offers artists the chance to showcase their work to wider audiences and further their involvement in the international art world.

Artists may submit their work into any one of the four categories: Photographic & Digital Art, Three Dimensional Design & Sculpture, Painting & Drawing and Video, Installation & Performance.

There are two awards that artists can enter; the Main Prize and the Student Prize. Both prizes come with a cash reward, group exhibition and coverage in Aesthetica Magazine.

For more information and to apply, visit Aesthetica here and see their FAQs section here. Submission fee applies.

Deadline: 31 August

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Leading the way in digital arts and culture? The Space WIRED Creative Fellowship is for talented individuals looking to produce a new digital artwork that has the potential to have an impact on the world, politically, socially, technologically and artistically.

Three Creative Fellows will be awarded a £30,000 prize plus training and exposure. Applications are open to anyone, in any country and within any area of digital culture. The Fellows’ new work will be shown on The Space and WIRED UK online, they will also receive training and mentoring in addition to the full benefits of being a WIRED Innovation Fellow.

Visit here for for more information and application details.

Deadline: 1 March

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The Lumen Prize is an international award and exhibition celebrating digital art. Calls are now open for entries which embrace digital technology including graphic design, animation, and interactive works. In addition to seven monetary prizes, artists will also have the chance to have their work appear in the Lumen Online Gallery and the Lumen Prize Exhibition.

Deadline: 30 June

For more information and how to apply see the Lumen Prize website.

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The McLaren Wall-to-Wall Competition is an international competition run by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and the Quartier des Spectacles in Montreal to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Norman McLaren’s birth.

The Canadian filmmaker born in Stirling was famous for his 1952 Oscar-winning Neighbours. McLaren forged animation techniques that were not only innovative but enduring. Cross-dissolves, pixilation and synthesised sound all form a legacy of experimental work which has largely shaped Canadian animation- not to mention his work in the creation of the National Film Board’s first ever animation studio.

Emphasising McLaren’s “uncommon boldness and originality,” this contest gives four winning artists from any background the chance to use four iconic facades in Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles as video canvases. Creators are invited to submit linear work from any discipline that opens a dialogue with McLaren’s work. The winning work will form one of three parts of the celebration.

Application Deadline: 20 February
Final Drop Date: 6 March

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The Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale opens its “online” doors here, and in a more relaxed pace, its “AFK” (away from keyboard) doors in more than ten different cities around the world.

The Wrong aims to create, promote and push positive forward-thinking contemporary digital art to a wider audience worldwide through a biennial event that gathers the best selected by the best, while embracing the young talents of today’s digital art scene.

A team of 30 top curators/artists have featured what they like best in the new digital art world. The biennial is divided into pavilions; virtual spaces in which selected works are exhibited. In total, there are 30 online pavilions, including an “unlimited” pavilion open to public participation and a “meta” pavilion exclusively featuring the artwork of the curators. More than 300 artists have been invited officially, to have their work featured in the pavilions, and several hundreds are still applying until the end of the event to participate in the “unlimited” open pavilion. The Wrong is the only free biennial that is fully accessible both to participate and to attend.

The open public unlimited pavilion (aka Homeostasis Lab) displays a selection of artwork submissions where artists interested in participating in the event, but who were not invited by any curator, can submit to the two curators assigned specifically to this space. An open call will run until the last day of the event, allowing everyone interested to have a chance to submit their work also during the event. The content of this pavilion will be curated by Julia Borges Araña + Guilherme Brandão and renewed everyday until last day of the biennial. Visit the Homeostasis Lab for to submit your work.

Selected highlights from the curators’ pavilion:

Gallery404 is an open source browser-based 3D art gallery.

And one day, boom: the pavilion of exploded reality! is an augmented reality experience.

Triangulation is a blog about net.art, computer graphics and video.

That was your dog, 2012 by Sebastian Buerkner

Wilderness of Mirrors is a collection of online works curated by Max Hattler.

The curators’s pavilion curator, David Quiles Guilló, is also the creative director of the The Wrong, and found guilty of selecting the 30 curators of the biennial. He is the founder and creative director of ROJO®, the art joint responsible for putting this biennale together, from initial ideas to getting everyone on board, to design, production and full media communication of the event, until its last consequences.

At the very end of the biennial, The Wrong Book will be launched, compiling a selection of the best digital artwork submitted by all participants to specifically appear printed in this book. Due to the very nature of the event, The Wrong Book’s binding will be done in “random mode”, meaning that each and every copy will be unique. It will be available for orders online on January 2014.

The Wrong is, as David Quiles Guilló puts it; “A large gathering of creative individuals, inside a virtual environment, speaking the highest form of human communication; ART”.

The Biennale runs until 31 December 2013.