During Z!ng – Zone of Innovation and Growth, the annual Var Group event dedicated to innovation and digital culture, the VDA Award returns — the prize that celebrates contemporary languages of digital art in Italy.The final of the VDA Award 2025 will take place on October 23 and 24 at the Palacongressi in Rimini, within a program that connects art, technology, and visions of the future.

  • The 2025 edition presents a selection of four artists and collectives – Auriea Harvey, Martina Menegon, Quiet Ensemble, and The Cool Couple – nominated by four leading curators in the digital art scene: Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, Ivan Quaroni, Gemma Fantacci, and Serena Tabacchi. This selection brings together different generations, backgrounds, and perspectives, offering a plural and multifaceted vision of contemporary art — one that merges aesthetic research, technological awareness, and critical reflection.

    From the maternal body to glitch identities, from cosmic signals to climate collapse, art and technology converge beyond the boundaries of sculpture and design — between mathematical clay, digital selves, astrophysical mysteries, and environmental crises.

    The four finalists of the VDA Award 2025, promoted by Var Group, are Auriea Harvey, Martina Menegon, Quiet Ensemble, and The Cool Couple.

    Together with Davide Sarchioni, artistic director and curator of the award, and Alex Tiezzi, head of Var Digital Art by Var Group, the scientific committee responsible for the selection is composed of Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, Ivan Quaroni, Gemma Fantacci, and Serena Tabacchi — four key figures in the contemporary art landscape whose diverse paths and perspectives embody a plural and layered approach to the digital present.

Auriea Harvey — Mother/Child

A pioneer of Net Art, Auriea Harvey transforms digital interactions and virtual environments into spaces inhabited by archetypes and memories. With Mother/Child, she constructs an intimate and universal reflection on the mother–child bond, where strength and fragility intertwine in a delicate, luminous balance. For her, the polygon becomes “mathematical clay” — an immaterial substance that takes shape in virtual space and translates into physical presence through 3D printing. The surfaces, soft to the eye yet solid to the touch, convey the complexity of motherhood as a contradictory and layered experience. Harvey has exhibited in major international museums, building a practice that unites technological innovation with sculptural depth.

Martina Menegon — untouched. 7285252

With untouched. 7285252, Martina Menegon brings to the stage unstable, glitching bodies — digital self-portraits generated through 3D scanning that multiply within immersive environments. Her research exposes the vulnerability of the self in the era of extended realities, opening new perspectives on identity and perception through bodies that fragment, become interactive experiences, and oscillate between physical presence and virtual dimension.

Within this suspension emerge fragility, disorientation, and unexpected affection, in the work of an artist, curator, and lecturer who, through her poetics, has created a language capable of challenging the linearity and definition of the body.

Quiet Ensemble — Fragile

It is Fragile by Quiet Ensemble that opens a passage to the cosmos. Data from the European Gravitational Observatory in Cascina become sensitive material, transforming into visual and sound landscapes that make the invisible perceptible. Luminous fractures, sonic vibrations, and digital collapses reveal fragility as a generative principle — where breaking becomes rhythm and disintegration turns into poetry.

For years, Fabio Di Salvo and Bernardo Vercelli have intertwined nature and technology, creating “invisible concerts” that translate the movement of a fly or the breath of a tree into audiovisual symphonies. With Fragile, their research reaches a cosmic intensity: art becomes an antenna that listens to the secrets of the universe and translates them into experience.

The Cool Couple — Flyin’ High

With Flyin’ High, The Cool Couple confronts the contradictions of our time, suspended between desire and collapse. A digital flight from Milan to Rome through Microsoft Flight Simulator becomes both a metaphor for lost freedom and a critique of climate impact. The experience, seemingly light, reveals itself as a mirror of the present — a world where the illusion of control collides with the planet’s fragility and the growing weight of CO₂.

Both educators and artists, Niccolò Benetton and Simone Santilli pursue a practice that moves between research and teaching, between international exhibitions and collective reflection projects, transforming art into a space of awareness.

Following its first edition in 2023 and two years of ongoing research, the VDA Award once again offers a profound reading of the present through the lens of digital artists, transforming contradictions, fragility, and vision into artistic language.

From Auriea Harvey’s maternal body as the primary bond between mother and child, to Martina Menegon’s fragmented and glitch-inflected identities; from Quiet Ensemble’s real-time cosmic data turned into living matter, to The Cool Couple’s exploration of ecological collapse — four perspectives that reveal the tension between technology and humanity, between the desire for control and its inevitable illusion.

Beyond the boundaries of technological design and sculpture, the finalist works intertwine immersive experiences, three-dimensional digital and interactive environments, hybrid textures, and unstable corporealities, blending art, research, and critical awareness.

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