The City Digital Skin Art Festival on the Media Wall of the Elbphilharmonie 2025

Media façade as a living archive: For the second time, the Elbphilharmonie’s Media Wall features the award-winning works of the City Digital Skin Art Festival (CDSA). The overarching theme is »Memory Coexistence« and the works explore the intangible cultural heritage of our societies that shapes our relationship with nature and the cosmos in diverse ways.

The exhibition shows how the past, present and future merge in media artworks and asks how digital technologies can expand archives to make culturally significant memories and forms of expression accessible for future generations to experience. What emerges is a vision of a new balance – a coexistence that brings together the human, the digital and the ecological.

From more than 200 submissions by students and young artists from around the world, an international jury selected 50 works that, following their premiere in Milan at the end of November, are now being shown in Hamburg.

Every day from 24 to 30 November 2025, from 10:00 to 22:00, a curated selection of eleven video artworks will be screened on the Media Wall.

The selected artworks address identity and myth, temporal landscapes and transience, as well as urban and ecological habitats.

(Nanyang Technological University, Singapore / Golden Award)

This work is a digital portrait that highlights the different roles of women as creators, workers, healers and pioneers across different historical periods and cultures. It honours their contributions to social and cultural development, as well as their ability to shape and renew. The focus is on resilience, identity and emotion as connecting aspects of female expressiveness.

(École Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Techniques du Théâtre / Silver Award)

This work combines post-Anthropocene future scenarios with the aesthetics of romantic landscape painting and documentary traces of real disasters. Painterly, digital and artificially intelligent imagery merge into a contemplative panorama of collective responsibility.

(Nicolas Michel, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University / Silver Award)

In »Shadings of Memory«, digital 3D scans give rise to landscapes that are constantly shifting and flowing into one another. The visual transformations represent the fragility and mutability of memory. The work combines technological precision with poetic reflection on the relationship between space, time and memory.

(NTU Singapore / Silver Award)

This work draws on Chinese landscape aesthetics as a meditative reflection on change and time. Architectural forms emerge from the two-dimensional imagery of the scroll, where traditional and modern elements meet. This creates a fluid transition between past and present, and between imagination and built reality.

(NTU Singapore / Bronze Award)

In »Mumbai Miniatures«, India’s largest city appears as a finely detailed miniature world in which surreal elements alienate and deepen the view of everyday life. The work is a love letter to Mumbai’s pulsating, contradictory energy. It reveals a multi-layered portrait of urban intensity, oscillating between reality and imagination.

(China Academy of Art / Bronze Award)

This work creates hybrid ecosystems where human and non-human life merge with virtuality and algorithmic structures. It explores new, non-anthropocentric forms of coexistence and questions established notions of nature and technology. This opens up a speculative space in which ecological and digital processes intertwine.

(Bronze Award)

This work examines the city as a collective memory. With the help of generative algorithms and 3D technologies, buildings become carriers of recollections that materialise in virtual layers.

(Experimental Award)

This work transforms Ghirlandaio’s Renaissance portrait into a pulsating stream of data, where historical pictorial tradition and digital processes become entwined. Between the painterly surface and the algorithmic structure, a dialogical interplay between history and the present unfolds. The result is a visual reflection on the instability of identity in the face of technological transformation.

(NTU Singapore / Creative Award)

Inspired by the historic Silk Road, »Caravans of Memory« unfolds a network of narratives, symbols and gestures that coalesce into a living archive, inviting a continuous process of remembering and reshaping.

(NTU Singapore / Business Award)

The starting point for this work is the mythological cosmos of the Chinese goddess Nuwa, whose story changes in different cultural contexts. The artist translates the traditional narratives into digital forms of imagination that mediate between tradition and contemporary reinvention. This creates a visual and conceptual space in which mythological origins, transculturality and digital aesthetics enter into dialogue with one another.

(Zheng Haiyu / Business Award)

The work shows a lamp made of living fungal structures, where organic growth becomes part of the creative process. The visible life cycle reveals forms of transience and regeneration. At the same time, the installation refers to hidden networks that bind nature and object into a symbiotic whole.