“Timeline Shift” is the title of the group exhibition for the fourth edition of the Re:humanism Art Prize, the international contemporary art award that, since 2018, has explored the intersections between artistic practices and artificial intelligence.
Curated by Daniela Cotimbo, the 2025 edition will take place at Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in Rome, a symbolic site for experimentation and research in the contemporary art scene, and will be open to the public from June 19 to July 30, 2025.
On view will be the works of the ten finalists selected through the open call launched last winter, each of whom has tackled the theme of time with originality and critical insight. Also featured is the winner of the APA Prize, whose work will be displayed on APA’s digital advertising screens throughout the city of Rome for the entire duration of the exhibition. Through a deep reflection on artificial intelligence, the exhibited projects challenge the Western conception of time, as linear, progressive, and productivity-oriented, offering instead a plural, synchronic, and ritualistic reinterpretation.
Timeline Shift, literally – “displacement of the temporal sequence” – aims to question the extractive logics of data and resource exploitation that currently drive AI development, paving the way for more ethical, sustainable, and inclusive technological models.
The works offer speculative, poetic, and political perspectives that deconstruct dominant value systems and open up new horizons of thought.
The Re:humanism Art Prize thus reaffirms itself as a space for research and critical vision, where the dialogue between art and artificial intelligence fosters awareness, transformation, and imagination about the future. As curator Daniela Cotimbo explains:
With over five hundred submissions from around the world, many of which of exceptionally high artistic quality, we focused on projects diverse in origin, format, and themes, yet all driven by a common intent: to offer an alternative vision to a future that seems increasingly uncertain and marked by conflict. The jury did an outstanding job. By rewriting the narratives that have long fueled the rhetoric around technological progress, and by reclaiming ideas of well-being, care, listening, and participation, the artists in this edition show that it is still possible to go beyond this flawed timeline.
The first prize in the MAIN PRIZE category was awarded to the collective Lo-Def Film Factory, composed of François Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson, for Concept Drift, an immersive and interactive environment that weaves together video game aesthetics, visual archives, and postcolonial storytelling.
Using AI-generated 3D models, material collages, game-based environments, and archival footage, the project constructs a counter-archive of South African culture, exploring how AI reactivates and reformulates colonial-era logics through a technocapitalist lens.
The second prize went to Isabel Merchante for One Day I Saw the Sunset Ten Thousand Times, a poetic meditation on the mechanization of perception and the digital reproducibility of nature.
The artist reconfigures an algorithmic machine, originally designed for efficiency, into a contemplative entity devoted exclusively to observing sunsets. The work reveals how generative AI functions through abstraction and standardization, challenging conventional emotional and perceptual frameworks.
Third prize was awarded to Minne Atairu for Da Braidr, a “conceptual startup” that employs AI to empower the micro-entrepreneurial economy of Afro hair braiding, while deconstructing AI’s promotional rhetoric within technocapitalist discourse.
Drawing from personal experience, the project explores how generative AI can support the economic and cultural autonomy of Black women, challenging stereotypes that continue to confine them to narrow aesthetic norms.
Among the other seven finalists:
Federica Di Pietrantonio, a returning finalist, presents Net Runner 01, a “wearable” installation that investigates how virtual environments – especially video games and decentralized forums – shape our perceptions of identity, time, and relationships.
Inspired by motion photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, Me vs. You is a multi-channel video installation by Adam Cole and Gregor Petrikovič that delves into the nuances of queer intimacy in a world increasingly mediated by AI. Using wrestling sequences, the work exploits AI vision’s inability to distinguish entangled bodies, questioning computational systems of classification and control, turning AI into a tool of poetic ambiguity.
In Ever – both an installation and a website – Amanda E. Metzger presents a generative, decentralized diary archive powered by an AI trained on her personal writings collected from 2010 to 2023. Projecting authentic past experiences into speculative futures, the texts are minted as NFTs and stored on the blockchain, forming a shareable, potentially eternal, intimate memory.
In the exhibition, the archive is displayed as a white carpet with cushions where visitors can lie down to read both real and AI-generated diary entries projected on the ceiling. This setup allows them to experience the tensions between private and public, memory and foresight, authorship and loss of control.
Esther Hunziker’s Screen Tests comprises AI-generated video portraits, reminiscent of both cinematic casting photos and Andy Warhol’s screen tests, where human figures blend with furry entities. Glitches and distortions disrupt realism, evoking hybrid, unstable identities.
The Pits by Daniel Shanken is an immersive installation that evokes the natural erosion and industrial landscapes of rare earth extraction, the backbone of AI infrastructures, dragging the viewer into the unstable threshold between technological enchantment and systemic collapse.
AI-Ludd, a video installation by the collective IOCOSE, stages a fictional AI trained to think and act like a Luddite. With irony and paradox, the work subverts optimistic narratives of AI as a tool of efficiency, giving voice to an algorithmic agent that calls for machine sabotage, work abandonment, and reclaiming time for oneself.
Finally, Cloud Scripts by Kian Peng Ong interprets Taoist Cloud Seals as an asemic form of communication with the spiritual world.
Trained on a corpus of seal symbols, the AI generates talismans that lack pictographic meaning but are rich in ritual intent, removing the machine from a productivity-driven logic and repositioning it within a transcendent connection.
The APA Prize was awarded to Franz Rosati for DATALAKE:CONTINGENCY, a project that presents constantly shifting AI-generated scenarios, exploring the tension between nature and technology and their attempted coexistence.
Blending faux documentaries and hyperreal newscasts, the installation immerses viewers in a stream of imagery marked by unstable timelines, threshold openings, and sudden state changes, transporting them into the realm of uncertainty.
During the official opening, two additional installations by students of the RUFA – Rome University of Fine Arts MFA in Multimedia Arts & Design will also be presented at RUFA Space, adjacent to Fondazione Pastificio Cerere.
Developed in response to the same themes proposed in the art prize open call, these projects offer a complementary and original reflection on the topics explored in the main exhibition.
An audio-visual performance by Franz Rosati will also take place in the courtyard of the foundation on the same evening.
Lastly, the Digitalive Prize of Romaeuropa Festival was awarded to Valerie Tameu for Metabolo II: Orynthia, a performance exploring the relationship between AI, natural ecosystems, and cultural traditions through a decolonial and post-anthropocentric lens.
Water serves as a symbol of the African diaspora and displacement narratives. Mami Wata, the shapeshifting aquatic deity, becomes the focal point of an Afrofuturist vision in which AI and virtual reality become tools for cultural resistance and myth-making.
As in the previous edition, a special mention of the Digitalive Prize was awarded to Jessica Tucker for her project Improbable Excess, a performance combining prints, videos, and interactive digital renderings of mutant bodies. The work exposes how algorithmic gazes pursue, decode, reduce, and reconstruct us, manipulating our desire for certainty and control.
Both projects will be presented in September at Mattatoio in Rome as part of the festival’s official program.
The jury for the fourth edition of the Re:humanism Art Prize was composed of: Alfredo Adamo, CEO of Frontiere; Lorenzo Balbi, Director of MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna; Alice Bucknell, artist, writer, and educator; Claudia Cavalieri, Director of Fondazione Pastificio Cerere; Daniela Cotimbo, founder and curator of Re:humanism; Niccolò Fano, founder and director of Matèria Gallery; Anika Meier, writer and curator; Paolo Paglia, CEO of APA – Agenzia Pubblicità Affissioni; Federica Patti, curator at Romaeuropa Festival; Walter Quattrociocchi, professor at La Sapienza University of Rome and head of the Center of Data Science and Complexity for Society; Diva Tommei, Italy Director at EIT Digital; Joanna Zylinska, professor at King’s College London.
Rehumanism4: Timeline Shift, curated by Daniela Cotimbo, Pastificio Cerere Foundation, Rome, 19.06 – 30.07.2025
images: (cover 1) Adam Cole e Gregor Petrikovič, frame, video, «ME VS YOU», 2025, REHUMANISM 4 (2) Jessica Tucker, «IMPROBABLE EXCESS», 2025, REHUMANISM4 (3) Isabel Merchante, «ONE DAY I SAW THE SUNSET TEN THOUSAND TIMES», 2025, REHUMANISM4 (4) Kian Peng Ong, «CLOUD SCRIPT», 2025, REHUMANISM4 (5) Franz Rosati, «DATALAKE CONTINGENCY», 2025, REHUMANISM4 (6) Valerie Tameu, «ORYNTHIA», 2025, REHUMANISM4
