Auriea Harvey, Martina Menegon, Quiet Ensemble and The Cool Couple are the finalists of the VDA Award 2025. With their poetics, visions and works, after the first edition in 2023 and a twenty-four-month research process, the award returns to offer not only a snapshot of the digital art scene, capable of intertwining pioneering visions and new realities, but also a profound investigation of the present: a spotlight on its contradictions, transformed into artistic language, beyond simplifications and rhetoric.
From Auriea Harvey’s maternal body as the primary relationship between mother and child, to Martina Menegon’s fragmented and glitchy identities in search of definition; from the cosmic mysteries translated in real time into living matter by Quiet Ensemble thanks to data from observatories, to the destabilising revolutions in astrophysics and quantum physics that challenge the essence of man and acquired knowledge; to the climate disaster addressed by The Cool Couple and the illusion of control.
Beyond the boundaries of technological design and sculpture, between three-dimensional and interactive digital environments, hybrid textures and unstable corporeality, immersive experiences that question identity and presence, the finalist works of the second edition thus intersect technology, art and critical awareness.
A pioneer of Net Art, capable of transforming digital interactions and virtual environments into scenarios inhabited by archetypes and memories, Auriea Harvey’s Mother/Child constructs an intimate and universal reflection on the mother-child bond, where strength and fragility intertwine in a precarious and 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 and 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 combines technological innovation and sculptural depth.
With untouched. 7285252, Martina Menegon brings unstable and glitchy bodies to the stage, digital self-portraits generated by 3D scanning that multiply in immersive environments. This research exposes the vulnerability of the self in the era of extended realities, opening up new perspectives on identity and perception through bodies that shatter, become interactive experiences, and oscillate between physical presence and virtual dimension. In this suspension, fragility, disorientation and unexpected affectivity emerge in the work of an artist, curator and teacher who has created a language capable of challenging the linearity of the body and its definition.
Quiet Ensemble’s Fragile opens a window onto the cosmos. Data from the European Gravitational Observatory in Cascina becomes sensitive material, transforming into visual and sound landscapes that make the invisible perceptible. Luminous fractures, sound vibrations and digital collapses render fragility as a generative principle, where rupture becomes rhythm and disintegration becomes poetry. For years, Fabio Di Salvo and Bernardo Vercelli have been intertwining nature and technology, creating “invisible concerts” that transform 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, with Flyin’ High, then tackles the contradictions of our time, suspended between desire and collapse. A digital flight from Milan to Rome via Microsoft Flight Simulator becomes a metaphor for lost freedom and, at the same time, a denunciation of climate impact. The seemingly light-hearted experience reveals itself to be a mirror of the present: a world in which the illusion of control clashes with the fragility of the planet and the growing weight of CO₂. Teachers and artists Niccolò Benetton and Simone Santilli pursue a practice that moves between research and teaching, international exhibitions and collective reflection projects, transforming art into a space for awareness.
Together with the artistic director and curator of the award, Davide Sarchioni, and the head of Var Digital Art by Var Group, Alex Tiezzi, the scientific committee that selected the works is composed of four experts who, with different generations, roles, backgrounds and trajectories, embody a plural and layered approach to contemporaneity: Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, Ivan Quaroni, Gemma Fantacci and Serena Tabacchi. These four personalities from the contemporary art world represent VDA by Var Group’s desire to embrace the heterogeneity of contemporary digital practices.
‘The finalist works reveal a heterogeneous and extraordinarily topical panorama,’ explain Davide Sarchioni and Alex Tiezzi, ‘in which identity, environment and the future become subjects of shared research and reflection. The Var Digital Art Award is a permanent observatory on the present, capable of inspiring the business world and restoring art as a cultural innovator, necessary for society as a whole.’
The finalists’ works will be featured in the final of the VDA Award 2025 on 23 and 24 October at the Palacongressi in Rimini, as part of “Z!ng – Zone of Innovation and Growth”, Var Group’s annual event that lights up the digital innovation scene.
(from the press release)
Z!ng – Zone of Innovation and Growth, Palacongressi di Rimini, 23-24.10.2025
images: (cover 1) Var Digital Art Award archive 2023 Rimini, photo by Var Group (2) Auriea Harvey, “Mother-Child”, still, VDA2025. Courtesy of the Artist (3) Martina Menegon, “FutureBodies-untouched.7285252”, VDA2025. Courtesy of the Artist (4) Quiet Ensemble, “Fragile”, VDA2025, Courtesy of the Artists (5) The Cool Couple
