Prize Money: The STARTS Prize Africa prize money amounts to € 30.000 and will be distributed among:
- Grand Prize of € 15.000
- 5 Awards of Distinction each € 3.000
Award Ceremony and Symposium: The winner of the STARTS Prize Africa Grand Prize makes a commitment to accept the award in person at the Award Ceremony and to present the work at the STARTS Prize Forum. Both will take place during the Ars Electronica Festival on September 3 – 7, 2025 in Linz, Austria. Groups and institutions are requested to nominate a representative to fulfill this commitment.
Exhibition: If the submitted work is selected and honoured by the Jury, the artist is committed upon invitation to present the submitted work at the Ars Electronica Festival 2025, as well as at the consortium members’ events.
+ Eligibility Criteria
- The STARTS Prize Africa is offered to honour the initiatives made at the intersection of arts, science, and technology that strive towards a positive social, humanitarian, economic, environmental, or political impact and promote diverse and sustainable society.
- The projects should be driven by both technology and the arts. Purely artistic or technologically driven projects are not the focus of this competition.
- All forms of artistic works and practices with a link to innovation in technology, business and/or society are welcome. STARTS Prize Africa is not restricted to a particular genre such as media art and digital art. The competition is open to all forms of creative practices, be it music, performing and visual arts, film, animation, gaming, photography, VR and XR, design, fashion, architecture, journalism, art-science collaborations, citizen science initiatives, human-centered AI projects, new media applications, machine learning, biotechnology, art & science, material research, smart cities and citizen empowerment, robotics, and many more.
- The competition is open to citizens and residents of all African countries, as well as legal entities registered on the continent.
- An artist group is eligible to apply if at least one member is an African citizen or resident and he/she/they are the ones to make a submission.
- The competition is open to applications from natural persons (such as individual creatives, artists or other professionals), groups of natural persons, legal entities (such as startups, associations, research and higher education institutions, public bodies, NGOs, companies, and other legally established organizations), and groups of legal entities (such as research consortia).
- Community initiatives may be submitted only by an authorized representative. This may be an individual or an organization as specified above.
- Every submitted project must be, at the time of its submission, either totally completed or far enough along for the jury to be able to assess its quality and the likelihood of it being successfully implemented. The same applies to collaborative arrangements—at the time they’re submitted, they must already be up-and-running and in the implementation stage. No consideration will be given to entries that are purely concepts, ideas or proposals for collaboration.
- Projects should not be older than two years or have to show a significant update or further development within the last two years.
- Initiatives consisting of or benefitting entities subject to EU sanctions are not eligible to apply. *
