Projects within the Master’s degree programme in Digital Arts at the National Academy of Art are impressively presented at Ars Electronica Festival 2025, Linz, Austria
2025.09.04
From the 2nd to the 7th of September 2025, the Master’s degree programme in Digital Arts of the National Academy of Art participates in the prestigious Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. The Academy has been invited as a Specially Featured University in the Campus section and presents two projects: the exhibition /decisions/make/art and the results from the collaboratively implemented international project PERFORMING DATA.
The exhibition /decisions/make/art presents projects of students, alumni and teachers within the Master’s degree programme in Digital Arts and examines art as logics of choices: composition as a system, creation as a protocol, and authorship as a dynamic dialogue with the environment.
/decisions/make/art thinks not only in images, but in systems; not only in aesthetics, but in the ethics of the interaction between man and technology. The works shown include generative visual systems, interactive installations, machine learning and experimental forms of participation. The creative solution unfolds as a reactive aesthetic and ethical process — one that develops, responds, and invites the viewer inside its mechanism.
Every act of creation is a solution — a dialogue with systems, the environment, and the unknown. In the context of the exhibition at Ars Electronica, this process opens up to students as a rare opportunity to share, learn, and develop in a global artistic community, said Prof. Venelin Shurelov, PhD, leader of the Master’s programme.
Participants
Antoni Raizhekov, Venelin Shurelov, Volen Penev, Ivelina Ivanova, Iliyana Kancheva, Martin Penev, Pepa Parisheva, Roslana Yotova, Radina Yotova, Stefan Donchev, Yana Vasileva
The video art selection includes: Ada Paunova, Boryana Cherneva, Elena Andreeva, Ivan Bogdanov, Marina Genova, Ralitsa Georgieva, Simeon Damyanov
As part of its participation, the Academy is also presenting the exhibition PERFORMING DATA. It is part of the Erasmus+ Mixed Intensive Programme (BIP), in which the partner universities National Academy of Art (Bulgaria), Cyprus University of Technology Limassol (Cyprus) and Linz University of the Arts/Interface Cultures (Austria) are involved.
The project explores problems, challenges and perspectives in a data-driven world, using data as a material, tool, subject and critique. In his curatorial text for the exhibition, Prof. Venelin Shurelov says:
PERFORMING DATA explores data not simply as information, but as a material, tool and aesthetic voice. In four installations – different in media and approach – data become actors of their own story: material processes, digital shadows, acoustic traces, electromagnetic fluctuations... All projects pose the question: What does it mean to “let data speak”? What happens when we do not read it, but listen to it, observe it, feel it? In PERFORMING DATA, data is not visualised – it acts… This is not an exhibition about technologies, but about their sensitive poetics – about that quiet turn in which it is not we who experience the data, but they experience us.
Bulgarian participants in PERFORMING DATA
Students Akseniya Avramova, Nevena Vassileva, Nil Zheleznyakov, Radina Yotova, Roslana Yotova and supervisors Prof. Venelin Shurelov and part-time teacher Antoni Raizhekov
The Master’s degree programme in Digital Arts
Established in 2008, the Master’s programme in Digital Arts at the National Academy of Art develops interdisciplinary training and research practice, in which visual arts, technology and critical thinking meet. Students work with software environments, interactive design, generative systems, video, XR, data and AI, emphasising the ethics of interaction, authorship and the language of new media.
Participation in the festival takes place within the framework of the 2025 Competition for Funding Projects on the Scientific Research and Artistic Activities at the National Academy of Art.
Ars Electronica Festival https://ars.electronica.art/news/en/
Gallery
