Win €20,000 for Art x Science x Tech Work: The S+T+ARTS Prize Competition 2026 Complete Guide

Some awards are basically a polite pat on the back and a logo for your website. The S+T+ARTS Prize Competition 2026 is not that.

This one is a spotlight so bright it can tan you at twenty paces: two Grand Prizes of €20,000 each, plus high-profile showcasing at Ars Electronica Festival—one of the few global stages where artists, researchers, and technologists genuinely mix instead of nodding at each other across a coffee urn.

And here’s the part applicants often miss: S+T+ARTS isn’t hunting for “pretty tech” or “science, but make it aesthetic.” It’s looking for projects where art and technology actually change each other—where collaboration isn’t a press-photo handshake but a working engine that produces new methods, new tools, new questions, new outcomes.

If you’ve built something at the intersection of creative practice and serious technical work—machine learning with an artist in the loop, bio-experimentation guided by design, robotics shaped by choreography, materials research that becomes a public experience—this competition is aiming straight at you.

S+T+ARTS Prize Competition 2026 at a Glance

What This Prize Actually Rewards (And Why That Matters)

Think of S+T+ARTS as an awards program with a specific taste: it likes projects where technology isn’t just a tool and art isn’t just packaging. The sweet spot is mutual influence—like a chemical reaction where the original ingredients don’t survive unchanged.

The competition offers two Grand Prize tracks, and while they overlap, the emphasis is different:

Grand Prize: Innovative Collaboration

This is the category for teams that prove collaboration can be a working method—not a buzzword. The jury wants to see industry/technology sectors and artists/creative sectors creating something together that opens new avenues for innovation.

Translation: if your project has a strong partnership story—an R&D lab and an artist co-developing prototypes, a startup and a creative studio building a new interface, a research institute and a cultural organization field-testing a public-facing technology—this category is a natural home.

Grand Prize: Artistic Exploration

This track favors artistic research and works where the artistic adoption of technology can shift how technology is used, understood, or even designed. It’s less “collaboration as organizational structure” and more “art as a force that re-aims the tech.”

Translation: if your work makes engineers reconsider assumptions, makes users perceive a technology differently, or exposes consequences and possibilities that conventional R&D would ignore—this is your lane.

And then there’s the part people underestimate: visibility. Winners are featured at Ars Electronica Festival and across events hosted by consortium partners (including groups like INOVA+, French Tech Grand Provence, Media Solutions Center Baden-Württemberg, HLRS in Stuttgart, Salzburg Festival, Sonar, T6Ecosystems, and Kustodie at TU Dresden). In practice, that can mean invitations, collaborations, speaking slots, touring opportunities, and the kind of credibility that makes funders stop “considering” and start “replying.”

The Hidden Value: Why €20,000 Is Only Half the Prize

Yes, €20,000 is real money. It can pay for fabrication, compute time, travel, documentation, a producer, legal support for licensing, or simply give you breathing room to keep building.

But the bigger win is often positioning.

S+T+ARTS has a track record (since 2016) of rewarding projects that sit in the messy, fertile middle—where art meets research meets industry meets society. If you’ve ever tried explaining your work to a traditional art jury (“So is it sculpture?”) or a traditional tech panel (“Where’s the ROI?”), you know why that matters. This prize is one of the rare arenas where hybrid work isn’t treated like an odd duck. It’s the point.

Also: the program has honored 350+ projects from 18,900 submissions across 124 countries, and distributed €400,000 over the years. That tells you two things at once: it’s globally recognized, and it’s competitive. Tough to get, absolutely worth the effort.

Who Should Apply (With Real-World Examples)

S+T+ARTS is open to artists/creative professionals and the researchers/companies involved—and it’s open worldwide. No EU passport required. The main eligibility filter isn’t geography; it’s the nature of the work.

They explicitly say they’re not focused on projects that are purely artistic or purely technology-driven. So the question to ask yourself is simple: Would this project exist in anything like its current form if either the art or the technology side were removed? If the answer is “no,” you’re getting warm.

A few examples of strong-fit submissions (not exhaustive, but hopefully clarifying):

• A machine learning project where an artist shaped the training logic, dataset ethics, outputs, and public experience—resulting in a tool or method that researchers now use differently.
• A biotech collaboration where lab protocols become a public artwork and the artistic approach improves experimental framing, documentation, or engagement (especially around bioethics).
• A robotics project where choreography and embodied practice changed the robot’s interaction model, making it safer or more legible around humans.
• A materials research partnership where artists and engineers co-developed a new material process, and the “art side” wasn’t decoration—it drove constraints, tests, and design decisions.
• A smart cities/citizen empowerment project where civic engagement is not a comms campaign but part of the system design, with an artwork acting as a participatory interface.

If you’re coming from a company or lab, don’t assume “artist involvement” means hiring someone to make the launch video. The jury can smell that from space. They want the artist as a genuine collaborator—someone who helped choose the questions, not just paint the answers.

What the Jury Seems to Care About (So You Can Write to It)

The criteria listed in the call give you a clear blueprint of what to emphasize:

1. Artistic research quality and its potential influence on technology.
   Spell out the mechanism of influence. Did your artistic method change design requirements? Reveal bias? Create a new evaluation approach? Affect adoption?

2. Collaboration quality and success between art and technology.
   Don’t just name partners; explain roles, decision-making, co-authorship, shared risks, and what each side learned.

3. Connection to innovation, education, social inclusion, or sustainability.
   Choose one or two and go deep. If you try to claim all four, you’ll sound vague. Show outcomes, communities, or measurable changes.

4. European Dimension.
   This doesn’t mean “you must be European.” It means they value relevance to European contexts, networks, partnerships, societal challenges, cultural exchange, or dissemination across Europe. If your project had European collaborators, pilots, exhibitions, research ties, or policy relevance—say so clearly.

5. General criteria: aesthetics, originality, concept, innovation, technique, and presentation quality.
   This is your reminder to submit excellent documentation. Great projects lose competitions because the submission looks like it was assembled on a train.

Insider Tips for a Winning Application (The Stuff That Actually Moves the Needle)

You don’t win S+T+ARTS by being interesting. Plenty of interesting projects apply. You win by making it painfully easy for the jury to understand what changed because your collaboration existed.

Here are practical moves that tend to separate finalists from the “almost” pile:

1) Write the project story like a cause-and-effect chain

Avoid the “We explored themes of…” fog. Instead: We built X, using Y method, which produced Z outcome, changing A assumption, enabling B use case. The jury is cross-disciplinary; clarity is kindness.

2) Prove the collaboration was real with specifics

Name who did what. Show co-development: joint workshops, shared prototypes, iterative tests, conflict resolution, decision points. If you can include evidence of co-authorship (papers, patents, exhibitions, open-source repos, credited roles), even better.

3) Show the technology has stakes beyond novelty

Lots of tech is clever. S+T+ARTS tends to reward tech that matters—because it touches society, ethics, climate realities, labor, accessibility, education, healthcare, or civic life. Don’t just say “sustainability”; explain what your work changes and for whom.

4) Treat documentation as part of the artwork

Submit clean images, legible diagrams, short video clips that show the work functioning, and captions that explain what we’re seeing. If the jury can’t quickly “get it,” your project becomes homework. Nobody likes homework.

5) Explain your European Dimension without forcing it

If your work connects to European partners, festivals, labs, universities, funding, public policy, or communities, describe that plainly. If it doesn’t, don’t invent a flimsy connection. Instead, emphasize how your project travels across contexts and why it’s relevant internationally.

6) Balance ambition with proof

Big claims are fine—if you back them with prototypes, deployments, publications, audience engagement metrics, pilot results, or testimonials. Even a small pilot can be powerful if it’s well evidenced.

7) Make your submission skimmable without dumbing it down

Use short paragraphs, strong section headings, and concrete phrases (“three-week residency,” “field test with 60 participants,” “open dataset with 12,000 labeled samples”). Precision reads as credibility.

Application Timeline (Working Backward from March 4, 2026)

If you treat March 4 like a finish line you can sprint to, your submission will look like a sprint. And not the Olympic kind.

A more realistic plan:

8–10 weeks out (early January): Decide which Grand Prize category you’re targeting and collect your core assets: project summary, partner names and roles, best images, video links, press, publications, exhibition history, and any proof of impact. If your documentation is scattered across drives and forgotten Vimeo passwords, fix that now.

6–8 weeks out (mid-January): Draft your narrative. Focus on three things: what you made, how art and tech shaped each other, and why it matters. Then send it to two readers: one artist who hates jargon and one engineer who hates vagueness. If both understand it, you’re on the right track.

4–6 weeks out (early February): Tighten documentation. Edit video clips. Add captions. Create a simple diagram of the system or collaboration workflow. Confirm permissions for images and any human-subject documentation.

2–3 weeks out (mid-February): Finalize the application text and do a ruthless coherence pass. Make sure the category choice matches what you’re claiming. Confirm partner names, titles, and links.

Last week (late February to early March): Submit early enough to survive technical hiccups. Then re-check the uploaded materials as they appear in the portal—files sometimes upload incorrectly, and broken links are the silent killer of applications.

Required Materials (What to Prepare Before You Touch the Form)

The call page is the final authority on submission requirements, but in practice you should be ready with:

• A clear project description that explains the work, the collaboration model, and the results in plain language.
• Documentation assets (high-quality images, short video, diagrams, screenshots, or recordings—whatever best shows the project actually functioning).
• Team and partner information, including the roles of artists, researchers, labs, or companies involved. Be explicit about who contributed what.
• Proof of outcomes such as exhibitions, pilots, deployments, publications, open-source repositories, press, audience metrics, testimonials, or adoption by others.
• Context for impact, especially if your work connects to education, inclusion, sustainability, or public benefit.

Preparation advice: create one folder that contains “jury-ready” materials—proper filenames, concise captions, and a one-page overview. The calmer your internal organization, the sharper your final submission.

What Makes an Application Stand Out (A Judges-Eye View)

Picture the jury reading dozens (or hundreds) of strong submissions. Your job is to make your project memorable for the right reasons.

Standout entries typically do three things:

First, they show a crisp idea with a real outcome. Not just a concept, not just a prototype, but a completed work or a demonstrably functioning system.

Second, they explain how the collaboration changed the result. The most convincing applications make the partnership inseparable from the output: “We could not have reached this result without the artist’s method,” or “The artistic research forced a redesign of the technology.”

Third, they communicate why anyone beyond the team should care. That can be societal relevance, a new technical approach, a new aesthetic language that shifts perception, or a model that others can reuse.

In other words: show the work, show the collaboration, show the consequence.

Common Mistakes to Avoid (And How to Fix Them)

Mistake 1: Submitting a beautiful project with a vague explanation

Fix: add a short “What changed because of this project?” section. Mention the specific shift—in technology design, adoption, perception, or capability.

Mistake 2: Treating the artist as a “creative services” add-on

Fix: document shared authorship and shared decision-making. If the artist influenced core technical choices, say exactly which ones.

Mistake 3: Overclaiming impact with no evidence

Fix: replace generalities with proof. Even small proof beats big adjectives. “Piloted with two community groups” is better than “empowers communities.”

Mistake 4: Sending messy documentation

Fix: choose fewer assets, but make them excellent. One strong two-minute video beats eight shaky clips.

Mistake 5: Ignoring the European Dimension entirely

Fix: if you have European connections, make them obvious. If you don’t, explain how the work is relevant across cultures and why European partners/audiences would care.

Mistake 6: Picking the wrong category

Fix: decide whether your strongest argument is collaboration structure (Innovative Collaboration) or artistic research shifting technology (Artistic Exploration). You can mention both, but lead with one.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1) Is this competition only for EU citizens or EU-based teams?

No. The call is open worldwide. S+T+ARTS explicitly welcomes submissions beyond EU member states.

2) Can a company apply, or is it only for artists?

Companies, researchers, and institutions can be involved and can submit—what matters is the project is genuinely driven by both technology and artistic practice, not just one side.

3) Do we need a finished project, or can we submit a concept?

The prize emphasizes results and pioneering collaborations. A pure concept with thin documentation usually struggles. A prototype, pilot, exhibited work, deployed experiment, or clearly evidenced research output tends to fare better.

4) My work is not “digital art.” Is that a problem?

No. The call explicitly says it’s not limited to genres like media art or digital art. If the work has a strong link to innovation in technology, business, and/or society, it can fit.

5) What kinds of fields are welcome?

They mention a wide range: new media applications, HCI, machine learning, biotech, art & science, green tech, materials research, smart cities, citizen empowerment, robotics, quantum tech, and more. If your project sits between disciplines, you’re in good company.

6) What does European Dimension mean if I live outside Europe?

It’s about relevance and connection—partners, dissemination, collaboration networks, cultural context, societal challenges, or presence in European venues. You don’t need to force it, but if it exists, make it explicit.

7) Can our project be both artistic and socially engaged?

Yes, and that combination can be powerful here—especially if you show concrete methods and outcomes (education modules, participatory design, accessibility impacts, community pilots).

8) How competitive is it?

Historically, it’s highly competitive (thousands of submissions over the years). That’s not a reason to skip it; it’s a reason to submit something polished, specific, and well documented.

How to Apply (Plus What to Do Next)

Start by choosing your angle: are you best framed as an Innovative Collaboration (the partnership itself is the engine) or Artistic Exploration (the artistic research meaningfully reshapes technology)? That decision will sharpen every paragraph you write.

Next, assemble your “jury pack”: a tight project narrative, proof of collaboration, and documentation that shows the work clearly in under five minutes of viewing. Then do one final check for coherence: does your submission show not only that the work is good, but that it could only exist through art-and-tech working together?

Finally, submit before the deadline so you’re not debugging file uploads at midnight, bargaining with your Wi‑Fi like it’s a moody deity.

Apply Now and Full Details

Ready to apply? Visit the official opportunity page for the S+T+ARTS Prize Competition 2026 here: https://starts-prize-call.aec.at/2026/