share prize xviii: popular singularity
The Share Prize is Italy’s longest-running award dedicated to the most innovative artistic proposals within the international contemporary tech art scene. Now in its 20th edition, Share Festival – the Italian contemporary art festival exploring technological evolution and science – has reopened the call for entries for the Share Prize. Every year, the artistic directors of Share Festival select a new theme for the Share Prize. In 2026, entries for the prize will be required to explore singularity – the concept of singularity – a scientific field that is losing its philosophical character and becoming increasingly concrete and real:
Popular Singularity
By definition, a "Singularity" happens when science is advancing so fast that even scientists can't understand it. However, artists can intuit it!
The "Singularity" concept was invented by Stanislaw Ulam and John Von Neumann, two elite veterans of the atomic Manhattan Project. A Singularity is always associated with scientists, programmers, rich moguls, and billionaire investors, even though none of them ever seem to know what it means and how feels. Instead, a lived singularity is left to the daily experience of all the rest of us. Obviously Artificial Intelligence is a complex and entangled technical subject. The software is dense and stochastic, the server-farms are costly and gigantic, we know all that. But if you're a young modern child, you're simply born in that fire. You're not amazed about it, you were given no choice. If you're ninety, it's even more of your same old world, where you arrived long before any of these so-called amazing marvels. So, this year, we ask our artists for clear, lucid, sincere art about the Singularity. A popular, heartfelt folk art about it, immediate and accessible, without any tech-jargon, or any ugly, lazy AI-slop. Our city's ivory tower is a National Cinema Museum, so we know "new media" and we also know "dead media."
Art will last when hype dies!