Diriyah Art Futures opens a digital and technology-led creative production and training programme targeting emerging artists working in new media and digital arts. If you are interested in working alongside the most prominent digital and new media artists in the world in this unique supported one-year programme, then

  
Diriyah Art Futures is waiting for you. Diriyah Art Futures centre, a cornerstone for new media and technology art in the region has developed its emerging artist programme in collaboration with Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains in France. Diriyah Art Futures is dedicated to advancing the field of digital and new media art by providing emerging artists with access to cutting edge professional equipment, a production budget, as well as a wide range of multidisciplinary learning opportunities which include theoretical, conceptual and technical learning opportunities and personal mentorship by prominent international digital artists.

  
In the following six months, as emerging artists in the programme you will receive personalised mentorship from prominent artists, while you produce your artwork using the technologies offered by the Diriyah Art Futures labs. You will have access to cutting-edge technologies such as advanced audio-visual, immersive reality, coding, sensing, machine learning and spatial audio-visual environments. The artwork you produce will be exhibited with Diriyah at Futures as a final curated and juried outcome of the one-year programme. 

  
— **Reality and Artificial Reality**, an invitation to explore the intersection between the physical and virtual worlds, within a range of technical engagements from immersive worlds to bio or synthetic material. Questions in this track include how virtual spaces embed themselves in corporality or how virtual spaces engage non-visual sensory experiences? Lastly, the topic explores how artists can subvert this reality using technologies that currently impact human engagement. 

  
— **Sound and Cinema Creation**, an invitation to examine the ways in which artists push the boundaries of cinema, archive and documentary. A key question is how artists can expand the cinematic and spatial sound experience through digital means, installation or new cinematic immersive experiences. Additionally, the topic explores how artists envision an expansive and narrative-led digital encounter. 

  
— **Humans and Artificial Intelligence**, an invitation to examine the intersection of humans and machines, with a particular emphasis on the role of artists within this framework. This track focuses on computational creativity, code, machine learning & AI (image, text, speech), robotics, code art, interactivity, and living in data. A key question that arises within this topic is what role artists can play in offering a unique perspective on the social and technical events that are reshaping our era and the different perspectives on the issue of new intelligences.

**THE ONE-YEAR EMERGING ARTISTS PROGRAMME** 

  
The first three months of the academic year will be a series of thematic and conceptual explorations offered by artists and theorists through seminars, lectures, screenings and workshops. Thematic topics will include: 

  
— Nature, Human and Non Human: In the era of the Anthropocene and in light of the upheavals affecting our environment, the separation that Western society has wreaked with the non-human world is being called into question. 

  
— Nature, Climate, Environment and Societal Transformation: What role does art, particularly digital art, play in all of the current transitions in energy, society, climate, and ecology? 

  
— The body and technological transformations of living beings: From the digital body to the cyborg, effects of digital technologies on corporality and bodily representations. Understanding of the body and its relationship with self, others or its environment with or through technology. 

  
— Migration, Post-colonialism and a critique of capitalism: Critique of a capitalism in crisis through the consequences we are observing today, both from an environmental and migratory point of view. 

  
— Mapping Memory, the relationships between digital practices and the archive: The use or constitution of archives by artists (especially artists from the Arab world) has intensified thanks to the potential to be found in new digital tools and uses of such tools. 

  
— Internet and the post-internet era: « Post-Internet » art sometimes takes its inspiration from the « Internet Art » movement, but goes beyond and questions the notions of network, immaterial and material concepts. It questions the increase in connectivity, information overload or so-called concepts of community. 

  
— Global Modern and Contemporary Art and Arabic Regionalism: Reviews on the digital arts related histories of modern and contemporary art, and an additional focus on contemporary art practice from the MENA region and through the lens of the Arab region.