Rhine Waal Media Art Award

This project was developed in response to a basic condition of current ZEITGEIST and contemporary AI culture: speed. Because tools, platforms, models, and debates evolve so quickly, a conventional workshop format can easily become outdated before it is even over. The workshop therefore took the form of a speedrun, not as a superficial shortcut, but as a method for navigating a moving field in real time.

The first part introduced participants to the current AI landscape through a compact overview of both proprietary and open source systems, while also addressing questions of transparency, dependency, control, and risk. Rather than framing AI as a neutral productivity aid, the workshop treated it as a contested technological environment that needs to be explored critically as well as creatively.

The second part transformed this introduction into a research driven artistic experiment. Participants were asked to create an interactive HTML one pager using AI, ideally through a single prompt, with only minor corrections permitted. The requirement to submit the full chat transcript made the process itself part of the work. This shifted attention away from polished outputs alone and toward the methods, negotiations, and improvisations through which the results were produced.

This process visibility was central to the research. The submitted chats exposed how participants worked with the models, where they trusted them, where they intervened, and how they handled errors or unexpected outputs. In that sense, the prompts and conversations became data, and the resulting websites became material traces of a new kind of creative literacy.

A key conceptual decision was to reject the usual competition logic. In most design or art open calls, many people invest significant effort, but only a few receive recognition. This project deliberately inverted that structure. The prize pool was shared among all contributors, every entry was treated as a winning entry, and on the PostMova website the submitted works were presented accordingly. The competition became less about exclusion and selection, and more about participation, acknowledgement, and collective authorship.

That choice also shaped the motivational structure of the project. The premise that everyone wins was intended as an invitation to continue experimenting beyond the short workshop itself. It created a softer, more inclusive framework in which students could engage with AI not only as a tool for immediate tasks, but as a medium for exploration and self directed research. The outcome exceeded expectations. Eight participants submitted multiple projects, and the diversity of the results suggested that even a very brief and highly compressed teaching format can generate meaningful experimentation when the framework is clear, open, and process oriented.

Together with survey data collected from 28 participants, the project offers a small but revealing snapshot of current student approaches to AI assisted design. Because this was not a double blind study and the surveys were distributed openly to all participants, the project should not be read as a controlled scientific experiment. Its value lies elsewhere: in the transparency of the process, the visibility of the prompts, and the way it maps a moment of emerging practice in public. In this sense, the workshop functioned simultaneously as teaching format, artistic experiment, and research prototype. It used the instability of AI not as a problem to be solved, but as the very condition under which new forms of design, participation, and authorship become visible.