The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Annie at Ballistic Media (no strangers to the blog with their extremely gorgeous books on digital art, which you can see on our webstore here) kindly drops me a line to say that the winners of the NVArt digital art challenge – this year with the theme Art Space: Architecture and Landscape Digital Arts, the second in a worldwide series of digital art competitions – have been announced by NVIDIA and the CG Society. “We invited artists to stand on the shoulders of giants like architect Frank Gehry and gaze into the far reaches of their imaginations,” said Mark Snoswell, president of CGSociety, a global organization for digital artists. “Our artists have created wonderful places that are pure art, where one can wake each day to marvel at the play of light through fantastical spaces and at vibrant fusions of light, color, and texture.”

Regular readers will know that I am a big fan of some of the artwork Ballistic and the CG Society have been involved in fostering – some of the art is now really becoming hard to identify as ‘digital looking’ (which was always a bit of a problem with earlier digital work, even when well executed and imagined there was a certain look to it which marked it as CG) and as an added bonus for we geeks there is often a science fiction or fantasy influence to many of the works. Entries came from all around the globe, but the submissions were finally whittled down to three main award winners:

1st place: “Complex at the Centre of the Universe” by Staszek Marek, Poland

2nd place: “The Great Bayan” by Sergey Skachkov, Russia

3rd place: “Mega Village 2108” by Andrew Barton, Great Britain

With such a high standard of artwork and imagination on display the judges – who included people from Ubisoft, Midway Games, the CG Society, NVIDIA, Dreamworks and the San Jose Museum of Art among others – felt compelled to go beyond the three main winners and also issued a fairly large list of honourable mentions:

“Gaia’s Gift” by Petar Milivojevic, Belgrade, Serbia

“The Valley” by Rudolf Herczog, Sweden

“Wandering City” by Sergey Skachkov, Russia

“5:45 to Santa Monica – Now Boarding” by Aleksander (Olek) Novak-Zemplinski, USA

“Solaric Glass Anemone Structure V” by Albert Kiefer, Netherlands

“Heaven in Desert” by Tolgahan Güngör, Turkey

“The Pinevalley Keeps” by Georgi ‘Calader’ Simeonov, Great Britain

“Underworld” by Maxime Desmettre, Canada

“Water Plant” by David González Fernández, Spain

“Water Station” by Steve Bjorck, Great Britain

“Atmosphere Emitters” by Brajan Martinovic, Croatia

“In a Beautiful Place out in the Country” by Colin Cassidy, Great Britain

Obviously being a little biased I am delighted to see several Brits among the winners and the honourable mentions, but to be honest I’m even more delighted to see how international the range of entries was, with artists from Spain, the Netherlands, Croatia, Russia, America, Turkey, Canada and many more taking part, which is always a heartening thing to see in any art competition. The theme of the next NVArt challenge is “Digital Fusion.” It will run from April 24th to June 19th, 2008. Artists are invited to create inspiring fusions of 2D and 3D that are more than the sum of their parts. For more information on “Digital Fusion,” check the website here. Selected NVArt award winners will be on display at NVISION 08, the premier event for visual computing professionals and enthusiasts, on August 25th to 27th, 2008 in San Jose, California. The winning submissions for this year can be viewed online here while the winners of the first NVArt Challenge (“Amazing Creations”) can still be seen here.