Diriyah Art Futures (DAF), the MENA region’s first New Media and Digital Arts hub, has announced an open call for the second edition of its pioneering Emerging New Media Artists programme – an ambitious, fully supported year-long initiative designed to empower the next generation of new media and digital artists. Based in the historic city of Diriyah, just outside Riyadh, the programme will welcome its second cohort in October 2025.

Developed in collaboration with France’s Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains, the programme offers a rare convergence of theory, mentorship, technological immersion and production. Open to artists aged 35 and under with a graduate or postgraduate background in new media or digital art, the call is a beacon for emerging creatives across Saudi Arabia, the wider MENA region, and beyond.

As Saudi Arabia accelerates its investment in culture and innovation, Diriyah Art Futures stands as a cornerstone – preserving the past and prototyping the future. Set against a UNESCO World Heritage Site backdrop, the DAF campus is more than just a home for experimentation; it’s a space for collective reimagining, where art merges with science, and technological practices engage urgent questions around climate, identity, migration, and intelligence.

The inaugural cohort, launched in November 2024, featured twelve artists from eleven countries, all exploring the boundaries of immersive realities, machine learning, spatial sound and post-internet aesthetics. The year will culminate in a curated exhibition showcasing DAF’s vision, scale, and ambition – inviting a new wave of artists to step into the fold.

A curriculum that engages the moment

Structured across one academic year, the programme begins with three months of thematic and conceptual exploration shaped by international artists and theorists. Through lectures, screenings and seminars, participants engage in topics such as climate crisis, post-colonial critique, materiality and the body, artificial systems and intelligence, and regional modernities in contemporary art.

This initial phase is designed to expand how artists think about technology – moving beyond tools and aesthetics to consider new media’s capacity for reflection and reinvention.

Syllabus:

The first three months of the academic year span a series of thematic and conceptual explorations led by artists and theorists through seminars, lectures, screenings, and workshops.

Topics include:

• Nature, human, 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, what are the effects of digital technologies on corporality and bodily representations? How can we develop an understanding of the body and its relationship with self, others or its environment through technology?
• Migration, post-colonialism and a critique of capitalism:
  A critique of 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 from the Arab World) has intensified thanks to the potential of new digital tools.
• Internet and the post-internet era:
  Post-Internet Art sometimes takes its inspiration from the Internet Art movement but goes beyond and challenges 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.

Over the following six months, participants will receive personalised mentorship from prominent artists, and will produce artworks using the technologies offered by the Diriyah Art Futures labs. They will enjoy unique access to innovative technologies such as advanced audio-visual, immersive reality, coding, sensing, machine learning and spatial audio-visual environments. The artwork they produce will be exhibited with Diriyah Art Futures as a final curated and juried outcome of the one-year programme.

Artists are invited to explore a range of contemporary fields in New Media Arts, including:

• 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 how artists can 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 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 outcome: a public exhibition

At the programme’s close, artists will exhibit their works at Diriyah Art Futures in a curated showcase. This final exhibition will serve as a culmination and a public-facing invitation to engage with the new ideas, forms and technologies shaped by this rising generation of digital artists.

Who should apply?

Applications are open to artists aged 35 or younger with experience creating new media or digital art. Ideal candidates are recent graduates or postgraduates who demonstrate a strong conceptual practice and a willingness to engage in interdisciplinary thinking. The programme has a global outlook and welcomes international applications, with a strong emphasis on nurturing voices from Saudi Arabia and the wider MENA region.

A space for speculation, collaboration and invention

More than just a residency or training course, the Emerging New Media Artists Programme is a proposition for what art can be in a technologically saturated world. It champions the idea that creativity – when paired with critical inquiry and cutting-edge tools – can offer new aesthetics and new ways of seeing, sensing and shaping the future.

For those ready to move beyond traditional forms and explore the poetic and philosophical potential of emergent creative mediums, Diriyah Art Futures offers the stage, the tools, and the vision.

daf.moc.gov.sa