biographies of the 5 artists finalists

André Martins (1994)
André Martins lives and works in Lisbon. After a short-lived academic experience in the field of health sciences he went on to earn a degree in multimedia art from the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Fine Arts. He is currently studying for a master’s in anthropology at the New University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Science.
He has participated in collective exhibitions and in artists’ residencies in Portugal and in Poland, where he took part in the ERASMUS + programme. In 2015, he was awarded first place in the Jov’arte youth art Biennial, promoted by the Council of Loures, the same city where he held his first solo exhibition in the Vieira da Silva Gallery.
Martins uses a range of analogue and digital media in his work, always looking to capture, measure and synthesise the human presence in a physical and/or virtual reality.

ANDRÉ SIER (1977)

Artist-engineer, electronic artisan, programmer, musician and visual artist who is trained in the sciences, painting, sculpture and music and has a degree in philosophy. From s373.net/x studios, which he founded in 1997, during the last 20 years he has done work in coding, 3D, video, sound, electronics, painting, drawing, sculpture and video games and has exhibited in more than 27 solo exhibitions and over a hundred collective events in Portugal and abroad. Among his solo exhibitions are: “Atlantis” at the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado in Lisbon (2016), curated by Adelaide Ginga; “02016.41312785388128” at the Sacrament Church in Lisbon (2016), curated by Ocupart; “Esculturas Generativas e Jogos (∆s/∆t)” at the Church of St Vincent in Evora (2015); “Skate.Exe” at the Galeria Luis Serpa Projectos (2014-15), from the “Eye for an Eye, Mind for a Mind” project; “uunniivveerrssee.net” at the Museu de São Roque in Lisbon (2011), in the contemporary art exhibition cycle “Perceptions of the Sacred”; “Ape-x” at NT Gallery in Łódź (2010) curated by Michał Brzeziński; “Motion=Snd” at the Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana (2009), curated by Jurij Krpan and “747” at the Quadrum Gallery in Lisbon (2002), curated by António Cerveira Pinto.

Through algorithmic structures and customised man-machine interfaces that he designs from scratch, Sier creates objects and serial interactive work that aim to unravel, in playable ways, relationships between space and time, and that propose a continuous and infinite synthesised virtual cosmogony in electronic substrates that can rival reality. The following series stand out: ‘wolfanddotcom’ (2014-) – games , drawings, sculptures and installations interlinking animality, cyberspace, mythology and interfaces in a bio-electronic contest;  'piantadelmondo' (2011-) – video games, installations, paintings  and objects exploring the creation of imaginary virtual cities; 'uunniivveerrssee' (2010-) – coding, installations, networks, games, simulations and sculptures that propose a virtual computational cosmogony; 'k.' (2007-11) – games, installations, photos and sculptures that navigate in the pseudo-infinite spatium inspired by Franz Kafka’s The Castle; Space Race' (2007-8) – a trilogy of generative and playable simulations where agents and players compete for fuel to conquer galaxies;  '747' (2001-) – machines and objects that playfully explore the human in the moment of free flight; 'struct' (2000-) – continuous and interactive audiovisual compositions orchestrated from a vacuum. The work is made up of immersive pieces in synthesised abstract virtual spaces, or objects and drawings that are created through the latter, often using site specific information from microphones and cameras, or synthesising experiences with generative and chaotic mathematics in combination with electronic substrates.

Sier is undertaking doctoral studies in the Planetary Collegium under the supervision of Roy Ascott and Mike Phillips. He has also been a teacher of electronic arts since 2002, giving more than 50 workshops and annual courses, teaching at festivals, art schools and hacker/maker spaces. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Evora since 2012. A user and programmer of free artistic software and hardware, since the year 2000 he has published thousands of lines of code added to objects, libraries and executable programmes. He has received awards three times from the Lisbon Maker Faire (2014, 15, 16), the Cerveira International Art Biennial (2009) and Young Creators (2006), supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (2015) and Samsung (2011), commissioned for the net.arte gallery of the

Portuguese Directorate-General for the Arts (2007). You can find Sier‘s portfolio at http://andre-sier.com.

Nuno Lacerda, 1983

Born in Lisbon, lives in Sintra. He graduated (pre-Bologna) with a degree in visual arts, specialising in painting, from the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Fine Arts (2008). He trained in comic book design at CITEN - José Azeredo de Perdigão Modern Art Centre - Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and has also trained in theatrical performance at the Casa de Teatro de Sintra. He regularly collaborates in a range of collective illustration, music and theatre projects. He is currently working in the field of artistic education for children and adolescents at the Museu Coleção Berardo and for young people and adults with special needs at the AFID Diferença Foundation.

His work as an individual centres around illustration and video. He won awards in 2011 and 2014 from the FUSO - the Lisbon International Festival of Video Art for his pieces Percurso (6) and Mapa Museu, respectively. He was shortlisted on several occasions by the same festival in Paris, New York and Bahia. Other places his work has been shown include Cantabile, Goethe Institute - Lisbon, 2011; VAFA Video Art For All - Macau, 2012; Chantiers D'Europe - Paris, 2013; InVideo - Milan, 2014 - 2015; IndieLisboa 2015, and Proyektor - Madrid, 2016 - 2017.

He participated in the artists’ residency The Non Zero Sum Art Games in Plataforma Revolver - Lisbon, 2013. He was selected for the Young European Creation of Contemporary Arts Biennial 2013-15. He has also participated in various group exhibitions, such as O Efémero em Passagem - Carris Museum, Lisbon, 2014; Mostra de Arte Contemporânea - Garagem Centro Difusor das Artes, Lisbon, 2015; Porque o Céu é Azul - ISEG, Lisbon, 2016; and Panorama - Le Consulat, Lisbon, 2017.

His private exhibitions include Abscôndito, hosted by MUTE Gallery in Lisbon, 2016.

www.nunolacerda.weebly.com

Rodrigo Gomes (1991)

Born in Faro. Lives and works in Lisbon. He is currently studying for a master’s degree in multimedia art at the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Fine Arts, having previously studied multimedia art at the University of Évora, specialising in sculpture (2012-2015). He also has a post-graduate qualification in sound art from the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Fine Arts (2015-2016) and has done a course in communication and multimedia design at etic_algarve (2010-2012).

Gomes co-founded the Évora Centre of Visual Arts at the University of Evora’s School of Arts (2013) and co-created T10 Gallery (2014) at the same institution. He has produced multimedia concerts, such as the Pedreira dos Sons Festival with the University of Évora Symphony Orchestra (2014) and Dejavú, a collective electronic music project of VJing and video mapping (2014-2015).

Gomes participated in the artists’ residencies RésVés in the village of Alte (2016), Utopia in Montemor-o-Novo’s Oficinas do Convento (2015) and LUZ3, organised by Pedro Portugal in Aldeia da Luz (2013).

Since 2014 he has regularly exhibited in group shows, most notably in the Viga Goiva Maço exhibition - Quadrum Gallery (2017), Mostra (2017), Festival Múltiplo at Zaratan – Contemporary Art (2016), Soniferous – Sound Art Exhibition of the Lisbon Fine Art Faculty (2016) and Utopia – T10 Gallery (2015)

Sofia Caetano (1987)

Born in Ponta Delgada, Azores.

She graduated in fine arts, specialising in painting, from the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Fine Arts. She studied production at RESTART and photography at the Portuguese Institute of Photography. She has also done an internship as a photojournalist for VISÃO magazine. She concluded her Master of Fine Arts in Media Art at Emerson College in Boston, the U.S., where she later taught the modules Introduction to Film Production and Foundations of Visual and Media Arts Production.

Her work focusses on screenwriting and production and investigates and experiments with their relationship with installations and consequently the exhibition space/set. Her filmography includes short fiction, documentary and experimental films, dance videos, video clips, video art, and more recently, a web series.

One of the works that stands out from her career is BLISS (2016) - a hybrid of cinema and installation art, which received a Creative Artistic Grant, awarded by the Government of the Azores in the audiovisual and multimedia categories. It is a short science fiction film that explores the existential comedy derived from a future reality where God is a scientist. It is presented to the viewer through a physical and individual cinematographic experience in which they are required to move through the space in order to watch the full film on different