New Accenture digital art bursary winner explores our online identity

• Published date: 30 September 2022

This is something that Accenture is acutely aware of, so they decided to create a bursary to nurture the talent of an artist exploring some of the most topical issues facing our digital future

Speaking about the creation of the Accenture Digital Innovation in Art bursary, Etain Seymour, marketing and communications director at Accenture in Ireland comments: "When technology meets human talent and ingenuity, exciting things happen. We explore this in our business every day and were interested to see how it manifests within art. So, we created this bursary to support an artist whose work is both created digitally and showcases how creativity and technology can produce new perspectives and approaches to art."

The 2022 winner of the €10,000 Bursary, Nadia J. Armstrong, explores the commodification of human emotions, the creation of machines, and the physical entanglement of our bodies with world systems in her work. Using video and digital animation, Armstrong creates pieces that investigate the virtual space and humanity's relationship to it.

A graduate of the National College of Art and Design, Armstrong's interest in the digital realm stems from the symbiosis between human and machine, device and individual. "Working in the digital space allows me to comment on the contemporary moment through the means of the technological systems that define the fabric of our virtual and our physical lives," she says.

It was this understanding of how to probe the themes in her work through technology that stood out for the judging panel, composed of a multi-disciplinary team from across Accenture with an external new media expert. Seymour adds, "Nadia's work impressed us all due to its creativity, passion for design and deep understanding of human + machine interplay through artificial intelligence and machine learning."

Armstrong plans...