Selected artists of the 2027 Digital Art Expo Competiton

As part of the 7th Digital Art EXPO (2027), The following 7 artists have been selected among the 90+ international artists who applied to the 2027 D-ART open call for artists. They will have the exclusive opportunity to showcase their artwork in the heart of Megève's prestigious ski resort streets from January 8th to January 10th, as well as at the Megève Congress Center Auditorium on the evening of Saturday, January 9th.

AIporium

AIporium is a UK artist who builds small living places out of code. The series Little Elsewhere turns real and imagined places into interactive 3D miniatures: a harbour in Maine (Port Alder), a walled town of the English Marches in the 1380s (Borrowmere), and now Megève. Each is built block by block like a diorama, then given rules (timetables, lifts, weather, people with somewhere to be) and left to

get on with its day. Each work is a single web page, its original stored in full on Ethereum.

MEGÈVE (Little Elsewhere No. 03) is a living miniature of the resort, from the church square at 1,113 m up through the Chamois and Caboche gondolas to the Rochebrune cable car at 1,754 m. Eight lifts run up the mountain; skiers queue, ride and ski down again; skaters circle the rink on Place de la Résistance; the light moves on towards evening, and snow or mist can settle in. No two visits are the same:

the place stays fixed, the life in it does not.

Scan the code in the streets of Megève and the same village opens, alive, in your hand, in French or English, with no app needed. Look up at the real slopes, then down at the miniature, and find yourself in both.

Nils Hansen

Nils Hansen (b. 1978, Düsseldorf) is a German-Norwegian sculptor whose practice combines two disciplines: thirty years of carving stone, including two years in Carrara, and twenty years of digital modelling. Working as Hybrid Sculpture Lab, he uses ZBrush, photogrammetry and CNC as extensions of the chisel rather than replacements for it. He has been active in NFT art since 2019; his works are held in the Museum of Crypto Art and the Whale Collection.

ANIMA DIGITALIS consists of nine digital busts built on the conventions of the classical marble portrait: idealised male heads, polished faces, rough-hewn crowns. Each is cut by a single incision running from the top of the head to the neck. Where the viewer expects solid stone, Hansen places a glowing network of circuit traces. The device is simple, and the series succeeds through restraint. The faces stay calm and intact; the opening reads less as damage than as a cross-section, the view a sculptor has of a block that is not yet finished.

The nine variations differ in where the cut falls and how dense the interior becomes, from a single luminous core to an almost overgrown circuitry. Each work is a unique 1/1, presented as a short looping video. In Megève, visitors open the series on their own phones via the QR code, without installing an app.

Helio Santos

Helio Santos is a Mexican artist, researcher and educator whose practice sits at the intersection of painting, artificial intelligence, generative systems, computer vision and blockchain art. He holds a Master's degree in Digital Arts from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, and is a full-time professor-researcher at the University of Colima. His work has been exhibited in Philadelphia, Copenhagen, Seoul, Berlin, London, New York and Mexico City, and in 2024 he was selected for HUG 100: Artists to Watch.

His recent work treats landscape as an information system. He generates landscapes with artificial intelligence and reprocesses them with his own computer-vision software, which fragments and reorganises the image. In some works the result returns to matter: it is drawn by robots he builds himself and finished by hand in oil, moving back and forth between code and paint.

Monoculture of agaves on the slopes of the volcano (2024) passes through four states. It begins as an image generated with artificial intelligence. A drawing robot traces it onto canvas paper, and the sky and clouds are painted by hand in oil. The painting is then digitised and handed back to an algorithm that takes it apart: its pixels scatter, the volcano and the agave rows dissolve into grain, and the sky runs down the image. Agave is one of Mexico's oldest cultural plants, yet here it appears as a monoculture, a territory reorganised by the logic of production. The work shows a landscape transformed twice: first by agriculture, then by computation.

Eniola Victor (Ne8ure)

Eniola Victor, professionally known as Ne8ure, is a Nigerian contemporary visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections of human psychology, philosophy, memory, mental health, and spirituality. Working across digital art, painting, conceptual illustration, textiles, and mixed media, he investigates how belief systems, inherited patterns, and lived experiences shape individual identity and human relationships. His work draws from the complexities of human existence, translating abstract and often intangible experiences into visual narratives that invite introspection and dialogue. A graduate of the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria, where he studied Marine Science and Technology, Victor has developed an independent artistic practice informed by continuous experimentation, personal reflection, and an interest in the human condition.

His works have been exhibited internationally, including Navigating New Horizons with Artion Gallery and Two Roads Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland; The Road Less Traveled at Houghton Golf Club, Johannesburg, South Africa; and PELO: A Mother’s Love, a benefit exhibition supporting children with congenital heart diseases, in collaboration with The Grateful Hearts Foundation and Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital. His collaborative projects also include an animated retelling of the African folktale How the Tortoise Got His Cracked Back, exhibited in Germany. Beyond his studio practice, Victor engages with art as a tool for social connection and well-being. Through The Reflects, his charitable initiative, he has facilitated art-based outreach for children with disabilities and participated in community art education programmes.

His selected work, Comfort (A Shoulder to Lean On), examines the relationship between technological advancement and the enduring human need for companionship, belonging, and emotional support, questioning what remains constant as the ways we connect continue to evolve.