Observer Arts Interviews The Lumen Prize’s Gillian Varney

In six days, Sotheby’s will open bidding for lots in an auction led by a work painted by a robot. Specifically Artefact 26, a fracas of eddying blues and blacks that hint at figures paused in a chaos of motion, which has a high estimate of $60,000 and was created by artist Sougwen Chung, whose work with art and technology won her a Lumen Prize in 2019. The robot they collaborated with was called D.O.U.G. or, more formally, Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 4. The sale in question is the Featuring Future: Pathfinders of Digital Art auction, curated by Auronda Scalera and Alfredo Cramerotti (co-directors of IAM-Infinity Art Museum) and benefiting The Lumen Prize on the occasion of its thirteenth anniversary.

“This auction represents a significant milestone for many of our past winners who have reached a point in their growth as artists where they can be presented to worldwide collectors through a prestigious venue like Sotheby’s,” Gillian Varney, director of The Lumen Prize, told Observer.

For those unfamiliar, The Lumen Prize was established in 2012 along with Lumen Art Projects (now Lumen Studios) by Carla Rapoport, a champion of digital art in the contemporary art world who had, by her own admission, no background in the arts. “However, it’s probably because I didn’t have any art qualifications that I was undaunted by the prospect of trying to shine a light on an aspect of art that I felt had been unfairly neglected at that time,” she told Artnome in 2020. Her goal was to elevate technology-driven art’s standing in the contemporary scene by connecting innovators with global opportunities while showcasing (and funding) the best in tech-infused art​.

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Since its inception, Lumen Studios has distributed over $100,000 in prize money and provided opportunities for digital, Web3 and A.I. artists through exhibitions, commissions and partnerships. Its most recent show is “ECLIPSE,” artist duo NONOTAK’s solo London debut of three architecturally-scaled light and sound sculptures in a 3000-square-foot warehouse space.

Varney oversees the annual competition, which has a multi-stage judging process that involves reviewing thousands of entries to select roughly seventy finalists, whose work is then assessed by a jury panel of prominent curators and academics from institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, M+ Hong Kong and the Whitney. Notable past Lumen Prize winners include digital art world darling Refik Anadol, researcher and scent artist Sissel Tolaas, artist and software developer Casey Reas and A.I. artist Mario Klingemann. Among this year’s finalists are Emily Xie and Sasha Stiles (both part of Christie’s 2023 Future Frequencies: Explorations in Generative Art and Fashion sale with Gucci), Chantal Pisarzowski (whose work deals with the use of technology to manage grief) and Jiaqi Yang, who created a Mixed Reality game to visualize dissociation.

Varney, who has worked at art institutions like Sotheby’s, Christie’s, UOVO and Convelio, has experience in curation, commissions, art logistics and collection management. Most recently, she was part of Metaversal, a Web3-centric venture studio that was initially focused on the future of generative art. Observer connected with Varney to learn more about how Lumen Prize winners are selected and the mainstreaming of digital art.

First, tell me a bit about your background—how did you come to be involved with The Lumen Prize, and what was your relationship with digital art prior to joining the project?

In 2023 as partnerships director at Metaversal, a digital art incubator, I helped create The Lumen Prize’s inaugural Generative Art Award and Commission. This exposure to Lumen’s community of groundbreaking art innovators and their extraordinary work was captivating.

My background is in the traditional art world. I have guided art acquisitions at a hedge fund and managed major art collections as a logistician. At Metaversal, I oversaw diverse digital art initiatives, from coordinating generative art exhibitions to helping major brands explore their first engagement with blockchain. I also briefly managed a Web3 artist collective.

It was through The Lumen Prize that I came to fully appreciate the appeal of digital art. This area of the art world felt fresh and forward-looking, and The Lumen Prize’s legacy of recognizing exceptional visionary artists early in their careers resonated with me. As we considered renewing our partnership, the idea of developing a more enduring relationship emerged organically.  Over several months, I closely collaborated with Carla Rapoport, Lumen’s founder, and Jack Addis, the longstanding director of the Prize. Together, we began shaping a shared vision for The Lumen Prize’s next chapter.

The Lumen Prize was founded in 2012 but feels very timely, given the relatively recent mainstreaming of digital art. Has what exists at “the intersection of art and technology” changed since the prize’s inception?

Although this convergence feels especially relevant in today’s digital age, our focus has always been on honoring the creative process that marries artistic vision with technological sophistication.

Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed and championed an evolving landscape of creative expression. Our approach has transitioned from recognizing specific technologies, exemplified by our Artificial Intelligence Award in 2018, to acknowledging the broader societal impact of these technologies. This evolution is reflected in our new thematic categories for 2024, including the Impact and Futures Awards.

Our artists wear multiple hats—as computer scientists, choreographers, sociologists, linguists, dancers, fabricators, designers, mathematicians, poets and musicians—to produce art that is not just visually stunning but intellectually provocative and emotionally resonant. It’s clear that what began as a niche field has blossomed into the vital artistic movement of our generation.

How does The Lumen Prize reflect or perhaps even influence trends in technology-driven art? 

Our annual Open Call draws applications from over sixty countries, so The Prize both mirrors and influences global trends in technology-driven art, reflecting the current state of the field while actively shaping its future direction. From our applicant pool, we’re able to identify the emerging themes and trends playing an integral role in our industry’s evolution. We disseminate these observations in trend reports and through programming, including our recent exhibition at the V&A’s Digital Design Weekend, aptly titled “The Future of Art.”

In addition, our International Selectors Committee (ISC) and Jury Panel provide a crucial feedback loop. The ISC includes experts from institutions like the Whitney Museum, the V&A, the Royal College of Art, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and blue-chip galleries, ensuring a diverse range of perspectives. Each submission undergoes rigorous review by up to five ISC members, followed by a month-long review by our five-member Jury Panel. This year, I made a deliberate choice to balance commercial, academic and institutional viewpoints, including representatives from major platforms like Tezos.

Importantly, not a single Lumen Prize team member is involved in judging, maintaining our commitment to impartiality. But our mission extends beyond recognition. We actively nurture artists, connecting winners with opportunities such as residency programs, enabling them to expand their practices, pursue groundbreaking projects and deepen their technological engagement.

Why is it important to have an art prize like this? Do you feel like The Lumen Prize and the associated exhibitions are playing a role in the mainstreaming of things like digital art, generative art or art powered by A.I.?

The Lumen Prize supports the maturation of our industry, identifying high-quality submissions each year from a global pool of artists, some of whom apply multiple times before being selected. Our past winners and finalists then encourage others to apply, creating a virtuous circle of growth and mentorship. And now we’re seeing our winners’ works acquired by major institutions like MoMA, a clear signal of institutional validation and the arrival of technology-driven art to a mainstream audience.

We’re an engaged community dedicated to creating a brain trust of leaders and facilitating connections, such as curating intimate events throughout the year. For example, our Lumen Prize “Art Fare” dinner series in New York and London features a special party favor: we commission a Lumen artist to create bespoke artworks on napkins, unique for each attendee. After the dinner, we mint these artworks as NFTs, encoding topics of conversation from the evening into the metadata. We’re turning each dinner into a collaborative performance piece, with attendees becoming part of the digital artwork itself.

We also educate the broader art world about the possibilities of technology-driven art. Our upcoming benefit auction with Sotheby’s exemplifies this mission.

What are your thoughts on gender equality in the digital art realm/Web3? Are we approaching something like parity/equity there?

As an organization, The Lumen Prize is proud of our strong track record in achieving near 50-50 gender parity among our finalists and winners each year.  We’re committed to ensuring that the world of digital art and Web3 don’t repeat the mistakes of past art movements, where underrepresented groups were recognized for their talents and unique contributions far too late, if ever. Yet collectively, as an industry, we have a long way to go.

What gives me confidence in our progress is the feedback I receive from our artists and the ways they practice what they preach to improve our industry. Recently, an artist selected for our Sotheby’s auction indicated they would have withdrawn had we not ensured a balance of works from both men and women.

Tell me about your favorite Lumen Studios project and why it resonated.

While I can’t take any credit for producing it, I’m particularly excited about “ECLIPSE” by NONOTAK, a critically acclaimed exhibition presented by Lumen Studios at 47 Tanner Street in London, which will be on view until December 8. This immersive audio-visual experience showcases three ethereal installations by the Japanese-French artist duo whose work has been exhibited at venues from Tate Britain in 2015, where they premiered HORIZON, to the Galeries Lafayette in 2016, commissioned by Hermès, to Art Basel Miami in 2018 with their TIDES installation.

What resonates is how “ECLIPSE” bridges art, technology and history. The venue, a 19th-century former leather tannery, symbolizes Bermondsey’s evolution from an industrial hub to a cultural destination. It’s now stretched to its power limits to house NONOTAK’s intense installations—a fitting metaphor for how digital art is transforming traditional spaces.

Are you a collector? If so, what kind of art are you collecting and who are the artists you think we should be watching?

I’ve been drawn to collecting since I was young, a passion I inherited from my father, who showed me the joys of collecting everything from rare books to pre-Raphaelite drawings. I’m what you’d call a cross-collector, appreciating the creativity and skill involved in bringing beauty into the world in many different forms.

I collect vintage couture, pieces that embody a level of care and craftsmanship that’s sadly becoming a lost art. I’m also drawn to Mughal-era block-print fabrics and have been fortunate to observe textile craft techniques firsthand in places like Laos. But given my work at Lumen, I’m increasingly drawn to generative art. I’m fascinated by how artists create autonomous systems that produce infinite unique outputs, ceding control to randomness in a way that mirrors life itself.

Two artists I’m watching closely are Béatrice Lartigue and Sougwen Chung, both Lumen artists. Lartigue’s The Big Smoke project uses A.I. to visualize pollution data in striking images of Paris, making the invisible visible in a thought-provoking way. Chung creates breathtaking canvases with robots she programmed at MIT, which respond to her brainwaves, challenging us to rethink concepts like co-creation and the definition of the artist’s hand.