Emerging Virtualities explores the shifting boundaries between the real and the virtual, the natural and its representations, the physical and the immaterial. It investigates how contemporary moving image works, experimental films, and artistic practices articulate new forms of presence, perception, and projection in an increasingly mediated world.
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This theme captures the ways in which virtualities are not merely technological constructs, but layered temporal, emotional, and cultural conditions. Whether through the digital reproduction of environments, the simulation of memory, or the construction of archives, artists trace how people, landscapes, and histories open up to new meanings in their virtual reconfigurations.
The concept also suggests a poetics of instability and transformation: where the virtual is not an escape from the real, but a lens through which the real is refracted, multiplied, and interrogated.
Museums, cinematic spaces, and memory devices become stages where temporalities overlap, contexts shift, and cultural values accrue — offering a speculative terrain where emerging virtualities are felt, not just seen.
Together, these films demonstrate that virtuality is not only a technological phenomenon but an aesthetic and philosophical dispositif. They stage emotional, spatial, and ontological virtualities—emerging worlds of potentiality that question the fixity of time, identity, and place. Within the framework of Emerging Virtualities, they point to cinema’s unique capacity to conjure what is not yet actual but deeply felt—a virtual dimension embedded within the fabric of the real.
During the award winning ceremony, prizes are awarded to the artists & filmmakers according to three categories:
Best Feature Film
Best Art Film – ArtReview Prize
Love at First Sight – Kulm Prize
The awards consist of an artwork by the renowned Swiss artist Not Vital.
The artwork is called “Buatscha”, which means, in the local idiom ‘cow patty’. Its form was inspired by Engadin’s nature and symbolises Engadin’s exceptional connection to its landscape that inspired so many creatives and also its own, sometimes stubborn, character.
It also stands for artistic freedom, independence of thought and the uniqueness of the St.Moritz Art Film Festival.