it's a wrap!

Weiter geht's mit HAICA 2026 – stay tuned for updates!

@haic_award

HAICA – Hamburg AI Creators Award ist der erste Wettbewerb, der kreative Arbeiten mit KI auszeichnet und fördert. Wir schaffen eine Plattform für Austausch, Inspiration und neue ästhetische Wege. Hier treffen lokale Kreative auf internationale Innovationskraft.

Die Teilnahme am Wettbewerb ist kostenlos.

sponsors

winners 2025

Still

  • The dissolution of all things
    1. Platz Still

    The dissolution of all things

    Lambros Zakkas aka Blumquist

    Describes a series of synthographies about dissolution, exploring fear of dissolution on individual and societal levels, loss of values, ideals, and reason, and the collapse of the West due to ideological delusion, guilt complexes, and moral narcissism.

  • Echoes of Geometry
    2. Platz Still

    Echoes of Geometry

    Hekuran Avdili SibeSiech GmbH

    This work approaches the digital as living matter, showing how a precise prompting and iterative reference process can develop its own visual language that doesn't copy technology but thinks with it. It describes building images in multiple stages, where AI interprets and distorts initial compositions to create something organic from data, pixels, and patterns. It explores the point where the digital is no longer abstract but natural, and how geometric forms reflect nature's rhythms. It's an attempt to find something deeply human in the precision of the algorithm.

  • Dystopia
    3. Platz Still

    Dystopia

    Thomas-Armin Mathes

    DYSTOPIA views the human body as architecture, transforming faces into structures of order and precision where emotion is replaced by form. It explores the interface of human form and constructed systems, turning bodies into architectural surfaces. It's not a chaotic vision of the future but an ordered one, where emotion transforms into geometry and individuality doesn't completely dissolve. The work questions control and perfection, and how technology shapes our perception of the present. The motifs were developed by refining Midjourney suggestions, focusing on discipline and aesthetics.

Musik Video

  • Preservation
    1. Platz Musik Video

    Preservation

    Kai Lipphardt

    'Preservation' is a visual parable about holding onto the past – a metaphor for relationships and societies that cling to destructive structures.

  • Diary of a Shoebox Kid
    2. Platz Musik Video

    Diary of a Shoebox Kid

    Jan Lucas

    I come from the hip-hop generation and grew up with MTV and those legendary old-school videos. But instead of nostalgia, I wanted to create something new, an experiment with AI that breaks down the boundaries between music videos, art, and technology. That's how the idea for the fictional track 'Diary of a Shoe Box Kid' came about, in which talking traffic lights rap. It's kind of absurd, but also quite authentic in its vibe.

  • Alles Schwebt
    3. Platz Musik Video

    Alles Schwebt

    Cadmo Quintero

    This is a music video for an AI artist I created. The video is characterized by associative, partly surreal black-and-white imagery. I experiment a lot with AI in film and art and also work as an AI artist, in addition to my work as a director. This is already my second AI music video; this time I found it exciting to create the music and an 'artist' myself. This work was created completely freely.

New Talent

  • THE BANANA RETURNS
    1. Platz New Talent

    THE BANANA RETURNS

    Stefanie Pfeffer PFEFFER MOTION DESIGN

    THE BANANA RETURNS – One morning in 1994, a banana wakes up and puts on its peel, ready to leave its box. 30 years later, its story is retold with the help of artificial intelligence. An experimental short film between analog 16mm material and AI-generated imagery – about memory, love, loss, and a surprising art heist. The film is a continuation of a stop-motion animation I shot in 1994 as a freelance 16mm project. This material was not only reused but also served as visual DNA to continue the story in early 2025 with AI – at a time when I had about four months of practical experience with AI. The goal was to explore the possibilities of AI and creatively experiment. The film begins with the original 16mm scene, then jumps 30 YEARS LATER, where AI takes over the depiction. Stylistically, the look remains true to the analog source material. The design principle remains radically realistic: no anthropomorphism, no comic elements – the banana remains a banana in a physically believable world: a box as a home, a table as a birthing bed. The film is a miniature about memory, media continuation, and the question of whether a reduced means can tell an emotional story.

  • Rote Rosen feat. Charlize
    2. Platz New Talent

    Rote Rosen feat. Charlize

    Reno Mezger

    'Rote Rosen' is a real-time interactive AI poetry video in collaboration with Hamburg musician Charlize. Charlize is digitized live via motion capture. The motion capture data runs through a local image AI, controlled by TouchDesigner. The image AI is programmed to create the illusion of movement with 13 generated images per second, close to real-time AI video. All body movements, facial expressions, and gestures are interpreted in real-time into cubist-poetic visual worlds. The prompts for image generation are formulated in real-time and mixed and diffused via MIDI controller during the video's creation. A creative ping-pong between the performance artist in front of the camera and the live work on the AI system creates a unique and 'real' take during recording.

  • Cicada
    3. Platz New Talent

    Cicada

    Tarek Zarroug

    A hypnotic visual ritual: Taroug & Marie Brosius turn Cicada into a flickering field of AI-generated textures and satellite patterns. The result is a dense, pulsing composition that echoes the track's raw, organic energy – a meditation on transformation, rhythm, and the beauty of constant motion.

Bewegtbild

  • 1Q89
    1. Platz Bewegtbild

    1Q89

    Mihai Grecu

    Pyongyang, winter 1989. Kim Jong Il, watching the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu on satellite television, is shaken by the live collapse of a fellow autocrat. This silent shock became a turning point that reshaped strategies, borders, and ideologies. This experimental film uses AI not just as a tool, but as a lens that reconstructs lost perspectives, imagines hidden moments, and challenges the boundaries between fact and fiction. By revealing what history didn't record, it explores how technology can resurrect ghosts of the past and anticipate the echoes of authoritarianism in the present.

  • Las hermanas
    2. Platz Bewegtbild

    Las hermanas

    Alina Bardavid

    Joined by a bridge of flesh that burns and seethes, two sisters wage an intimate war. Every caress is an attack, every kiss an act of suffocation. Their shared body is a battlefield where pleasure is born from the other's pain. To finally see each other's faces, they must unleash a tear that will fracture not just their flesh, but their very existence. 'Las Hermanas' is a synthographic push into forbidden territory. This short film is a visceral exploration of the grotesque as a narrative language, reclaiming the obscene from AI censorship. Told in flesh and fluid, it finds truth in the body's fragility and its most explicit acts. It is a tactile, uncomfortable exploration of what it means to be human when the body itself becomes a horror.

  • Gap Years
    3. Platz Bewegtbild

    Gap Years

    Sean Weingarten

    Gulf War, Christmas, Absence. Three divergent depictions of a Christmas festival portray a family in the 1990s and explore the fluid transitions from experienced to fragmented truth. An experimental documentary and animation film about memory and the boundaries of human and machine perception. By the end of the 1990s, my hometown was strongly influenced by the presence of the US military. US soldiers and local women formed families, often short-lived. The father's abandonment of the family was widespread, and thus a narrative that has shaped my family identity for over 30 years. The discovery of old video footage fundamentally questioned seemingly secure memories and dynamics reproduced over years. Interviews with family members, illuminating different perspectives, and AI-generated visual material interwoven with documentary footage are part of an attempt to approach a new, coherent narrative. Influenced by filmmakers like Dziga Vertov, Rose Lowder, and Harun Farocki, Gap Years uses a personal story to explore how the medium of film makes the implications of machine perception and memory in times of generative AI tangible.

jury unsere schlauen köpfe

the makers

unsere
vision

Hamburg AI Creators Award

Wir glauben, dass gute Gestaltung beides braucht - kluge Technologie und echte Intuition.

Mit HAICA machen wir kreative Synergien sichtbar, fördern Talente und gestalten die Zukunft aktiv mit.

HAMBURG WIRD ZUM VORREITER FÜR KREATIVE KI-KULTUR.

wer darf
teilnehmen?

Kreative Köpfe, Designer*innen, Filmemacher*innen, Fotograf*innen, Musiker*innen und Sounddesigner*innen

Agenturen, Studios, Einzelkreative

FOKUS AUF HAMBURG UND UMGEBUNG –OFFEN FÜR INTERDISZIPLINÄRE TEAMS

Die Teilnahme am Wettbewerb ist kostenlos.

warum HAICA?

Kreative Arbeit verändert sich rasant durch künstliche Intelligenz.

Neue Tools ermöglichen ungeahnte Formen der Gestaltung. Doch es fehlt eine Plattform, die diese neue kreative Kraft sichtbar macht – besonders auf lokaler Ebene.

backstory

Was uns im ersten Anlauf begeistert hat, wollten wir teilen: UNLTD.VISIONS hat mit überwältigender Beteiligung im internen Wettbewerb drei zentrale Potenziale aufgezeigt:

KI ERÖFFNET NEUE KREATIVE BILDWELTEN

Der Human Factor emotionalisiert die Ergebnisse.

Die Auseinandersetzung mit verschiedenen Tools stärkt das Verständnis der Möglichkeiten und den eigenen Wert.