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Matthew Biederman, an artist based in Montreal, has won the EDIGMA Semibreve Award 2026. His installation Situational Compliance will be shown in Braga, during the 16th edition of the Semibreve festival.

The piece is built on Simon Says. A computer vision system with pose detection tracks whoever stands in front of it and gives instructions: raise your arms, show your hands, kneel. It then scores each body as compliant or threatening. None of the machinery is hidden. The cables are exposed, the cameras are in view, and the skeleton the software reads from the visitor’s body is displayed live.

Systems of this kind already run in public space, where they convert bodies and behaviour into data that can be sorted and acted on. Biederman narrows the process down to one room and one person, and leaves the visitor to work out when the game stopped being a game.

Biederman began working in the early 1990s on the technical systems most people never see: the electromagnetic spectrum, communication networks, surveillance, and more recently machine learning. He has shown at the Lyon and Moscow biennales, at Ars Electronica and at MUTEK. He is a co-founder of the Arctic Perspective Initiative.

The award goes to installation work that uses digital technology to build with sound and image. EDIGMA funds it, and the winner receives a cash prize along with a presentation of the piece at the festival.

The installation is open to visitors at Semibreve, in Braga

07 September 2026