PDAF — Public Digital Art Fund
Technology as an Artistic Medium
PDAF explores how emerging technologies can become artistic media. We connect artists with technologies, research teams, companies, institutions and public environments to investigate forms of cultural expression that may not yet exist.
Technology companies build new capabilities. Artists create new cultural languages around them. PDAF creates the conditions for those encounters to happen.
Entry Points
For Artists
Introduce your practice to PDAF and the technologies you work with or wish to investigate.
EnterFor Technology
Companies, startups, laboratories and research teams introducing technologies that could become artistic media.
EnterFor Spaces & Institutions
Museums, cities, agencies, universities, architects and developers with public environments.
EnterThe Question
What happens when an emerging technology enters the hands of an artist?
Questions We Are Exploring
- When does a technology become a medium?
- What can artists discover about technologies that engineers cannot?
- How does artistic experimentation change the way a technology is understood?
- What happens when computation becomes embedded in physical public space?
- What happens when digital art is no longer contained by a screen?
- What forms of authorship emerge between artist, algorithm and machine?
- How should public institutions approach AI-generated environments?
- What does public art become when the environment itself can perceive?
Artist × Technology Residencies
A technology partner provides access to an emerging technology — prototype, API, SDK, hardware, engineering knowledge. PDAF selects or invites an artist. The artist is not commissioned to advertise the technology; the artist is invited to investigate it independently as a medium.
Outcomes may include an artwork, prototype, installation, performance, public intervention, digital environment, a new interaction model — or no finished object at all. Research itself is a valid outcome.