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Digital Guide: EDAA 2025

Digital Guide: EDAA 2025

Presented by EQ Bank

March 19, 2026 – June 28, 2026

The Emerging Digital Artists Award is an annual celebration of creativity and experimentation in digital media. Now in its 11th year, the prize recognizes the exceptional talents of emerging artists in Canada working at the forefront of the genre, highlighting the dynamic ways in which digital tools and technologies expand artistic practice.

This year’s exhibition presents the work of five remarkable artists that embrace the limitless nature of digital media, whether uncovering new possibilities for our physical bodies, revitalizing artforms that connect across cultures and geographies, honouring connections to “home” amidst feelings of dislocation, or employing glitch as a necessary tool for spiritual transformation. As recipients of the 2025 prize, each artist pushes the boundaries of their distinct medium, including still image, animation, game art, extended reality, and installation. Together, their works offer a snapshot of our current moment, including what to hold on to from the past and what to alter, shift, or destroy to move thoughtfully into the future.

11th Edition

Presented by

^{Image Credit: Screenshot from Virtual Shiva by Kahani Ploessl. 2025. Multi-channel video game installation.}

Alex Gibson, Untitled Passage

2025. Photogrammetry, animation, 4:41

Untitled Passage is a 3D-scanned, one-kilometer stretch of shoreline from Barbados’ East Coast. This recorded, ephemeral desire path was determined by the ever-moving shoreline where the ocean meets the land, a site that reflects the histories of colonization and (forced) migration between the Caribbean and Europe. With its slow, methodical approach to a geographical survey, the work considers shifting notions of scale and perspective, disorienting conventional bearings, and disrupting colonial cartographies to reimagine Caribbean space beyond imposed narratives.

Alex Gibson is a Barbadian Canadian interdisciplinary artist based on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, BC). They use images and archives as sites to examine queer spaces, temporalities, and architectures. Gibson holds an MFA from UBC, and their work has been exhibited in Barbados, Canada, Italy, Poland, and the United States.

Eva Grant, Exquisite Machines for Making Anything But Children

2025. Digital Image Series

Integrating cyber-feminism, queer ecology, and crip poetics, Exquisite Machines for Making Anything But Children is a speculative counter-anatomy conceived by the artist for healing following her miscarriage. In a society obsessed with viability, this series cuts the cord between reproduction and utility, repositioning the womb not as a site of extraction, but rather an incubator of autonomy. Midwifing refusal, Exquisite Machines do not produce children; they are a surrogate for futures the world is not yet equipped to carry.

Eva Grant is a St̓át̓imc-Eurasian filmmaker, writer and artist based in BC whose work is grounded in archive, interface, and ecology. She has held fellowships and residencies through the Sundance Institute, imagineNATIVE, Artengine, the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. A technological Trickster of the Indigital realm, she prototypes near-worlds, capacious futures, and their imagined implements. She studied philosophy and literature at Stanford University and is the founder of Tooth & Nail Pictures.

Kahani Ploessl, Virtual Shiva

2025. Multi-channel video game installation

Virtual Shiva is an exploration of the cosmic depth of generative spaces. Drawing from Hindu philosophy while reframing the language of contemporary gaming, the work reclaims and decolonizes the term avatar to take on its original spiritual significance as an avatār of Lord Shiva. As The Destroyer, Shiva embodies not only the force that brings endings, but also the one who clears the way for renewal and transformation. Within this cosmological framework of “technological Hinduism,” glitching is reimagined as a generative act: dissolution as the ground for regeneration.

Kahani (कहानी) Ploessl is a dimension-bending tech artist based in Markham, ON. Her work in generative, videogame, and installation art explores notions of the glitch and digital spiritualism. Guided by her Indian heritage, Kahani draws parallels between the cosmic philosophy of Hinduism and the pixelated manifestations of digital realms and avatar bodies. Her work considers the glitch as a purposeful gesture that can push our digital experiences away from their current structures and functions into experimental and transformative models for being.

Cadin Londono, El Cumbiatron

2025. Game art, dimensions variable

El Cumbiatron is a game that prioritizes experience over achievement. Inspired by the diversity of cumbia music and dancing styles across Latin America, it combines visual and musical expressions to represent the chaotic beauty of a Latinx Club. Designed to push players into a state of constant movement, El Cumbiatron is a digital, intergenerational, cross-continental party for all Latinxs, particularly those who have lost freedom of expression, third spaces, and connection to the motherland.

Cadin Londono is a Colombian game developer born in Medellin, Colombia and based in Tio’Tia:ke (Montreal). His interest in coding began from a young age, watching his father code his own games in his free time. Cadin released his first videogame at age eighteen and is now busy creating videogames that look at life through an anticolonial lens. He holds a BA from McGill University with a major in Computer Science and a minor in Philosophy.

Laura Caraballo, No Me Demoro

2024. Virtual Reality

No Me Demoro is an interactive virtual space that encapsulates the experience of growing up in a Colombian household in the 2000s. Through iconic pop cultural objects and sounds of the time, visitors are invited to navigate the two level immersive experience through the perspective of a little girl. Prompted by the nostalgia of the immigrant experience and heightened by the architectural similarities between Bogotá and Montreal, No Me Demoro was born out of yearning for a time and place that cannot be revisited.

Laura Caraballo is an interdisciplinary artist born in Bacatá [Bogotá] and based in Tiohtià:ke [Montréal]. Her work uses technology to reimagine and create interactive, sensorial physical and virtual spaces that revisit the past and question its role in shaping Latinx futurist aesthetics and narratives. Laura is particularly interested in how we shape, and are shaped by, the spaces we inhabit within a temporal context, while exploring themes of home, memory, and consciousness.

Emerging Digital Artists Award (11th edition) / EQ Bank

The Emerging Digital Artists Award (EDAA) is Canada’s award for critical experimentation in digital media, proudly presented by EQ Bank. Launched in 2015, the award celebrates the contributions of artists working exclusively in virtual space. Each year, we seek artwork submissions from across the country that push us in new directions and challenge us to see the world through a different screen. Whether digital images, videos, animations, GIFs, websites, games, apps, augmented and virtual realities, or immersive installations, the EDAA is here to recognize it, support it, and help it grow.

EQ Bank is Canada’s Challenger Bank™. Guided by our purpose to drive change in Canadian banking and enrich people’s lives, we firmly believe that progress requires challenging outdated norms. We put innovation at the heart of everything we do and use digital to deliver more effortless, transparent and high-value experiences that help Canadians reach their potential.