City Digital Skin Art Festival 2025: the international call

During Milan Digital Week 2025, Milan will be transformed into a giant open-air screen with the City Digital Skin Art Festival (CDSA), an international digital video art competition promoted by the China Academy of Art. The project will bring the works of young students from all over the world to the city in a public and collective exhibition space.

CDSA 2025 is an international call for entries exclusively dedicated to students from schools, universities, and art and design academies. Participants are invited to create short videos, lasting no more than ninety seconds, designed to interact with digital screens installed in public spaces. Entries must be submitted by August 15, 2025, on the CDSA website.

Memory Coexistence

The theme chosen for the 2025 edition is Memory Coexistence, an invitation to reflect on the coexistence of memories in the contemporary city. Individual, collective, historical, and digital memories overlap with the urban fabric and create a constantly evolving stratification. The festival proposes to explore these traces and recount how cities are made up of visible and invisible memories. The reflection also opens up to digital memories and the role of artificial intelligence in their construction, preservation, and transformation.

An international cultural network

The City Digital Skin Art Festival is also a platform that promotes collective art, understood as open and shared creation. After Milan, which will be the first city to host the Festival in 2025, the CDSA will reach several cities in China and around the world. The festival invites students to imagine works that are part of a choral narrative, capable of creating connections between artists from different countries and cultures. In this context, digital technology establishes itself not only as a language, but as an international network for art, a global structure that allows artists to exchange ideas, collaborate, and participate in a creative community without borders.

A Milan Digital Week event

During Milan Digital Week, which will take place from October 1 to 5, 2025, the selected videos will be screened on large LED screens located in Milan’s main transit hubs, such as the Central Station and other areas of the city. The screenings will continue until the end of October, allowing citizens, visitors, and passersby to encounter the works in their everyday space, in a casual, open, and accessible way.

The festival is part of the Milano Digital Week program, with MEET – Digital Culture Center as its main venue. MEET founder Maria Grazia Mattei will be part of the international jury evaluating the works in competition. Mattei’s participation strengthens the dialogue between the CDSA and the Milanese and international cultural scene.

The City Digital Skin Art Festival 2025 aims to be an open and shared experience, capable of bringing art out of museums and transforming the city itself into a meeting place between memories of the past and visions of the present. Through digital art and the connective power of technology, Milan becomes the stage for new visual narratives, collectively constructed and destined to travel across the global art network.