The Kiefer Prize for 2024 is awarded to the artist Shai-Lee Horodi in recognition of her interactive work, which encourages audiences toward self-reflection and activates them to create new representations.

Shai-Lee Horodi, born in 1993, completed her undergraduate studies at the School of Art in Musrara (2013), the Faculty of Arts–HaMidrasha at Beit Berl College (2015), and her master’s studies at Northwestern University in Illinois (2019). Horodi is an interdisciplinary artist whose performative works explore the methods and boundaries of knowledge construction in relation to technology, the human body, and its senses. Through internal introspection, she examines the limits of her body and its abilities, and through external interaction, she involves the audience in the act of creation.

The gap between sensory experience and the cogito, between the physical sense organs and their interpretation, and between the audience’s actions and carefully planned technological scenarios—these elements form, for Horodi, an aesthetic space of seduction. Within this space, she and the audience actively create visual content as well as specific, temporal narratives. Many of her works rely fundamentally on the participation of spectators, who produce captivating displays through their active and effective engagement with creations based on digital interfaces, sound systems, cameras, vision devices, video games, and puzzles.

For Horodi, the artwork functions as the infrastructure for dynamic interactions between herself and the viewers. These infrastructures feature focused and critical themes that question the sensory and cognitive boundaries of perception on one hand, and the mechanisms of meaning-making on the other. Her works belong to the field of the psychology of perception, examining the artistic medium as a mode of human cognition. Horodi uncovers the mechanisms of immediate perception while simultaneously transforming them into creative, distant tools.

In Horodi’s work, the active body—whether hers or ours—is both reflective and productive. It critiques itself, maintaining a distance and autonomy. From this position of detachment, Horodi mobilizes her own body or that of the audience to create new images, representations, and modes of expression. These do not merely define the singular subject but foster the emergence of new communities.

Tomer Koren

Affiliation at the time of the award:

Tel Aviv University

The Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences,

Blavatnik School of Computer Science

Award citation:

“for unique contributions in the field of computer learning, understanding algorithms and their improvement”.

Dr. Tomer Koren’s research deals with theory and algorithms for mathematical optimization and their properties and uses in computer learning and reinforcement learning. Optimization methods are currently at the heart of the work in the field of Artificial Intelligence – AI, and are used to train almost any learning-based system in a wide variety of fields and applications.

Despite this, there is still much that is still unknown in regards to the generalization properties of these algorithms, and especially their surprising ability to provide insights and predictions about information details that they have never seen before. One of Dr. Koren’s main research goals is to strengthen the theoretical foundations behind the breakthrough successes of computer learning in recent years. This reinforcement is essential to better understand why the learning methods we use today succeed above and beyond expectations (that is, beyond what classical theory promises), and how they can be improved and optimized.

Yotam Drier

Affiliation at the time of the award:

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Faculty of Medicine, Department of Immunology and Cancer Research

Award citation:

“for original contributions in the field of cancer research and their combination with the development of new algorithms for data analysis, the development of new experimental methods and the prediction of relevant changes”.

Cells tightly regulate the levels of each gene, and dysregulation can lead to diseases such as cancer. Dysregulation can be caused by genetic alterations, epigenetic alterations (chemical modifications on the DNA), or changes in chromosomal folding. Our chromosomes are extremely long linear DNA molecules, folded neatly into the cell nucleus, and this structure is important for proper gene regulation. While the role of genetic alterations in genes in disease is well understood, much less is known about epigenetic and structural alterations

In Dr. Dreyer’s laboratory, they aim to fill this knowledge gap by studying these alterations in multiple cancer types and a few genetic diseases. They combine experimental techniques to systematically characterize epigenomes and chromosomal folding, computational algorithms to integrate these data and predict events that drive disease, and experimental validation of these predictions.