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There’s a distinct lack of screens in the Zero 10 sector at this year’s Art Basel, despite the initiative’s singular goal to celebrate art of the “digital era”. From Hito Steyerl, there’s an installation made of living plants and recycled glass bottles (which are, admittedly, easy to mistake for a regular, oversized screen). Elsewhere, there are paintings from a godfather of computer art, interactive sculptures fashioned from backpacks and lightbulbs, and forged iron electronic instruments with video proof of the blacksmithing process.
It’s Zero 10’s first time in Basel, after debut showings in Miami and Hong Kong, and curators Trevor Paglen and Eli Scheinman have a point to prove. Not only is the history of digital art much longer than we often give it credit for – it’s also difficult to disentangle what we even mean by digital art today. “The thesis of the show is that most art made in the last 20 or 25 years is digital art,” Paglen tells Dazed. “Every painter is mocking up their shit in Photoshop, every sculptor is making their thing in Blender or whatever. Every photographer, obviously, has a digital process.”
Paglen, a pioneering artist in his own right, was reluctant to get involved with the first co-curated iteration of the sector when he was initially asked. “I was like, ‘I don’t think so,’” he says. “But then I slept on it. I was like, ‘You know, I really care about this stuff.’ And I was thinking about this space, and seeing a lot of ways it could self-destruct, and I had a theory of how to help.” This doesn’t mean that Paglen is all-in on digital technologies – far from it, actually. The crypto space is filled with “so much bullshit” that it’s hard to tell genuine project from straight-up scams, while anxiety about AI is also “very well justified”, he says. “But at the same time, I still think there’s really interesting artists doing stuff.”
The “expanded understanding” of digital art that Paglen and Scheinman bring to Basel was based on a pretty rigid framework: “One third of the artists had to be dead, one third had to have had solo shows at major museums, and one third had to be cooler, younger artists who are established in a digital space but haven’t had a lot of experience with institutions.” As a result, visitors see historic examples of algorithmic drawing and net art, alongside works dated to the boom-and-bust era of NFTs, and others capturing our digital culture in real time. Alongside the artworks themselves, a series of iconoclastic talks curated by Paglen takes aim at things the art world typically doesn’t like to talk about: how artists actually make rent, how gatekeeping was upended in the digital era, and whether we’re heading for a world of art without any actually artists.
Below, we’ve gathered some of the highlights from Art Basel’s Zero 10 sector in Basel, 2026.
The programmer and artist Harold Cohen is best known as the creator of AARON, a computer system designed in the late 1960s to draw and paint by itself, which he continued to develop up until his death in 2016. In this presentation, Cohen’s earlier paintings (with which he represented Britain at the 1966 Venice Biennale) hang alongside artworks by the pioneering computer program. Together, these demonstrate the whole scope of his career, and capture a major milestone in man-machine collaboration in the process.
It’s tempting to see Mapan’s paintings and code-based artworks as picking up where Harold Cohen left off. Both a painter and a programmer, the artist creates many of his paintings by hand, en plein air, but also uses a plotter machine loaded with crayons to produce physical works based on virtual drawings. “Painting and drawing is emotional, programming is logical,” he says. “What is in-between?” At Zero 10, his Paysages Plausible (Plausible Landscapes) add another layer of ambiguity via scenes from nature that don’t actually exist, drawing on inspirations including Cézanne, David Hockney, and Helen Frankenthaler.
Bioelectrical signals from a wall of living plants shape AI-generated visuals and sound in Hito Steyerl’s Green Screen, displayed on a ‘screen’ of recycled glass bottles. “It’s really beautiful,” says Paglen, “but when you look at the materials, it’s also pretty apocalyptic. Plants, and AI, and empty beer bottles, the refuse of consumer society.” Reflecting on the interplay between biological and technological systems, the 2023 artwork feels more relevant than ever.
As the name of ArtMeta’s presentation – Digital Masterpieces: From Code to Canon – suggests, the focus lies on the entangled histories of technology and digital art, going back to the so-called birth of computer art in the 1950s. As time goes on, there’s curiously (or not) a parallel theme of machine-rendered nudes, including Vuk Ćosić’s ASCII video version of Deep Throat and the aptly-named Computer Nude from 1966/7. As a rare female artist working in this field, Rebecca Allen’s Swimmer (1981) takes a deeper dive into simulation human motion, and represented at the time a cutting-edge inquiry into the changing relationship between our bodies and our machines.
Avery Singer’s “Shit Coin Maxi” (2025) layers two images depicting digital wallets found on Twitter, and recreates them in acrylic on canvas. In case you’re unfamiliar, a “shitcoin” refers to a pointless or low-value cryptocurrency token, typically associated with unethical “pump and dump” schemes. This reflects one of Zero 10’s aims this year, which involves reimagining images we typically find in the digital realm. “What happens if you change the context” Paglen says. “It would read in a really different way than it would if you looked at it on Twitter.” In this case, Singer is shining a new light on gambling, finance, and technology – three of the biggest factors shaping our online culture today.
The Basel-based HEK presents several works of net art at this year’s Zero 10, hailing from the mid-90s to the late 2000s. Via a wall-mounted tablet, viewers can take a virtual holiday to the Alps courtesy of Studer/van den Berg, or watch Jodi’s Max Payne Cheats Only (2004) – early video game appropriation art from long before the concept was everywhere. Maybe the most innovative artwork, though, comes from the Austrian duo UBERMORGEN, whose The Sound of eBay (2008-9) generates music based on robot-scraped data from real eBay accounts of the viewer’s choosing. These are played back in the form of teletext sex ads (Remember teletext? Maybe not!) as part of what the duo described in the 00s as a “high-end, low-tech contribution to the atomic soundtrack of a new shock capitalism”.
Three huge flags greet visitors to the Zero 10 showspace, displayed on a triptych of screens where the environment – rendered in a game engine – changes over time. Developed by Gerrard over nine years, the artworks each speak to a different moment in humans’ (and Earth’s) ecological history. The first belches black smoke at the site of Lucas Gusher in Texas, where the first major strike of the Texas oil boom occurred in 1901. The second takes on a fiery form, sounding an alarm in the South Pacific near Tonga. And the third releases a white cloud of clean water vapour into the Mojave Desert – an image of a better, cleaner future, or the white flag of surrender?
Zero 10 runs at Art Basel until June 21.
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There’s a distinct lack of screens in the Zero 10 sector at this year’s Art Basel, despite the initiative’s singular goal to celebrate art of the “digital era”. From Hito Steyerl, there’s an installation made of living plants and recycled glass bottles (which are, admittedly, easy to mistake for a regular, oversized screen). Elsewhere, there are paintings from a godfather of computer art, interactive sculptures fashioned from backpacks and lightbulbs, and forged iron electronic instruments with video proof of the blacksmithing process.
It’s Zero 10’s first time in Basel, after debut showings in Miami and Hong Kong, and curators Trevor Paglen and Eli Scheinman have a point to prove. Not only is the history of digital art much longer than we often give it credit for – it’s also difficult to disentangle what we even mean by digital art today. “The thesis of the show is that most art made in the last 20 or 25 years is digital art,” Paglen tells Dazed. “Every painter is mocking up their shit in Photoshop, every sculptor is making their thing in Blender or whatever. Every photographer, obviously, has a digital process.”
Paglen, a pioneering artist in his own right, was reluctant to get involved with the first co-curated iteration of the sector when he was initially asked. “I was like, ‘I don’t think so,’” he says. “But then I slept on it. I was like, ‘You know, I really care about this stuff.’ And I was thinking about this space, and seeing a lot of ways it could self-destruct, and I had a theory of how to help.” This doesn’t mean that Paglen is all-in on digital technologies – far from it, actually. The crypto space is filled with “so much bullshit” that it’s hard to tell genuine project from straight-up scams, while anxiety about AI is also “very well justified”, he says. “But at the same time, I still think there’s really interesting artists doing stuff.”
The “expanded understanding” of digital art that Paglen and Scheinman bring to Basel was based on a pretty rigid framework: “One third of the artists had to be dead, one third had to have had solo shows at major museums, and one third had to be cooler, younger artists who are established in a digital space but haven’t had a lot of experience with institutions.” As a result, visitors see historic examples of algorithmic drawing and net art, alongside works dated to the boom-and-bust era of NFTs, and others capturing our digital culture in real time. Alongside the artworks themselves, a series of iconoclastic talks curated by Paglen takes aim at things the art world typically doesn’t like to talk about: how artists actually make rent, how gatekeeping was upended in the digital era, and whether we’re heading for a world of art without any actually artists.
Below, we’ve gathered some of the highlights from Art Basel’s Zero 10 sector in Basel, 2026.
The programmer and artist Harold Cohen is best known as the creator of AARON, a computer system designed in the late 1960s to draw and paint by itself, which he continued to develop up until his death in 2016. In this presentation, Cohen’s earlier paintings (with which he represented Britain at the 1966 Venice Biennale) hang alongside artworks by the pioneering computer program. Together, these demonstrate the whole scope of his career, and capture a major milestone in man-machine collaboration in the process.
It’s tempting to see Mapan’s paintings and code-based artworks as picking up where Harold Cohen left off. Both a painter and a programmer, the artist creates many of his paintings by hand, en plein air, but also uses a plotter machine loaded with crayons to produce physical works based on virtual drawings. “Painting and drawing is emotional, programming is logical,” he says. “What is in-between?” At Zero 10, his Paysages Plausible (Plausible Landscapes) add another layer of ambiguity via scenes from nature that don’t actually exist, drawing on inspirations including Cézanne, David Hockney, and Helen Frankenthaler.
Bioelectrical signals from a wall of living plants shape AI-generated visuals and sound in Hito Steyerl’s Green Screen, displayed on a ‘screen’ of recycled glass bottles. “It’s really beautiful,” says Paglen, “but when you look at the materials, it’s also pretty apocalyptic. Plants, and AI, and empty beer bottles, the refuse of consumer society.” Reflecting on the interplay between biological and technological systems, the 2023 artwork feels more relevant than ever.
As the name of ArtMeta’s presentation – Digital Masterpieces: From Code to Canon – suggests, the focus lies on the entangled histories of technology and digital art, going back to the so-called birth of computer art in the 1950s. As time goes on, there’s curiously (or not) a parallel theme of machine-rendered nudes, including Vuk Ćosić’s ASCII video version of Deep Throat and the aptly-named Computer Nude from 1966/7. As a rare female artist working in this field, Rebecca Allen’s Swimmer (1981) takes a deeper dive into simulation human motion, and represented at the time a cutting-edge inquiry into the changing relationship between our bodies and our machines.
Avery Singer’s “Shit Coin Maxi” (2025) layers two images depicting digital wallets found on Twitter, and recreates them in acrylic on canvas. In case you’re unfamiliar, a “shitcoin” refers to a pointless or low-value cryptocurrency token, typically associated with unethical “pump and dump” schemes. This reflects one of Zero 10’s aims this year, which involves reimagining images we typically find in the digital realm. “What happens if you change the context” Paglen says. “It would read in a really different way than it would if you looked at it on Twitter.” In this case, Singer is shining a new light on gambling, finance, and technology – three of the biggest factors shaping our online culture today.
The Basel-based HEK presents several works of net art at this year’s Zero 10, hailing from the mid-90s to the late 2000s. Via a wall-mounted tablet, viewers can take a virtual holiday to the Alps courtesy of Studer/van den Berg, or watch Jodi’s Max Payne Cheats Only (2004) – early video game appropriation art from long before the concept was everywhere. Maybe the most innovative artwork, though, comes from the Austrian duo UBERMORGEN, whose The Sound of eBay (2008-9) generates music based on robot-scraped data from real eBay accounts of the viewer’s choosing. These are played back in the form of teletext sex ads (Remember teletext? Maybe not!) as part of what the duo described in the 00s as a “high-end, low-tech contribution to the atomic soundtrack of a new shock capitalism”.
Three huge flags greet visitors to the Zero 10 showspace, displayed on a triptych of screens where the environment – rendered in a game engine – changes over time. Developed by Gerrard over nine years, the artworks each speak to a different moment in humans’ (and Earth’s) ecological history. The first belches black smoke at the site of Lucas Gusher in Texas, where the first major strike of the Texas oil boom occurred in 1901. The second takes on a fiery form, sounding an alarm in the South Pacific near Tonga. And the third releases a white cloud of clean water vapour into the Mojave Desert – an image of a better, cleaner future, or the white flag of surrender?
Zero 10 runs at Art Basel until June 21.
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