Zero 10—Art Basel’s global initiative dedicated to art of the digital era,now in its third edition, makes its debut at Art Basel’s flagship fair with an expanded, open format curated by award-winning artist Trevor Paglen and digital art strategist Eli Scheinman. Located in the Event Hall on Messeplatz, alongside Art Basel Conversations, the initiative will feature its largest presentation to date, with 20 exhibitors showcasing a compelling selection of artists at the forefront of digital artistic practices. Zero 10 will remain freely accessible to the public during the week of Art Basel 2026 from June 17–21, with a Preview Day taking place on June 16.
Zero 10 reflects Art Basel’s ongoing commitment to artistic practices shaped by digital culture and their growing significance to the contemporary art landscape. Following successful editions during Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 and Art Basel Hong Kong 2026, its European debut in Switzerland expands the initiative’s curatorial scope while deepening dialogue among artists, institutions, collectors, new and existing audiences, and digitally native communities.
Trevor Paglen, 2026 LG Guggenheim Award recipient and MacArthur Fellow, joins digital art strategist Eli Scheinman to co-curate Basel’s edition of Zero 10 around the anchor theme The Condition. Examining life in a world saturated by digital imagery, computational systems and artificial intelligence, the presentation brings together historical and contemporary voices across digital, generative, and media art.
Noah Horowitz, CEO, Art Basel, said: “The art market is expanding, and the audiences driving that expansion are digitally native, globally connected, and looking for platforms that speak their language. Zero 10 at our Swiss flagship is our most ambitious answer to that challenge yet – a clear signal of our commitment to digital art as a cornerstone of our go-forward strategy — not a trend to observe, but a direction to lead. We are particularly honored to inaugurate Zero 10 in Basel hand-in-hand with Trevor Paglen, a pioneering artist trusted equally by the institutional art world and digital communities.”
Trevor Paglen, Co-curator, Zero 10, Art Basel 2026, said: “Looking across the last 50 years of instruction-based and computational work, from postwar experimentalism through today’s generative practices, I see a continuous thread: a body of work that understands the digital as a medium with its own properties, possibilities, and demands. The showcase becomes an intergenerational conversation about what it means to be alive in the digital era, led by artists who were thinking seriously about these questions long before the rest of the world caught up.”
Eli Scheinman, Co-Curator, Zero 10, Art Basel 2026, said: “I am thrilled to deliver Zero 10 at Art Basel’s flagship show in Basel and to further establish the initiative as a long-term platform for artistic practices shaped by digital culture. This third edition marks an important evolution for the initiative, with Trevor Paglen joining me as co-curator alongside expanded programming and the participation of leading international galleries and institutions. Together, we wish to foreground the historical and critical perspective to conversations that are becoming increasingly central to contemporary culture today.”
Zero 10’s third edition features 20 exhibitors, among them long-standing Art Basel galleries Hauser & Wirth (Zurich, New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Somerset, St. Moritz, Gstaad, Basel, Menorca, Chillida Leku, Monaco, Hong Kong), Marian Goodman (New York, Paris, Los Angeles), Andrew Kreps Gallery (New York), Max Estrella (Madrid), Almine Rech (Brussels, Paris, New York, Shanghai, Monaco, Gstaad), Esther Schipper (Paris, Berlin, Seoul) and Sprüth Magers (Berlin, London, Los Angeles, New York); and leading exhibitors with dedicated digital art programs, including ArtMeta, Art Blocks, Asprey Studio (Kent), bitforms gallery (New York), eastcontemporary (Milan), Fellowship (London, Marrakech, Porto Cervo, Los Angeles), Gazelli Art House (London), Interface Gallery (Breda), OFFICE IMPART (Berlin), Galerie Oniris (Rennes), Upstream Gallery (Amsterdam) and Nguyen Wahed (New York, London); as well as the first-time participation of a leading research institution: HEK (Haus der Elektronischen Künste; House of Electronic Arts) (Basel). Together, these presentations extend the dialogue beyond the traditional booth model and broaden the range of artistic voices, historical interpretations, technological mediums, and experiential formats through which digital culture is approached today.
Bridging contemporary and historical discourses across 16 single and four shared-booth presentations, the initiative brings together leading artists, international galleries, institutions, and digital platforms. The breadth of participation reflects the growing place of digital practices in the contemporary art market.
Highlights include:
Hito Steyerl’s ‘Green Screen’ (2023), jointly presented by Esther Schipper and Andrew Kreps, features a large-scale installation combining an experimental LED wall made from recycled glass bottles with living plants and AI-generated imagery. Bioelectrical signals from the plants shape the work’s evolving sound and low-resolution animations of blooming flowers, creating a dialogue between organic life and digital systems. Reflecting on ecological interdependence and technological dependency, the installation reimagines plants as active agents within contemporary media environments.
Hauser & Wirth’s presentation of Avery Singer’s ‘Shit Coin Maxi’ (2025), a composite layered image depicting two digital wallets found on Twitter. Drawing on recent paintings that examine the intersections of gambling, finance, and technology, the work reflects on the speculative culture surrounding cryptocurrency through Singer’s distinctive fusion of digital imagery and painterly techniques.
Andreas Gursky’s ‘Ocean V’ (2010) at Sprüth Magers, part of the artist’s ongoing series in which he constructs composite oceanscapes, from satellite imagery inspired by a nighttime flight from Dubai to Melbourne. Using images taken 35,000 km above Earth, the work transforms oceans into vast, unfamiliar landscapes. Its deep midnight blues depart from conventional cartographic representations, evoking themes of borders, global conflict, and climate change while underscoring the sublime scale of planetary observation.
Vera Molnar, a pioneer of digital art who began using computers in 1968, is showcased by Oniris.art and Interface Gallery with a body of work titled ‘When Algorithms Draw: The Vision of Vera Molnar’ (2026). As one of the first academically trained to embrace algorithmic image-making, Molnar’s presentation will highlight the central role of coding in her practice, highlighting how algorithmic thinking can become a powerful vehicle for artistic expression. Parallel to the show week, Molnar’s solo exhibition at Kunstmuseum Basel ‘Vera Molnár. Possibilities’ showcases the printmaking oeuvre of the grande dame of computer art.
HEK (Haus der Elektronischen Künste; House of Electronic Arts) will present a non-selling exhibition that historically contextualises net art — works created from the 1990s to early 2000s that use the Internet as a primary medium — centring its presentation around education and the evolution of web-based artistic practices.
‘Matter and Signal’ (2026), a multimedia project by artist and engineer DEAFBEEF presented by Asprey Studio, which examines generative systems and technology’s role in contemporary society. Centered on ‘Glitchbox’, an interactive sculpture by DEAFBEEF that records participant-generated outputs on-chain, the presentation brings together blacksmithing, audio, and code.
Aziza Kadyri’s ‘A Borrowed Hand’ (2026), shown by eastcontemporary, explores the intersection of cultural memory and artificial intelligence. Across three free-standing textile and metal installations, Kadyri draws on suzani embroidery traditions from Central Asia and uses a custom-trained AI model to reinterpret inherited patterns, examining authorship, translation, and the preservation of collective memory in the digital age. Two touch-responsive works invite visitors into a dynamic exchange between body, textile, and machine perception. Aziza Kadyri has been nominated as an Art Basel Awards Medalist 2026 in the Emerging Artist category.
Japan’s leading composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda oeuvre ‘data.gram’ (2022), presented by Almine Rech, reimagines his monumental data-verse installations as a series of wall-mounted computer displays translating scientific data into immersive audiovisual compositions that merge mathematical precision with sensory experience.
Agnieszka Kurant’s series ‘Alien Internet II’ (2023/2026) and ‘Unthoughtforms’ (2026), presented by Marian Goodman Gallery, investigate forms of intelligence that emerge beyond the human, drawing on animal behavioral data, cybernetic systems, and Gordon Pask’s experimental ‘chemical computer’. Through evolving, self-organizing processes, the works explore the intersections of AI, biological networks, and collective cognition.
‘Infinite Garden’ (2025) by Leander Herzog and Meltdown (2023–26) by Andreas Gysin explore the materiality, rhythm, and participatory potential of generative art. Exhibited by Nguyen Wahed, Herzog’s evolving blockchain-based ecosystem transforms collectors into active participants, assembling and sharing ever-changing digital flora, while Gysin’s work turns programming code into a shifting visual language in which the mechanics of computation remain fully exposed. Together, the works reflect transparency, emergence, and the poetic possibilities of algorithmic systems.
John Gerrard’s triptych ‘STANDARD’ (2023), ‘Flare (Oceania)’ (2022), and ‘Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas)’ (2017), brought together by Fellowship, depict three real-time simulations examining environmental crisis, fossil fuel extraction, and systems of power. Generated live through custom software, Gerrard’s digital sculptures exist in perpetual, unrepeatable motion, transforming wind, smoke, fire, and light into contemplative meditations on climate, energy, and technological perception.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, jointly presented by Max Estrella and digital-first exhibitor bitforms gallery, showcases a new series titled ‘Panoptic Chiasma’ (2026), featuring interactive installations examining how perception is increasingly mediated by computation, AI, and surveillance technologies through works that respond to viewers’ facial features, heartbeats, thermal signatures, and movements in real time.
Curated by Trevor Paglen and Eli Scheinman, the three dedicated panels within Art Basel’s Conversations broader program in Basel:
Wednesday, June 17 – ‘How’re You Supposed to Pay the Rent These Days?’
Auriea Harvey, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Tyler de Will (0xDEAFBEEF)
Thursday, June 18 – ‘Barbarians at the Gates! Let Them In!(?)’
Erick Calderon (Snowfro), Natasha Degen, Tina Rivers Ryan
Friday, June 19 – ‘Art Without Artists, Texts Without Authors, Goddamn Algorithms Everywhere’
Aris Dean, Josh Kline, Hari Kunzu
About Trevor Paglen
Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image -making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Paglen’s work has had one -person exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; Ca rnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Barbican Centre, London; Vienna Secession, Vienna; and Protocinema Istanbul, and participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Muse um of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues. Paglen has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award – winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan. Paglen is the author of several books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, artificial intelligence, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. Paglen’s work has been profiled in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Financial Times, Art Forum, and Aperture. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award and in 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Paglen was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017. In March 2026, Paglen was named the winner of the LG Guggenheim Award. Paglen’s sixth book, “How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI”, comes out with Verso B ooks in May 2026. Paglen holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from U.C. Berkeley.
About Eli Scheinman
Eli Scheinman is a digital art strategist, advisor and curator, shaping the future of art collecting at the intersection of technology and culture. A community -builder and early -stage operator, he has led initiatives and built companies across Web3 and fine art includi ng PROOF (acquired by Yuga Labs). Today, Scheinman works with pathbreaking c ollectors, artists and institutions to help redefine how contemporary art is made, experienced and collected.
