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Zero 10 in Basel Contextualized Digital Art Within a Broader Historical Framework

Curators Eli Scheinman and Trevor Paglen gathered the work of historical pioneers and blockchain-native artists to argue that technology has long been part of art’s evolution.

Art Basel’s Zero 10 debuted in Miami, where—true to form—it was mostly defined by the hype around Beeple’s Regular Animals, then found natural terrain in Hong Kong’s digitally fluent and crypto-native crowd before landing at the historic Swiss edition with a far more institutional format. Trevor Paglen, a pioneer at the intersection of art and new technologies who was honored at the Guggenheim earlier this spring, received the LG Guggenheim Award and holds a MacArthur Fellowship, curated the section alongside digital art strategist Eli Scheinman. Their goal was to contextualize these practices within broader art history and encourage connoisseurship beyond hype and speculation.

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Together, the two cleverly conceived Zero 10 as an exhibition finally aimed at providing a more cohesive narrative of the past, present and future of digital art practices, advancing the discourse around them and fostering a deeper understanding of how they are already contributing to and shaping the future of artistic production. It was the survey that many in the community and beyond have long been waiting for: more concise in scope, but with contributions from various established key players in the digital art space.

To Paglen, the distinction between digital art and non-digital art has become increasingly artificial. Most contemporary painters use Photoshop, most sculptors use digital modeling software, and nearly all artists rely on technological mediation in some form. From this perspective, digital art is not a separate category but an integral part of contemporary artistic practice. “The argument we are making with this exhibition, and in general, is that all art is digital art at this point,” he told Observer before the fair opened. “Every painter I know makes their painting in Photoshop. Every sculptor I know makes a 3D rendering of their sculptures, then turns it into a physical thing. When you use that definition, it is all digital art.”

Artists and creative practitioners increasingly use computers and, perhaps surprisingly, A.I.-powered technologies to create work, inform distribution channels and build new touchpoints with emerging communities. After all, we now all interact with the world through technology; most of our experiences are filtered, amplified or expanded by devices. As Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz acknowledged in an interview with The Art Angle ahead of the fair, Zero 10 was launched specifically to meet and attract these new audiences and communities where they are, while helping to build a bridge to the traditional art world on both the institutional and market sides.

Importantly, as Scheinman confirmed to Observer, Zero 10 is not based on the conventional open-call model, as in other sectors, but rather on a mix of direct invitations and inbound interest from galleries and artists. This allowed them to shape a narrative—particularly important in this Basel iteration, where the context is very different. According to Scheinman, or much of the Basel audience, the language of crypto and NFTs remains largely abstract.

The curatorial structure of Zero 10 in Basel was grounded in three interconnected pillars: historical pioneers of computer-based art; established contemporary artists whose practices are deeply informed by digital technologies; and younger artists working at the frontier of internet-native, blockchain-native and computational culture. By bringing these groups together, the exhibition demonstrated continuities that are often overlooked while confronting how to think about and engage with the technological conditions that shape contemporary life. Their primary objective was to articulate a historical lineage of digital art, tracing connections from computer artists of the 1950s and 1960s to contemporary practitioners working with code, A.I., blockchain, networked technologies and hybrid works generated in real time on site.

Take, for instance, the work of digital art pioneer Vera Molnár, presented by Oniris.art and Interface Gallery, timed to coincide with her solo presentation at the Kunstmuseum Basel. She was one of the first academically trained artists to embrace algorithmic image-making, approaching the technology’s creative potential as a new language and a powerful vehicle for artistic expression, as was evident in the presentation “When Algorithms Draw: The Vision of Vera Molnár.” Another example is Harold Cohen, the British pioneer of computer and machine-generated art. At Zero 10, Gazelli Art House presented All Four (1964), a major early abstract painting exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1965, alongside his later machine-generated works, showing an already groundbreaking dialogue and continuity between his painterly practice and his later computational systems.

Cohen’s early interest in systems, structure and rule-based image construction found a contemporary echo nearby in the work of Paris-based artist William Mapan, whose Paysages Plausibles use machine-generated images as the starting point for painterly translation through oil. When we spoke, Mapan described a practice suspended between drawing, painting and code. “I generate the wireframe, the black-and-white lines, and then the composition makes me think of a photo or a location I’ve been to.” He said he considers himself simply an artist, working between the mediums available today. “I have two practices: I paint, and I draw, but I also code. I’m trying to combine the two. I make something in the middle.” Mapan added that the algorithm is collaborative rather than substitutive. He has a complicated relationship with A.I., he admits, and does not really use it; instead, code becomes a tool for iteration and surprise, almost like an assistant within a larger artistic process. The........

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