Trevor Paglen, the New York–based artist known for his incisive engagement with knotty technological issues including surveillance and AI, will curate the third edition of “Zero 10,” Art Basel’s new sector dedicated to the art of the digital era, the first to take place at the fair’s Swiss edition (June 17–21).
Major international galleries, including Marian Goodman, Hauser and Wirth, and Almine Rech, will present work by widely known contemporary artists such as John Gerrard, Agnieszka Kurant, Avery Singer, and Hito Steyerl. Paglen will work alongside digital art strategist Eli Scheinman, who organized the first two editions along with Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s chief artistic officer and global director of fairs.
“As we thought about the most cogent way to approach this summer’s Art Basel,” said Scheinman in a video conversation with his co-curator, “it felt compelling from the beginning to bring into the fold someone like Trevor and lean on him, with his artistic background, his experience, his lens on the world, and his investigative eye.”
Titled “The Condition,” Paglen and Scheinman’s presentation surveys some seven decades of instruction-based and computational work. Stars of our moment will appear alongside forerunners like Hungarian-born artist Vera Molnár, who began using computers as early as 1968. And there will be works stretching back even farther, such as Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth’s Oscilloscope Tests, begun in 1950, and Ben F. Laposky’s Oscillation 4, also dating to the 1950s.
Vera Molnár, 25 carrés (1990).
Galerie Oniris – Rennes
With 20 exhibitors, this will be the largest edition to date of an initiative that made a splash at its debut outing in the fair’s 2025 Miami Beach edition, where artist Beeple unveiled Regular Animals, a group of robot dogs bearing the faces of figures ranging from Pablo Picasso to Elon Musk, all of which pooped printed images. Paglen and Scheinman say there may not be any similarly spectacular moments, but they promise an equally thought-provoking presentation.
Paglen is the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2017 MacArthur “genius” fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s 2014 Pioneer Award, the 2016 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, and the 2026 LG Guggenheim Award for Art and Technology. He’s had solo exhibitions from the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, DC to the Fondazione Prada in Milan, and contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award–winning 2014 documentary Citizenfour. His latest book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI, “distills key insights from his practice to make the case that mainstream understanding of images remains stuck in an outdated paradigm,” writes Louis Bury in Art in America.
“There’s traditional art over here and then the digital section over here, and a big divide between the two,” said Paglen in the video conversation, characterizing the art world’s typical approach. “The philosophy we wanted to take was showing that that divide has never existed. Look at any piece of art in the last 30 years—it’s natively digital. Any sculpture you see was probably designed on Blender or ZBrush. Photographers are working in Photoshop, and even painters are mocking things up with the same program.”
But in a curatorial statement, Paglen notes that as far as he’s concerned, we should look back even farther when thinking about artists’ predilection for the latest tools. “Caravaggio would have murdered someone for a copy of Photoshop,” the statement opens. “Leonardo would have done far worse for a Claude Code subscription. Those are facts. Artists use whatever it takes.” So, he later asks, the NFT craze aside, why is there such skepticism toward digital art in so many parts of the art world? He doles out high praise for the artists included in Zero 10, saying that they “have all challenged me to see the world differently.”
“As generative AI floods the world with texts without authors, art without artists, photographs without photographers, and music without musicians, the conversation is far from academic,” adds Paglen in the statement. “It is the central cultural question of the present. The artists in this exhibition have been living inside it for decades. That’s why they’re here. That’s why this matters.”
DEAFBEEF, Glitchbox (2021–25).
Courtesy of the artist and Asprey Studio.
Many artists in the show are familiar to art audiences, but some, says Scheinman, will be brand new to the museum directors and curators, dealers, collectors and advisers convening in Switzerland this summer. As an example he puts forth artist and engineer DEAFBEEF, presented by Asprey Studio of Kent, England, who will show Glitchbox (2021–25), an interactive sculpture that “records participant-generated outputs on-chain,” per press materials, in a presentation that brings together blacksmithing, audio, and code.
“We hope this presentation, of an artist who’s been working with blockchain as the surface area of his work, will locate him amongst this dialogue that tracks back seventy years,” said Scheinman. “He could be ghettoized as a crypto artist, but he is articulating ideas and concepts that fit this context. I think it’s the new artists who likely will be the most substantive surprises.”
Zero 10 will also include public programs featuring leading voices such as artists Josh Kline and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, British author Hari Kunzru, and writer and former Artforum editor-in-chief Tina Rivers Ryan.
The full exhibitor list follows:
ArtMeta
Art Blocks
Asprey Studio (Kent)
bitforms gallery (New York)
eastcontemporary (Milan)
Max Estrella (Madrid)
Fellowship (London, Marrakech, Porto Cervo, Los Angeles)
Galerie Oniris (Rennes)
Gazelli Art House (London)
Marian Goodman (New York, Paris, Los Angeles)
Hauser & Wirth (Zurich, New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Somerset, St. Moritz, Gstaad, Basel, Menorca, Chillida Leku, Monaco, Hong Kong)
HEK, Haus der Elektronischen Künste/House of Electronic Arts (Basel)
Interface Gallery (Breda)
Andrew Kreps Gallery (New York)
Nguyen Wahed (New York, London)
Office Impart (Berlin)
Almine Rech (Paris, New York, Brussels, Shanghai, Monaco, London, Gstaad)
Esther Schipper (Paris, Berlin, Seoul)
Sprüth Magers (Berlin, London, Los Angeles, New York)
Upstream Gallery (Amsterdam)
