Zero10 at Art Basel

In 1915, fourteen artists in Petrograd staged an exhibition they called 0,10. Zero marked an origin, and the number ten signaled the artists who would cross that threshold together. Kazimir Malevich hung his Black Square in the corner where a Russian Orthodox icon would normally sit and Vladimir Tatlin installed his Counter-Reliefs – abstract sculptures that broke free from the wall. Formally titled The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10, the show became one of the defining gestures of the European avant-garde: a moment when artists stopped absorbing innovation and began generating it.

More than a century later, the name returns in a new context. At Art Basel, Zero10 is now a dedicated curatorial platform for art made with emerging technologies, integrated directly into the main fair floor. “The zero represents a zero point, a beginning,” Art Basel consultant Eli Scheinman says. “At the same time, there is a playful allusion to binary and code, but it also speaks to our desire to find a name that could embody what this space represents without pandering to tropes or using terminology that feels reductive.” Calling it the ‘Digital Art Section’ was never an option, since digital art already exists elsewhere in the fair and always has. What Scheinman envisioned was something broader: a platform whose name could gesture toward historical rupture, computational logic, and the feeling of a fresh start without tying itself to any single technology or market cycle.

The first edition of Zero10 launched at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2025. Three months later, Zero10 made its Asian debut in Hong Kong, expanding from twelve exhibitors to fourteen. Our editors, Justin Gilanyi and Nina Knaack, wrote down their conversations and reflections below.

Miami: the opening move

The Miami edition drew on some of the most recognized names in blockchain-based digital art. Beeple filled a glass pen with robot dogs on the first VIP day, XCOPY’s Coin Laundry drew more than 2.3 million NFT claims across the fair, AOTM presented Dmitri Cherniak’s Polygon Etcetera series, and Larva Labs debuted its first major release since 2021. There was also bitforms gallery showing Manfred Mohr (who’s often described as the godfather of generative art) plus Jack Butcher staging Self Checkout with Visualize Value – turning the economics of his own booth into visible, transactable material.

The concentration of marquee names was deliberate, with Scheinman describing the curatorial logic as a form of aggregation: “The composition of artists in the Miami Beach edition were, within the digital art ecosystem, the ten to fifteen names that even a cursory participant was familiar with, and that was very intentional. This was the first edition, and we wanted to bring together the artists who could make this community visible at the scale it deserved.” If Zero10 was going to establish itself as a permanent part of Art Basel’s architecture, the organisation felt it needed artists with enough gravity to command attention and move markets.

Looking back at Miami, Scheinman says that what struck him the most was the quality of attention. People lingered with the interactive presentations, engaging deeply with the work and with one another in the kind of sustained, participatory encounters that fairs rarely produce. Some journalists described the section as an arcade, but others called it the fair’s most talked-about debut. The response from the wider art world was more complex. For some traditional collectors, the space felt unfamiliar, even frontier-like, but Scheinman is candid about that tension. He sees it as part of a longer process, one that unfolds over years and across regions. “The friction is evidence that something genuinely new is being attempted.”

Hong Kong: a different register

Hong Kong was shaped as a different proposition, retaining Miami’s ambition while widening the frame. The section occupied 1,200 square meters on the main show floor, given over to fourteen exhibitors presenting robotics, painting, sculpture, generative work, AI-based art, and interactive installation.

Where Miami drew from a tightly defined digital art community, Hong Kong reached beyond any single ecosystem. Petra Cortright, Laurie Simmons, Jonas Lund, Sougwen Chung, and Kevin Abosch are artists whose work has circulated widely in museums and institutional contexts for years, and their presence suggests that Zero10 is interested in the full spectrum of practices engaging with technology, regardless of where a given reputation first formed.

The atmosphere seemed to shift as well. Alister Walker of Asprey Studio, who exhibited in both editions, noted that Miami felt more interactive, more social, more outward, while Hong Kong was more art historical and more rooted in heritage. “Digital is the most contemporary art form,” Walker observed, pointing to Art Basel’s decision to formalize the section as an acknowledgment that traditional galleries had years to embrace digital practices and largely did not. Zero10 now fills that gap with institutional weight.

The audience in Hong Kong also skewed younger, with a strong contingent of visitors in their twenties and thirties. Just as importantly, the relationship between digital art and Asian visual traditions, from scroll painting to seal inscription to the calligraphic mark, gave the Hong Kong edition a cultural specificity Miami could not have produced.

The through lines: Data as content

Across both cities, a core tendency emerged: artists building systems that ingest, process, and respond to information as their primary material.

At OFFICE IMPART, Jonas Lund presented Network Maintenance, a set of wall-mounted sculptural interfaces functioning as nodes in an interconnected system. Each device requires regular interaction from its owner, transforming art ownership from passive possession into something closer to stewardship. Neglect one, and the effects ripple outward. Alongside it, Optimized Trajectory ran on a monitor: a generative software work that mimics the visual rhetoric of institutional dashboards, growth curves, compliance metrics, productivity signals, only to let them dissolve into abstraction. The system continuously pursues a model of upward performance it can never sustain. Funny and uncomfortable at once, particularly within a commercial art fair where optimism is a professional requirement. Lund’s satirical AI-generated video The Future of Growth anchored the presentation, acting as a time capsule of its technological moment.

BottoDAO represented one of the most unusual exhibitor models in Art Basel’s history. Botto is an autonomous AI artist that generates hundreds of images each week and presents them to an online community for voting and discussion. In Hong Kong, Botto operated a live installation: two tracking cameras observed passersby, reading facial expressions and transforming that emotional data into evolving compositions in real time. The feedback loop between creation and reception became visible. The artist produces, the community shapes, the system adapts. Authorship, in this model, is distributed across human judgment and machine computation.

Then there was Daniel Canogar, approaching data in a yet different way. His LED-based sculptures translate real-time data streams into shifting light compositions, continuously reconfigured by external input. The works do not represent data, but actually perform it.

The through lines: Participation as form

If Lund and Botto make systems legible, another group of works made the viewer an active component of the system itself.

Jack Butcher, presented by SILK Art House, brought WORK, LUCK, PLAY – three linked projects examining how value is produced and distributed. The physical versions of both WORK and LUCK are handcrafted in solid silver, translating a digital design practice into material objects with a charged relationship to scarcity and craft.

PLAY unfolded as a live installation. Visitors collected and exchanged dice-themed coasters throughout the fair, then redeemed them at the booth for a dice roll, receiving a 3D-printed resin die produced on site. The roll determined what the system allowed them to have. In parallel, collectors could acquire the complete set, containing all possible outcomes at once. Participation was accessible, but certainty was reserved for those who could afford to own the full structure.

What Butcher articulated during the fair was that the opportunity to communicate an idea expands with the right interaction design. “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” At Zero10, participation became part of the medium.

Robert Alice’s SEAL extended this logic into history. Drawing on the tradition of collectors inscribing seals directly onto artworks, the project invited participants to create cryptographic seals on an infinite on-chain scroll. Provenance became visible, structural, and participatory. The artwork expanded through ownership rather than remaining fixed.

And Harvey Rayner, represented by Art Blocks, brought on-site minting environments to the fair, collapsing the distinction between viewing, collecting, and co-creating. The minting moment became part of the work’s provenance, a timestamp written into the blockchain. What unfolded was not just a point of sale, but a site of production. Each collector entered the system at the moment of creation, their decision inseparable from the form the work ultimately took. The artwork did not pre-exist the encounter, but only emerged through it.

In this model, authorship expands. The artist defines the parameters, the system generates possibilities, and the collector selects and instantiates. The result is a recorded event that carries the conditions of its own becoming. Harvey Rayner’s presence also made something else legible: the way generative systems shift the locus of meaning from the final image to the process that produces it. The artwork is not only what is seen, but how it comes into being, who participates in that process, and how that participation is recorded.

Harvey Rayner’s work in this context underscores a broader shift taking place within Zero10. The artwork is no longer something that is simply presented to a viewer. It is something that is activated, instantiated, and completed through interaction. Through this, a fair can become more than just a site of display.

The through lines: AI as creative environment

Kevin Abosch’s Testing Ground, shown by TAEX, approached generative systems as environments rather than tools. The works resemble aerial landscapes, shifting between geological and computational forms. Abosch resists describing this relationship as collaboration. The system does not want, risk, or intend. At sufficient complexity, it becomes something navigated rather than controlled. In a moment saturated with inflated claims about AI creativity, this clarity around agency becomes essential.

Petra Cortright and Laurie Simmons, brought by SOLOS, similarly operate within AI-inflected environments, where authorship becomes a process of selection, orchestration, and iteration. Here, the artist’s role shifts toward sustained judgment across a field of possibilities.

Emi Kusano's Ornament Survival, presented by √K Contemporary, took the figure of the magical girl – a staple of 1990s Japanese anime in which transformation promises both power and self-erasure – and relocated it inside generative AI. The installation combined sculpture, video, and two-dimensional works around a monumental compact inspired by the transformation devices of that era. Where Abosch treats AI as terrain to be navigated and Cortright and Simmons treat it as a field for sustained selection, Kusano uses it to anatomise a specific cultural loop: the demand to endlessly optimize and reproduce the self in order to remain visible within algorithmic systems. The main work sold within the first hour of the fair's opening – a fact worth noting not only commercially but structurally, since it suggests a collector base prepared to acquire work that is explicitly about the conditions of its own circulation.

The through lines: Performance and duration

Sougwen Chung’s RECURSIONS synthesized the section’s key concerns: data, participation, AI, and time. A robotic system, trained on the artist’s gestures and responsive to biosensor input, extended her movements across a monumental scroll in real time. Human and machine marks accumulated together, making origin difficult to locate.

Related works translated gesture into light, cycling drawings across LED structures that evolved based on attention data. Chung describes this as Operational Art: a framework for co-creation between human, machine, and environment.

Presented in Hong Kong, by Fellowship, the scroll format carried additional resonance, linking technological systems with longstanding visual traditions.

Zero10 round up, so far

Zero10 accommodates exhibitor models beyond traditional galleries: DAOs, platforms, studios, and hybrid structures. This openness is one of its defining strengths and one of its risks. As institutional expectations settle, the tension is whether that flexibility remains.

The strongest works in the section share a common quality: they make their systems legible. They show how they operate, who they involve, and what they demand, treating the viewer as an active participant in a living structure.

Art Basel Hong Kong closed with 91,500 visitors and a new five-year collaboration with the city’s Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau. What matters now is what those numbers actually contain. What happens when the younger, natively digital audience the section attracts and the established collectors Art Basel has cultivated for decades want fundamentally different things?

In a fair ecosystem that still largely treats artworks as objects to be acquired and displayed, Zero10 proposes something else: that some of the most vital works of the present are those that continue to operate after the fair closes, through networks, through communities, through chains of provenance that extend indefinitely. What Zero10 makes visible is not simply a new category of art, but a shift in what an artwork is allowed to be. Not an object to be placed, but a system to be entered. Not something that ends at acquisition, but something that continues to unfold.

For us, the question is no longer whether this type of work belongs within the fair. It is whether the fair can expand to meet it.