Zero 10 at Art Basel, Basel

At Art Basel Basel 2026, Zero 10 brings together artists whose practices have developed through computation, networked images, digital systems and technological histories. Curated by Eli Schein and Trevor Paglen, the initiative approaches art of the digital era as a field extending well beyond the screen. Its presentations encompass painting, sound, software, photography, interactive installation and sculpture.

Ahead of the fair, our editor Nina Knaack spoke with William Mapan, Jan Robert Leegte and DEAFBEEF about the works they are presenting, the ideas behind them and their relationship to wider histories of art and technology. Ryoji Ikeda has maintained a policy of declining interviews for more than twenty years, therefore his section considers how this position relates to a practice grounded in data, frequency, light and mathematical structure.

Together, these four upcoming presentations show how digital art increasingly operates through a close examination of material conditions: how an image is generated, altered, transmitted and compressed; how code can be translated into pigment or metal; and how technological systems act upon human perception.

Ryoji Ikeda

Presented by Almine Rech

Ryoji Ikeda does not do Q&As. For more than twenty years, this has been part of his artistic position. There is no portrait, interview format or explanatory persona placed in front of the work.

This spotlight therefore begins with that absence. Ikeda’s work speaks through frequency, data, light, scale and mathematical structure. It asks the viewer to encounter systems directly, before language settles them into interpretation.

Ikeda is an electronic composer and visual artist whose practice moves between sound, image, mathematics and physical perception. His works often operate at the edges of what the human ear, eye and mind can process: high frequencies, vast datasets, intense light, microscopic information and cosmic scale. The resulting abstraction can initially feel clinical, yet its effects are deeply bodily. The viewer is measured, surrounded and placed inside the work’s logic.

At Art Basel Basel, Ikeda presents data.gram. The work reimagines the monumental language of his data-verse installations through wall-mounted computer displays. Scientific data becomes image, rhythm, pulse and signal. With data.gram, Ikeda continues his long-running investigation into how information can be composed: how numbers acquire a spatial presence and how data can be made perceptible.

Ikeda’s data-driven research into nature has been unfolding since the early 2000s. In 2021, data-verse 3 premiered at Art Basel Unlimited, presented by Almine Rech and commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary. It marked the final chapter of one of his most complex projects to date: an audiovisual inquiry into nature through scientific information, moving from the smallest measurable particles to the scale of the cosmos.

Data.gram brings this thinking into a more contained register. Its screens retain the precision and density of the larger installations while concentrating attention on the visual organisation of information.

There is something exacting about Ikeda’s refusal to explain. His work is built from systems that already exceed ordinary perception. The silence surrounding the artist leaves space for the pressure of the work itself: sound as material, light as structure and data as a means of sensing the world.

William Mapan

Presented by Art Blocks

How would you describe yourself as an artist?

I work with code, colour, texture and physical materials. My practice often starts with an algorithm or a physical experiment, such as mark-making, but I am interested in what happens when a system begins to feel tactile and painterly. I like to build rules and then allow the unexpected to appear within them.

What are you presenting at Art Basel Basel and Zero 10?

I’m presenting Paysages Plausibles and Dances on Shadows, two series that consider how a landscape can emerge from an algorithm.

Paysages Plausibles consists of oil paintings based on landscapes generated by a system I have been developing for approximately a year. They are coded and painted landscapes: places that belong nowhere, yet feel possible.

Dances on Shadows will be made live during the fair. Visitors can explore the algorithm on screen, generate a unique composition and, should they choose, have it plotted on site. The final work is made on paper, with pastel on tracing paper laid over it, allowing the ground and surface to remain visible through one another.

How did the concept for this project come about?

Paysages Plausibles began with a question: can an algorithm construct a landscape that feels plausible without depicting a real place?

The system generates fragments, blocks of colour, architectural shards, partitions, horizons and terrains. After generating thousands of possibilities, I selected a small number to translate into oil paintings.

Dances on Shadows became a kind of detour from that larger body of work. It follows the traces around the image: contours, densities, coloured movements and residual energies. The plotter turns the system into a language of repetition and displacement, almost like choreography.

How does this work relate to your broader practice?

My work often moves between the digital and the physical. I am interested in the moment when an image leaves the screen and becomes something you can stand in front of: something with scale, texture, opacity and surface.

With these works, I wanted the algorithm to remain present while allowing the final objects to enter into older conversations around landscape, painting and drawing. There are echoes of constructed landscape, from Cézanne to Hockney, as well as early computer art and plotter drawing, from Sol LeWitt’s instruction-based works to Vera Molnár’s experiments with machines.

The large multi-panel painting extends this further. A single generated landscape is divided across several panels and only appears fully when you step back.

Is there another work or presentation within Zero 10 that you are especially curious to see?

I’m very curious to see the Frankenthaler show, and I’m also looking forward to the Max Hetzler presentation. There are some interesting crossovers with my own work: Bridget Riley’s investigations into perception and abstraction; Albert Oehlen’s Computer Paintings, which emerged from computer-generated patterns; and works by Sam Francis and Christopher Wool that connect, in different ways, to the questions I am exploring in the Dances on Shadows plotter works.

Jan Robert Leegte

Presented by Office Impart and Upstream Gallery

How would you describe yourself as an artist?

I see myself as a sculptor on the internet. I treat software as a subject. My entire practice is built on a sustained, three-decade act of attention to the medium beneath the content. Much of my work takes the form of online software, alongside installations, drawings and sculpture.

What are you presenting at Art Basel Basel and Zero 10?

I am presenting three series built on the same principle: images arising from nothing. These are JPEG, Sightings and Orbits. Each adds a different layer.

JPEG is the ground state and the most radical reduction. It consists of compression with no image beneath it: no subject and no reference, with the codec made visible in its pure state.

Sightings uses the same generative engine while allowing it to produce something that reads as photography: images that have never been placed in front of a lens.

Orbits extends the investigation into three dimensions and time. A three-dimensional scene is generated and compressed live, frame by frame, existing only in the instant the codec produces it.

How did the concept for this project come about?

JPEG already existed as a series, and I wanted to execute it at a different scale. The ideas for Sightings, moving further into photography, and Orbits, introducing animation, were also developing. Zero 10 presented an ideal opportunity to show them together.

We have reached a moment in which AI has made the trustworthiness of images newly urgent. Much of that conversation concentrates on machine learning, which generates images after consuming vast quantities of source material. These works contain no source, training set or underlying photograph, yet something appears. They are expressions of emptiness and of the medium itself.

How does this work relate to your broader practice?

The work looks more deeply into compression and the idea of the networked image. I have come to see the image on a screen as a performance rather than a record.

Every picture encountered online consists of data and process, staged for the viewer and held briefly still so it can be read. Behind that stillness, data is being retrieved from servers across continents, decoded by codecs written decades ago and reassembled in real time. The picture is an event rather than an object.

This attention to the medium beneath the content has always been the central focus of my practice.

Is there another work or presentation within Zero 10 that you are especially curious to see?

Yes, DEAFBEEF. I really appreciate his work, and I also know him as a characteristic artist within web3. He stands out in that context because his work is deeply rooted in art history, as is my own. He is also a blacksmith. As a fellow sculptor, I cannot wait to see his sculptural work.

DEAFBEEF

Presented by Asprey Studio

How would you describe yourself as an artist?

I write low-level code to produce sound and animation. I also work with metal as a blacksmith.

These two practices may appear distant from one another, although there are parallels between them. The motivation behind both stems from a desire to reclaim agency in a world of accelerating technological change. I want to work with my hands and my intellect. I am interested in tactility and the duality of the physical and virtual. Craft takes on a particular meaning in an age of generative media.

What are you presenting at Art Basel Basel and Zero 10?

I’m presenting a selection of existing works made over the past several years, alongside new pieces.

Glitchbox (2025) is a monumental interactive audiovisual sculpture that began in 2021 as a purely digital artwork.

Hashmarks (2023) is a series of 100 hand-forged iron talismans that are cryptographically linked to digital tokens. They are paired with photographic prints that use iron scale, a residue of the forging process, as pigment.

Chronophotographs (2023) is a collection of generative digital images inspired by Eadweard Muybridge, now presented as platinum-palladium prints.

The Synth Poem Oscilloscopes (2021–2026) are interactive audiovisual sculptures that reference vintage oscilloscopes and their early creative use in art and experimental film by artists including Ben Laposky and Mary Ellen Bute.

How did the concept for this project come about?

Synth Poems (2021) was originally a collection of 128 unique digital audiovisual works, procedurally generated by C code stored on the Ethereum blockchain. The works recall analogue sound synthesis and sound-driven oscilloscope visualisation, with an intentional reference to early electronic art.

The promises and fears surrounding technologies have always galvanised the human imagination. The concept behind Synth Poem Oscilloscope (2026) was to allow the original purely digital system to cross into a physical embodiment: one that brings the ethereal qualities of electricity and radio communication to life.

How does this work relate to your broader practice?

In my broader practice, I keep returning to themes of time, permanence and the duality of the real and virtual. I use my skills in code, sound and metalworking as a particular site for exploration.

Since 2025, I have been focused on creating technosculptures with tactile elements. Tactility is becoming an increasingly distinct dimension. Vision and hearing can be convincingly simulated by high-resolution digital media, while tactile information cannot be stored or reproduced with the same ease. Its transducers remain relatively crude and are unlikely to improve significantly until the emergence of technologies such as brain implants. There may be something about tactility that remains distinctly non-virtual.

Is there another work or presentation within Zero 10 that you are especially curious to see?

It is a great privilege to be part of this curation. As someone who is unable to travel often, I’m excited to see all of it.

Were I to select two artists, I would choose Agnieszka Kurant and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. I admire how both use time-based and interactive systems to reflect on socioeconomic themes.

Visit Zero 10

Zero 10 is Art Basel’s curated initiative for art of the digital era.

Art Basel, Basel VIP days: June 16–18 | Public days: June 18–21