Comment | Art Basel’s Zero 10 grows up and outgrows the digital community that led to its inception

Art Basel’s digital art sector Zero10 made its Swiss debut last week in the Messeplatz in Basel, across the street from the fair’s somewhat overstuffed Unlimited sector for large-scale art. Titled The Condition, it was co-curated by Eli Scheinman (who curated the previous iterations at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2025 and Art Basel Hong Kong in March), and the artist Trevor Paglen.

With 20 exhibitors, it was the largest edition of Zero 10 to date and showcased several historical presentations, so much so that I have accidentally called it “The Context” on multiple occasions. Upon arrival, visitors were greeted by a triptych of John Gerrard’s Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) (2017), Flare (Oceania) (2022) and STANDARD (2023) shown side by side for the first time, by the gallery Fellowship. Without a doubt the strongest presentation in this Zero 10, the work is emotionally grounded, well installed and thoughtfully representative of the zeitgeist, begging the question: is this the opposite end of the digital art spectrum from Beeple’s Miami spectacle? Do these works exist on the same spectrum at all?

Versions of those questions lingered throughout Zero 10, which was palpably preoccupied with gravitas. There was also an undercurrent of internal tension throughout the sector, with multiple participants and Paglen distancing themselves from prompt-based visual art in favour of more elaborate or code-based art, hinting at a sense of growing hierarchy within digital art.

The Toronto-based artist 0xDEAFBEEF presented steampunk-adjacent, hand-welded oscilloscopes alongside more traditional digital works, with Asprey Studio. During Artmeta’s Digital Art Summit in Basel on 15 June, he had dismissed prompt-generated visuals on the grounds that there was no precedent for prompt-based image-making in art—overlooking Sol Lewitt, John Cage, Yoko Ono and a whole slew of conceptual and Fluxus artists. His oscilloscopes are homages to the mathematician and artist Ben Laposky (1914-2000), whose own oscilloscope-made prints were shown on the stand’s walls. This type of overt historical grounding was employed by several Zero 10 exhibitors to highlight—or perhaps legitimise—the digital presentations.

Given the art-world establishment’s enduring scepticism toward digital art, the curators and exhibitors of Zero 10’s Basel edition could be forgiven for this overcorrection. However, the attempts at historical grounding sometimes veered too far into the academic, as in the case of Oniris and Interface Gallery's stand of works by Vera Molnar. While the installation featured some glorious works by the pioneering Hungarian artist, they were presented in a fashion so academic that it felt out of place in an art fair setting. Similarly, ArtMeta’s overpacked exhibition-within-an-exhibition, Digital Masterpieces: From Code to Canon, was filled with extraordinary works, including pieces by Charles Csuri and Ken Knowlton. ArtMeta artistic director Georg Bak’s enthusiasm alone is sufficient to shift one’s perspective on digital art, but the presentation’s busy curation and scholarly tone clashed with some of the more conventionally curated stands in the sector, making it accessible to those in the know but perhaps intimidating for newcomers unsure of where to begin.

One of the best parts of Paglen and Scheinman’s Zero 10 was the juxtaposition of Gazelli Art House’s delicious survey of Harold Cohen, with the works by French artist William Mapan presented by Art Blocks. Mapan’s warm and abstract generative works are clearly a spiritual successor to Cohen’s generative works, although the inclusion of Mapan’s plotter generating made-to-order works on site did give me pause. Too often, work created with artificial intelligence (AI) is misperceived as not requiring labour, with audiences asking to see prompts, codes and references to assuage their suspicions. Making the production process transparent—as the curator Christiane Paul did for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Cohen retrospective in 2023—can be enlightening. But in an art fair context, demonstrating an artist’s process can come off as either illuminating or pre-emptively defensive, depending on your preconceptions.

For a contemporary art audience perhaps unfamiliar with Cohen and Mapan, seeing their works side by side was an excellent opportunity to re-contextualise contemporary AI-driven practices with historical grounding. It was also a gentle reminder from Scheinman and Paglen that digital art has a rich history and the present moment (The Condition of their title) is a result of all that came before it.

Sprüth Magers’s Zero 10 presentation of the towering Andreas Gursky photograph Ocean V (2010) turned out to be a missed opportunity to improve what Paglen referred to as the "antagonistic relationship" between digital galleries and traditional Basel exhibitors. Throughout the fair’s run, the work mostly stood alone, without anyone from the gallery to explain how Gursky’s digital processes fit into the larger story of digital art. Though Paglen had been quite thoughtful in expanding the context of Zero 10 to include artists working with digital processes, this monumental Gursky (arguably more befitting of the Unlimited sector) ended up serving as a reminder of some top-tier galleries’ apparent disinterest in this more expansive definition of digital art.

The inclusion of art historical works and photography did prompt interesting questions about what Zero 10 might become. If all art that includes digital processes can be a part of this conversation, the spotlight will likely move away from crypto art and its supporters. While discussing this at Basel Social Club, a young fairgoer sporting a cap that read “INTERNET” dismissed this edition of Zero 10 as empty and lacking anything exciting. Neither entertainment nor shock value was at the sector's forefront in Basel, especially compared to its Miami Beach debut—no gimmicky presentation eclipsed all other conversations. Am I alone in considering this a welcome development?

A schism was perhaps inevitable when a community that has largely denied, dismissed or ignored the existence of historical digital art was placed within a context that stretches back more than a half-century. This Zero 10 still included NFTs (non-fungible tokens), with Gazelli offering Cohen’s works with accompanying NFT certificates, while the New York gallery Nguyen Wahed presented an ever-growing garden on the blockchain created by Leander Herzog. As the only overtly Web3 project on site, Infinite Garden (2025-26) leveraged the blockchain itself as a medium, which was a smart tactic to draw a wider share of fairgoers who may still be crypto-averse.

Over the course of last week’s fairs in Basel, attendees were repeatedly overheard debating whether Zero 10 should have been distributed within the Unlimited sector, which itself included several compelling works matching Paglen’s curatorial criteria for art made with digital processes. The galleries Magician Space and Société, for instance, showcased Timur Si-Qin’s Mariposita, which consisted of an LED screen on the floor displaying a pond in the Amazon, with a steel sculpture based on a 3D scan of a tree taken at the same site installed atop it. A kind of futuristic, eco-conscious and contemplative homage to Charles Ray, with a splash of Caravaggio’s Narcissus (1597-99) thrown in for good measure—as visitors bent forward to behold the pond that did not offer them their own reflection—it was the most overtly digital work presented in Unlimited.Also on view was Thomas Ruff’s haunting series of digitally altered found photos of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, presented by David Zwirner. And Dirimart’s presentation of Inci Eviner’s breathtaking double-sided, 10m-wide video piece Reenactment of Heaven (2018) could also fit neatly into this expansive category.

With room to breathe, thoughtful presentations and historical heft aplenty, Zero 10’s Basel edition represented a leap forward for the sector. Its success may have even inadvertently made a case for its own obsolescence or absorption into Basel’s pre-existing sectors—a future iteration of Zero 10 could, for instance, resemble Art Basel’s Kabinett sector of discrete capsule exhibitions within traditional fair stands.

One note of caution for such an approach would be to consider what happened at Christie’s after the auction house’s digital art department was absorbed into the broader 21st-century art category in 2025—the firm’s recent spring auctions in New York did not feature any digital works.