Trevor Paglen to Curate Art Basel’s Zero 10 in Switzerland With a Survey of Digital Art’s Long Arc
Art Basel is bringing its digital-art sector, Zero 10, to Switzerland for the first time, and Trevor Paglen (b. 1974) will shape the presentation. Titled “The Condition,” the third edition of the initiative will run during the fair’s Swiss edition, June 17–21, and will be co-curated by digital art strategist Eli Scheinman.
The project is set to be the largest Zero 10 yet, with 20 exhibitors participating. Among the galleries taking part are Marian Goodman, Hauser and Wirth, and Almine Rech, which will present work by artists including John Gerrard, Agnieszka Kurant, Avery Singer, and Hito Steyerl. The roster also reaches beyond the contemporary moment to foreground earlier experiments in computation and instruction-based art.
Paglen and Scheinman’s exhibition will survey roughly seven decades of work, tracing a line from recent digital practice back to artists who were already testing the logic of machines decades ago. Vera Molnár, the Hungarian-born artist who began using computers in 1968, appears as a key precursor. So do Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth’s “Oscilloscope Tests,” begun in 1950, and Ben F. Laposky’s “Oscillation 4,” also from the 1950s. DEAFBEEF will present “Glitchbox” (2021–25) at Asprey Studio.
The curatorial premise is meant to challenge the familiar split between “traditional” art and digital work. Paglen has argued that the divide is largely artificial, noting that many contemporary artists already rely on software and computational tools in their studios. In his view, the question is not whether art has become digital, but how long it has been so.
That argument gives Zero 10 a broader historical frame at a moment when generative AI, NFTs, and other digital systems continue to reshape artistic production and display. The sector first drew attention at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2025, where its debut made a vivid case for the visibility of digital art within the fair’s larger ecosystem. This Swiss edition suggests a more expansive ambition: not a novelty section, but a sustained account of how artists have used machines, code, and instruction to rethink what images can do.
Paglen arrives with substantial institutional weight behind him. He received the 2017 MacArthur 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. His work has been shown at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, DC, and Fondazione Prada in Milan, and he contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning documentary “Citizenfour.”
With “The Condition,” Art Basel is positioning Zero 10 less as a side attraction than as a serious historical proposition — one that places digital art inside a longer, more complicated lineage.
