Two worlds converge in Basel

Something seismic is unfolding at Art Basel in 2026.

For the third iteration of the Swiss fair’s digital art initiative, Zero 10, curated by Eli Scheinman and Trevor Paglen, a number of established blue-chip galleries are sharing space for the first time with prominent media art galleries. The inclusion of international houses such as Hauser & Wirth and Marian Goodman feels like a show of faith in a post-medium art world liberated from historical demarcations. At last, two parallel universes have started to converge.

In his new book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI, Trevor Paglen reflects on two major revolutions in how humans relate to images in the past 15 years: computer vision and generative AI. Now, for the first time at Art Basel, artists engaged with those revolutions are exhibiting alongside wider contemporary art practices.

William Mapan is showing two new series with Art Blocks as part of Zero 10, Paysages Plausibles and Dances on Shadows. By grouping together the artist’s paintings and drawings together with the plotter itself in the space of the booth, the display spotlights the way digital and analog approaches now live together in a generative feedback loop.

When asked by Alex Estorick, Founding Editor of Right Click Save, to assess the significance of this moment, the artist Jan Robert Leegte, showing with Office Impart and Upstream Gallery, opined: “After 30 years, [it feels] unreal. This field has been kept outside of the art world for a very long time … So this is miraculous to be in Basel.”

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

Basel’s museum institutions welcome converging art worlds as established galleries embrace Zero 10 digital art initiative

Jan Robert Leegte’s work on show at the Art Basel Zero 10 stand shared by OFFICE IMPART and Upstream Gallery. Via x.com. Courtesy of the artist, OFFICE IMPART, and Upstream Gallery

Landscapes of the Mind | William Mapan bridges code, paint, and pen plotter for two new series with Art Blocks at Zero 10

Installation view of Paysages Plausibles (2026) and Dances on Shadows (2026) by William Mapan at Art Blocks. Photography by Right Click Save

Images After AI | Trevor Paglen and investigative journalist Manisha Ganguly discuss how machines see

Trevor Paglen, Near Highway 80 (undated), 2024. © Trevor Paglen. Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, and Pace Gallery, New York

The Art of The Future | Sara and Johannes VanDerBeek on activating the Stan VanDerBeek Archive

Stan VanDerBeek and Kenneth C. Knowlton, (Still from) Poemfield No. 1 (Blue Version), 1967. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ralph M. Parsons Fund. Courtesy of the Estate of Stan VanDerBeek. Digital images courtesy of The Box, Los Angeles

Future Relics | The Toronto-based artist Ranbir Sidhu explores new border ecologies through a South Asian prism

Installation view of “No Limits” at Art Gallery of Ontario, with works: Asteroid 3033 X1 (2025, foreground) and Odyssey (2025) by Ranbir Sidhu. Photography by AGO. © Ranbir Sidhu. Courtesy of the artist.

Trending

Kindred spirits at Art Basel

Happening

Lap-See Lam, “Ombres”, is at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo until January 3, 2027

Lap-See Lam’s solo exhibition, “Ombres”, at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, celebrates the artist becoming the fourth recipient of The Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award. Courtesy of the artist and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo

“time is a flat circle” is at bitforms gallery, New York City, June 18 to August 1, 2026

Erick Antonio Benitez, Gengar Precolombino, 2025. “time is a flat circle” is the second exhibition in a series of collaborations between Rip Space and bitforms gallery, featuring work by Benitez, Ricardo Cabret, Lou Fauroux, and Umber Majeed. Courtesy of the artist, bitforms, and Rip Space

“Chris Dorland — Chrome Shelter”, is at Museum gegenstandsfreier Kunst, Otterndorf, Germany, June 28 to October 4, 2026

With “Chrome Shelter” the New York-based Canadian-American artist Chris Dorland is holding his first institutional show in Europe. The exhibition, at Museum gegenstandsfreier Kunst, Otterndorf, near Hamburg, is curated by Wilko Austermann, the museum’s director, and examines the intersection of painting, digital culture, and contemporary systems of technological mediation. Courtesy of the artist

The LAN Party Summer School runs from July 10 to 31, 2026, with webinars focusing on video game art

The LAN Party Summer School webinars are led by Alice Bucknell, Chia Amisola, Side Quest, and Janne Schimmel. Courtesy of LAN Party

Appointment

Florence Ostende is appointed Director of Artistic Programs and Content at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Before assuming her role at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Florence Ostende was Head of the Artistic Department at Mudam — Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Luxembourg). Before that she was Curator at Barbican Art Gallery, London. Photograph courtesy of Florence Ostende and Guggenheim Bilbao

Reading

In Between the Art Worlds | Download a copy of ART & TECH, our quarterly digest for slow reading in the expanding art world

Hockney a catalyst for converging art worlds

David Hockney, whose death was announced today, was an exemplar of a world-famous artist who experimented, over time, with new technologies. That time was taken to master a craft—whether using the immediacy of Polaroid to experiment with multi-focus composition, or the Brushes tool on iPhone to discover new ways of capturing light and color—rather than to tick off a flashy new tool. The retrospective “Hockney 25” at Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2025, and “David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting”, now at Serpentine, London, serve as reminders of how much he did to usher in the reality of a digital form of painting.

Hockney’s unique trajectory as an artist throws into relief how, for years, the digital and traditional art worlds occupied parallel universes, occasionally intersecting and often misunderstanding one another. But as Art Basel opens its doors next week, we’re witnessing a remarkable convergence.

A number of Web3-native galleries are debuting in Basel alongside established blue chips, while ArtMeta’s ambitious exhibition “Digital Masterpieces: From Code to Canon” traces nearly seven decades, and multiple chapters, of overlooked art history, stretching from early computer art trailblazers to today’s networked and AI-driven practices. These different threads of digital art history run through this week’s articles. Georg Bak speaks with David Em, whose journey from Xerox PARC and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to the present day offers a bridge between digital art’s earliest experiments and its contemporary moment. While artist and electronic musician Carsten Nicolai reveals what made Berlin so fertile as a test bed for all forms of creativity after the fall of the wall in his conversation with Viola Lukács. 

Fittingly, our Founding Editor, Alex Estorick, will be in Basel moderating a panel discussion on “How Masterpieces Are Made: Canon Formation in Digital Art”, a topic that feels timely as digital art’s histories become evermore visible.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

Remembering David Hockney 1937-2026

David Hockney in his west London studio, 1967. © David Hockney

The Voyager | Trailblazing artist David Em discusses the evolution of digital image-making from Xerox PARC to generative AI

David Em, Transjovian Pipeline, 1979, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Created using NASA software written by Dr James F. Blinn. © David Em

From Code to Canon | A show of digital masterpieces at Art Basel Zero 10 introduces collectors to 70 years of overlooked history

DADA, Creeps & Weirdos, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and ArtMeta

The artist and musician Carsten Nicolai reflects on his hybrid practice and Berlin after the fall of the wall with Viola Lukács

Alva Noto. Courtesy of Carsten Nicolai

Trending

NFC Summit Lisbon 2026 brings together the global digital art community

Happening: Art Basel Week 2026

Right Click Save partners with ArtMeta at the Digital Art Summit on June 15, 2026

The Digital Art Summit 2026 is ​presented by ArtMeta in partnership with Arab Bank Switzerland, Right Click Save, and Le Random

Vera Molnar, “Possibilities”, is at Kunstmuseum, Basel, until July 26, 2026

Vera Molnár, Triangles (2), 2023, Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, donation from Atelier-Éditions FANAL, Basel. © 2026, ProLitteris, Zurich, Photography by Jonas Schaffter. Via instagram.com/vera_molnar_official

“Cao Fei. Testimonies To The Near Future” is at Kunstmuseum Basel until October 11, 2026

Forthcoming

Creative Intelligence, a new festival exploring the intersection of technology, creativity, and art, is at Southbank Centre, London, September 11 to 13 , 2026

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Pollinator Pathmaker, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Creative Intelligence

The artists Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Holly Herndon, Andrew Thomas Huang, Kate Crawford, Akinola Davies Jr., Xin Liu, Sougwen Chung, and Razik Darji, are among the first announced participants of Creative Intelligence, a new London-based festival exploring how art and technologies, including AI, are combining to shape the future. The event, which runs from September 11 to 13, 2026, at Southbank Centre, is inspired by the 75th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, the utopian, post-austerity artist and scientist-led celebration of the future which was the Centre’s foundational moment in 1951.

Creative Intelligence was commissioned and produced by the Centre and is curated with PACT (Planetary Art Culture Technology). Keri Elmsly, founder of PACT, was invited by Mark Ball, artistic director of Southbank Centre, to curate the first festival. “The fundamental engagement with our own power and agency and imagination is what I want people to come away with,” Elmsly tells Right Click Save, “in whatever form that speaks to them. Because this is for everybody.”

Peckham Digital—the annual, community-led festival and creative technology organization in south-east London—will present the city’s grassroots creative computing communities in the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall during the festival.

The festival includes a one-day Creative Intelligence Summit, involving discussions and performances led by many of the featured artists—including a deep listening exercise led by Herndon—as well as a discussion of “The Image After AI” with Sougwen Chung, K Allado-McDowell, and Andrew Thomas Huang, hosted by Alex Estorick, Founding Editor of Right Click Save.

Opening

Julio Le Parc, “Light. Colour. Action.” is at Tate Modern, London, until May 3, 2027

Julio Le Parc, Blue Sphere 2001/2022. Tate. Installation view “Light. Colour. Action".” Lent by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2023. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025. Photography by Kathleen Arundell

Avery Singer, “War_overlays”, the artist’s first show of work using AI tools, is at Hauser & Wirth Zurich until September 5, 2026

Avery Singer, 2026. © Avery Singer. The artist is also showing Shit Coin Maxi (2025) on Hauser & Wirth’s stand at the Zero 10 initiative for art of the digital era, at Art Basel (June 17 to 21, 2026). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photography by Christian DeFonte

Justin Aversano, “Moments of the Unknown”, curated by Marlene Corbun, is at Nguyen Wahed, New York, until July 11, 2025

“Moments of the Unknown” is centered on the first full-length showing of Justin Aversano’s new film of the same title. Courtesy of the artist and Nguyen Wahed

RETRO

Zero 10 | Digital Art Goes Mainstream at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025

IX Shells, No Me Olvides. Fellowship and ARTXCODE stand at Zero 10, Art Basel Miami Beach. Courtesy of the artist, Fellowship, and ARTXCODE. Photography courtesy of Art Basel

Zero 10 embraces interactivity as it returns at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026

Sougwen Chung presents RECURSION 0 (2026) on the Fellowship & ARTXCODE stand at Zero 10, Art Basel Hong Kong. Photography via x.com/halecar2

Reading

Albertine Meunier | Critical Essays: My Google Search History by Claude.ai in the style of Marcel Duchamp, Georges Perec, and George Orwell (L’Avant Galerie Vossen, 2026)

Meeting people where they are

Labor strikes disrupting travel to NFC Lisbon this week made us wonder: can communities endure remotely? The instinctive answer is no: gatherings matter. This year’s proliferation of new institutions has reminded us of the importance of artists, collectors, and curators sharing physical space.

But perhaps the more nuanced answer is: it depends on how we collaborate. Edouard’s conversation with 100 Collectors’ Eleonora Brizi about digital asset preservation highlights the vital but unglamorous labor of stewardship, and the power of collectors thinking like custodians of culture rather than traders. This is certainly core to the vision of NODE, whose founders stressed this week to Right Click Save that “The institution can no longer behave like a passive container. It has to become an active collaborator.”

If NODE is currently perfecting the physical display of digital art, Connie Bakshi’s web-based interactive film Between These Black Waters demonstrates that meaningful artistic experiences can still happen entirely online. The work exists nowhere but on a screen, yet it is intimate and deeply physical in the way it demands your presence.

Following a week in which Pace Gallery’s CEO, Marc Glimcher, declared in a press statement that “the current gallery model isn’t only broken, it’s unfixable,” the need to meet people where they are has never been greater. With wall texts becoming increasingly user-friendly, the art world appears to be falling out of love with artspeak. Community, as it turns out, depends on inclusive language.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

NODE, Palo Alto | The founding team on making physical space for a digital world

Installation view of “BEEPLE: / INFINITE_LOOP” at NODE, Palo Alto, 2026, with work: Diffuse Control (2025) by Beeple. Photography by Felix Uribe

On Collecting by 100 collectors | Eleonora Brizi interviews EDOUARD about NFT preservation

William Mapan, Sketchbook B #28, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and EDOUARD

Landscape as Memory | Nora N. Khan talks to Connie Bakshi about her film Between These Black Waters

Connie Bakshi, (Still from) Between These Black Waters, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and EPOCH Los Angeles

Trending

General strike in Portugal disrupts community members’ travel to NFC Summit

Happening

Gretchen Andrew wins ABS Digital Art Prize 2026 for Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty Vietnam

Gretchen Andrew. Image courtesy of Arab Bank Switzerland

MoMI LAB, for emerging technology and culture, opens at Museum of the Moving Image, New York, on June 13, 2026

Axonometric illustration of MoMI LAB. Courtesy of Ralph Applebaum Associates & Museum of the Moving Image. MoMI LAB’s residency program is launching with Rachel Rossin as its inaugural Artist-in-Residence

“Video Killed the Radio Star: The 1980s and their Cultural Echoes” opens at Mudam, Luxembourg, on June 12, 2026

Lorna Simpson, Stereo Styles, 1988, in the Mudam Luxembourg Collection — Musée d’Art moderne Grand-Duc Jean

“Dusk Blue: The Networks of The Unseen”, a pop-up exhibition, is at Goldsmiths, University of London, on June 11, 2026 

“Jeff Davis — Mechanical Drawings” opens at Office Impart, Berlin, on June 9, 2026

Jeff Davis, Mechanical Drawings, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Office Impart

RETRO

FEMGEN and the Brave New Art World | The RCS community looks back on the critical conversations of 2022

Lia Something, (Still from) New Perspectives — Part I, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and VerticalCrypto Art

Primavera De Filippi, Kevin McCoy, and Rhea Myers on the importance of smart contracts to the creator economy

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Quantum Leap, 2021. Courtesy of the artists

Listening

Inferno | Boards of Canada capture contemporary technostalgia with irreverence and euphoria

Boards of Canada, Inferno, 2026. Warp Records

Riot in the forum

This week, three well-intentioned posts sparked much debate about the line between hype and valuable critique.

Priyanka Desai argued that the Beeple trading cards prove the Web3 space works best when it “stays native”: accessible, transparent, and community-first. Alejandro Cartagena countered that visibility and attention are not decentralized; NFTs reproduced traditional hierarchies almost immediately and perhaps more aggressively because of the public nature by which everything was quantified. Joana Kawahara Lino’s blog post went further, arguing that the space conflates “cultural energy” with “cultural substance”, mistaking secondary-market momentum for artistic significance.

Responses were swift and varied in both substance and tone, revealing different priorities. Some defended the value of institutional language a.k.a “artspeak”, while others viewed it as hype in imperial clothing. According to Carl Gombrich, who was interviewed this week by María Angélica Madero: “The primary problem with teaching visual literacy as an equal partner alongside numeracy and literacy […] is that there isn’t a clear, universally agreed syntax or semantics.”

Right Click Save has always viewed its role as a (curated) forum where the most interesting insights often emerge not from the initial text but from the collision of perspectives that follows. At a time when digital art is finally getting the institutional recognition it deserves, DIY critique can help to confront the resurgence of artspeak. Long may it continue.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

The power of interdisciplinary education | Carl Gombrich on art and learning in the Digital Age

Stephanie Dinkins, If We Don’t, Who Will?, 2025. Photography by Avery J. Savage. Courtesy of More Art

The Rule of the Bloom | The coder and chemist Kazuhiro Tanimoto reveals the power of cellular automata to unite sound and image

Kazuhiro Tanimoto, (Still from) Rain Blooms #122, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

Trending

Cultural energy or cultural substance? Anatomy of a thoughtful, and thought-provoking, discussion

Happening

Holly Herndon and Refik Anadol join conversation with Samira Ahmed at Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre, Oxford University, on “AI, Creativity and Ethics”

The broadcaster Samira Ahmed (left) moderated a conversation on “AI, Creativity and Ethics” at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, Oxford University, on May 28, 2026, with (from second left), the artist Holly Herndon; Professor Raphaël Millière, of the Institute for Ethics in AI, Oxford University; Dr Kathryn Eccles, of the Oxford Internet Institute; and the artist Refik Anadol. Anadol is the first recipient of the Lau Fellowship in Creativity and AI at the Schwarzman Centre. Photography by Right Click Save

“404_LAND”, the first exhibition in a partnership between HEK Basel and Tezos Foundation, to hold virtual opening on June 12, 2026

dmstfctn, The Models, 2025. The work is included in “404_LAND”, curated by Auronda Scalera and Alfredo Cramerotti that also features works by Gabriel Massan, Varvara & Mar, Hind Al Saad (with Martin Juras and Levi Hammett), Kat Zhang the Poet Engineer, and Alida Sun. Courtesy of the artists

Jonas Lund to hold artist talk with Charlotte Knaup at OFFICE IMPART, Berlin, on May 30, 2026

Installation view, Jonas Lund, “Performance Review” at OFFICE IMPART, 2026. Courtesy of OFFICE IMPART

Maja Petrić presents “Art, Tech & Nature: The Glitched Sublime” at SXSW London, on June 3, 2026

Maja Petrić, Arctic Poppies with Robotic System, 2026. Petrić’s presentation at SXSW London coincides with an exhibition of the artist’s work, “The Glitched Sublime”, at HOFA Gallery, London, June 3-11, 2026. Courtesy of the Artist

​Chapter 2 of “Automata Anima (Soul of the Machine)” opens at ArtVerse, Paris, on June 2, 2026. Sign up for ​Codes Morphos, a performance by Celine Shen

Céline Shen and Pepper the robot. Courtesy of ArtVerse, Paris

RETRO

The Trouble with Terminology | Paul Cohen on why artists are best placed to define the language of digital art

Harold Cohen, Untitled (i23-3547), 1971. Silkscreen on paper. Courtesy of Gazelli Art House & Harold Cohen Trust

Reading

Pascal Greco | Photography, Video Game, Landscape (IDPURE éditions & Chambre Noire, Switzerland, 2025)

Age of opportunism or radical futurism?

This week, the anonymous artist SHL0MS posted a cropped Claude Monet painting of Water Lilies, framing it as AI-generated and asking their followers to describe what made it inferior to the real thing. More than 600 responses poured in with confident takes citing a lack of impasto, unnatural reflections, and a loss of soul. SHL0MS then minted the image, which sold for just over $42,000.

For the writer and curator Anika Meier, SHL0MS’s Inferior Image sits squarely within the lineage of early internet art, whose proponents would playfully hijack systems in an era before NFTs commodified digital art. When Miltos Manetas initiated a new movement, Neen, at Gagosian Gallery in 2000—hiring young geniuses to play video games and do nothing else—he was staking a claim about what art could be, building something that might fail and, sure enough, ultimately fractured. The question SHL0MS’s work poses is whether provocations have now become products.

For T.J. Demos, the subject of our second interview of the week, truly radical practices are capable of giving sensory form to justice and imagining more livable futures. As ever, like the art world, Right Click Save remains a collision zone for different forms of cultural critique.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

Art After Justice | TJ Demos discusses the artists confronting catastrophe with Kalie Granier

The Otolith Group, (Still from) Infinity Minus Infinity, 2019. © The Otolith Group. Courtesy of the artists

Painter of Machines | Miltos Manetas discusses contemporary art’s changing attitude to technology with app sculptor Damjanski

Miltos Manetas, PERIPHERALS (Madonna and Child), 1997. Courtesy of the artist

Trending

Anika Meier on SHL0MS’s Inferior Image (2026)

SHL0MS’s Inferior Image is a radical gesture for our time because it exposes the AI zeitgeist using one of art history’s safest images. SHL0MS posted a Monet Water Lilies painting on X, declared it AI-generated, and asked people why it was inferior to a “real” Monet. Thousands responded. Painters, critics, and AI skeptics analyzed the work’s aesthetic qualities without realizing they were looking at an actual Monet. The image didn’t change, only the label.

What interests me is that the work sits within a longer history of internet art. Artists such as Vuk Ćosić of the early net.art movement used the internet as an artistic medium long before social media existed. They worked with provocations, interventions, pranks, and hoaxes, even declaring the death of net.art themselves. They stole websites, hijacked systems, and questioned institutions, technology, and power structures while configuring the internet as a space for artistic experimentation.

Three decades on, SHL0MS’s Inferior Image renews the provocative spirit of net.art for the age of AI. It no longer asks whether AI can produce convincing images but reveals how quickly context reshapes perception once something is labeled “AI”, with the audience becoming an unwitting part of the performance. 

— Anika Meier is a writer and curator specializing in digital art. Read her new interview with SHL0MS.

Happening

Trevor Paglen hosts performance-lecture, The Lizard People Are Here!, at launch of his new book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI, at Tate Modern 

Trevor Paglen’s performance-lecture, The Lizard People are Here!, followed an introduction by Annie Bicknell, Director Public Programmes at Tate. The event concluded with a conversation with journalist and filmmaker Manisha Ganguly. Photography by Right Click Save

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s online game, I DIDN’T REALISE YOU THOUGHT LIKE THAT, is now available for web and mobile courtesy of Serpentine, London

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, I DIDN’T REALISE YOU THOUGHT LIKE THAT (2026) is an online game and shareable tool for critical thinking, developed in partnership with non-profit organization Beyond Code Collective (Beyond Code), and supported by Glass Castle Foundation. Play online.

“Rectangle noir” group exhibition runs from May 28 to July 15, 2026, at Avant Galerie Vossen, Paris, in collaboration with Galerie Placido

Aram Bartholl, Dead Drops, 2010-ongoing. Courtesy of the artist

“Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age” is at Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, until August 30, 2026

“Phantasmagoria” includes work by artists including Jürgen Baumann, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, and Nina Davies. Courtesy of Henry Moore Foundation

Yoshi Sodeoka, Infinite Ascent (2025), presented by CHANEL Culture Fund, is on public view in London until July 2, 2026

Yoshi Sodeoka, Infinite Ascent (2025) is part of “The Window” public art initiative at the Time & Life Building, London. Courtesy of the artist, OFFICE IMPART, and CHANEL Culture Fund

LoVid, “Hotter than the Sun”, is at Picture Theory, New York, until May 30, 2026

LoVid, Spark Frame, 2026. Courtesy of the artists and Picture Theory

Watching

Urgent Futures | Kyle McDonald and host Jesse Damiani discuss how art, especially new media art, can intervene in a time of crisis

Out with the new, in with the old?

As if you hadn’t noticed, this is a coming-of-age moment for Web3. Just as major Art Basel galleries are joining the Zero 10 digital art initiative, with blue-chip houses like Hauser & Wirth, Esther Schipper, and Marian Goodman committing serious floor space to digital practices, NFC Summit is putting art first at its new factory site even as it seeks to sustain the event’s crypto-friendly culture.

For years, blue-chip galleries have avoided association with anything even NFT adjacent. That they are finally willing to accept the hybrid reality of contemporary art reflects both the instability of the traditional market and the concerted efforts of Art Basel, whose CEO Noah Horowitz regards digital art as a cornerstone of their future strategy. If the cancellation of this year’s planned edition of NFT Paris augured ill for the fragile Web3 ecosystem, Arab Bank Switzerland has helped to support the continuation of NFC Summit, sharing highlights from its collection along with its own resources.

Sadly for the emerging artists of Web3, the economic outlook remains bleak; and it is notable that none of the seven traditional galleries joining Zero 10 have yet embraced art on the blockchain. All of which leads one to ponder whether institutional validation is in fact closing doors for the new generation, entrenching a familiar walled garden.

This week: RGBMTL announces artist-curators for 2026; Es Devlin invites users to co-author an AI-collaborative “National Portrait”; Liam Young imagines planetary futures at the Barbican; Petra Cortright exhibits new digital paintings at Independent New York; ArtVerse, Paris invites the public to join Patrick Tresset’s Human Study #1; Nguyen Wahed, New York, hosts a group show for the 2026 graduates of the University of Pennsylvania’s MFA program; Gozo Yoshimasu wins the Serpentine x Flag Art Foundation Prize; applications for The Lumen Prize close on May 23, 2026; and we revisit our interview with Patrick Tresset.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

Established contemporary art galleries go digital as Trevor Paglen joins Eli Scheinman as co-curator of Zero 10 digital art initiative

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Broken Mirror, Ono, 2026. Courtesy of the artist, Antimodular Studio, bitforms, and Max Estrella

NFC Summit puts art first as new factory site serves as radical playground for the Lisbon-based digital culture festival

Exterior view of the Unicorn industrial complex, Lisbon. Courtesy of NFC Summit

Trending

NFC Summit offers a peek at their new Unicorn factory home

RGBMTL announces artist-curators for 2026

Opening

Es Devlin and Google Arts & Culture invite UK-based users to co-author a new “National Portrait” using AI model trained on the artist’s drawings

Es Devlin drawing in front of A National Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, London. © PQ Neiman, National Portrait Gallery. The work, which updates with each new submission, will scroll on screen at the gallery in randomized order until June 14, 2026

Liam Young “In Other Worlds” at Barbican, London, imagining planetary futures rooted in real technology and climate-based possibility, opens May 21, 2026

Liam Young, (Still from) After the End, 2024. Courtesy of the artist

Interval exhibits “gracePOINT”, new digital paintings on aluminum by Petra Cortright, is at Independent New York until May 17, 2026

Petra Cortright, NOBLECurve, 2025. Courtesy of the artist, Interval, and Independent. Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards, via instagram.com/interval.clerkenwell

​“Automata Anima (Soul of the Machine)”, an exhibition in two chapters, opens at ArtVerse, Paris, on May 21, 2026. Sign up to join Patrick Tresset’s Human Study #1

Patrick Tresset, Human Study #1, Cannes, 2026. Courtesy of ArtVerse Paris. Read more about the artist’s life and career in our recent interview and sign up to participate.

“Cross Talk” group show uniting graduates of the University of Pennsylvania’s 2026 MFA cohort runs to May 30, 2026, at Nguyen Wahed, New York

A show of “shared frequencies that never fully resolve”, “Cross Talk” brings together works by Ana González, Cacie Rosario Jackson, Sol Kim, Dylan Li, Jingyi Ling, Noa Mori Machover, and Shay Myerson, hosted by Do Tuong Linh. Image courtesy of Nguyen Wahed

Prizes

Gozo Yoshimasu wins first £200,000 Serpentine x The Flag Art Foundation Prize

Portrait of Gozo Yoshimasu (left) and the artist’s Voix I, 2019–21. Portrait photography by Masashi Asada. Painting © Gozo Yoshimasu. Courtesy of Take Ninagawa, Tokyo.

Applications for The Lumen Prize close on May 23, 2026

RETRO

Drawing with Robots | Patrick Tresset shares what he has learned about humans from a career spent creating, and performing, with machines

Installation view of “6 Robots Named Paul” with Patrick Tresset drawn by Human Study #1. Merge Festival, 2012. Curated by Illuminate Productions. Photography by Tommo. Courtesy of the artist

Breaking News

Established contemporary art galleries join the digital art conversation at Art Basel as Trevor Paglen co-curates Zero 10 initiative with Eli Scheinman

Agnieszka Kurant, Alien Internet (detail), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photography by Mathias Völzke

It’s big news for contemporary art. It’s big news for digital art. It’s a show of faith in a post-medium art world free from artificial separations.

Seven long-established Art Basel galleries, among them the international houses Hauser & Wirth and Marian Goodman, will be showing alongside leading exhibitors with dedicated digital art programs at the largest iteration of Zero 10 to date, Art Basel’s initiative dedicated to art of the digital era, to run at the art fair’s flagship event in Switzerland from June 16 to 21, 2026.

The artist Trevor Paglen joins the digital art strategist Eli Scheinman as co-curator for the Basel iteration of Zero 10, presenting displays by 20 exhibitors under the curatorial theme “The Condition”—a reference to a world saturated by digital imagery, computational systems, and artificial intelligence.

The seven established Art Basel galleries joining Zero 10 for the first time are Hauser & Wirth (showing the work of Avery Singer); Marian Goodman (Agnieszka Kurant); Andrew Kreps Gallery with Esther Schipper (Hito Steyerl); Max Estrella (Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, jointly with the digital art gallery bitforms); Almine Rech (Ryoji Ikeda); and Sprüth Magers (Andreas Gursky).

These mainstream international players are showing alongside bitforms and other leading digital art entities: ArtMeta; Upstream Gallery; Art Blocks (showing William Mapan); Asprey Studio (0xDEAFBEEF); eastcontemporary (Aziza Kadyri); Fellowship (John Gerrard); Gazelli Art House (Harold Cohen); Galerie Oniris jointly with Interface Gallery (Vera Molnar); OFFICE IMPART (Jan Robert Leegte); and Nguyen Wahed (Leander Herzog and Andreas Gysin).

The presence of Marian Goodman gallery at Zero 10 is a poignant reminder of the contribution that the gallery’s eponymous late founder made to the creation of today’s expanded art world with her support of the Belgian poet-turned-artist Marcel Broodthaers in a landmark 1977 exhibition in New York. The importance of that show was captured, by extension, in Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay “A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition” (1999), which identified the “post-medium age”, the era that has carried through to the hybrid practices celebrated at Zero 10, at the junction of the digital and the physical, and the human and the non-human.

Eli Scheinman (left) and Trevor Paglen. Photography by Caroline Tompkins, Courtesy of Art Basel

Asked what had convinced so many established Art Basel galleries to join Zero 10, Scheinman tells Right Click Save that Zero 10 has been set up from the beginning “to respond to the local considerations and each region in very different ways. Miami had its own texture that was maybe about spectacle. Hong Kong had a different feel and different type of nuance across the space. In Basel, very explicitly, there was an emphasis for us, because there is in the region, an institutional rigor and ameliorating [of] artificial delineations” between different art mediums. “That context, I think, was very attractive to some of those galleries”.

Scheinman says that Paglen’s role and that of Vincenzo de Bellis, Chief Artistic Officer and Global Director of Fairs at Art Basel, were “critical in building those bridges and working with those gallerists”. It was both a collective effort, he says, and a question of the region being “well suited for this blending of galleries”.

“We are particularly honored to inaugurate Zero 10 in Basel hand-in-hand with Trevor Paglen,” Noah Horowitz, CEO of Art Basel, said: “a pioneering artist trusted equally by the institutional art world and digital communities.”

— Louis Jebb, Managing Editor at Right Click Save

RETRO

Remembering the gallerist Marian Goodman, whose pioneering exhibitions gave life to the post-medium art world featured at Zero 10

Marian Goodman in the 1990s. Photography by Michael Goodman

Artists taking initiative in a moment of transition

If institutions are gradually absorbing digital art into their collections and exhibitions, artists aren’t waiting around for validation. Instead, they’re forcing the issue.

This spring, the collaborative duo Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon are co-curating “Strange Rules” at Palazzo Diedo during the Venice Biennale, exploring the concept of “Protocol Art” on one of the art world’s most prestigious stages. Just recently, Jack Butcher launched networked.art, a new foundation positioned explicitly as “by artists, for artists”. Meanwhile, Tyler Hobbs has orchestrated a new collaboration “Please Respond” involving a group of ten generative artists riffing on each other’s code in the manner of a Surrealist “exquisite corpse”. RGBMTL, the annual artists-curating-artists event in Montreal, is also returning for its fifth edition this summer, August 28-29.

At a moment of transition, when the worlds of digital and contemporary art are still engaged in fractious flirtation, these new ventures bespeak a trend of artists wresting control of the curation, distribution, and cultivation of critical discussion around their works. At Right Click Save, we will always support artists in setting the terms of the debate; because being artist-led doesn’t mean being amateur, it means putting the principal generators of cultural value first.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

PLEASE RESPOND | Generative art’s exquisite corpse sees ten artists evolving the same algorithm over ten consecutive days

“Please Respond” 1/10 by Tyler Hobbs. Courtesy of Tyler Hobbs Studio

The New Bad Image | Artists who understand what the algorithm wants and push until it breaks

Petra Cortright, Glasses & Teeth (Detail), 2026. Courtesy of the artist

Trending

“Strange Rules” opens at Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture, Venice, investigating how culture is produced, distributed, and perceived in the digital age

Tyler Hobbs launches “Please Respond” on Shape platform for on-chain generative art

Happening

Libby Heaney’s “Life in the Multiverse” opens “What is Life For?” season at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, on May 16, 2026

Libby Heaney with her work Ent- (2022). Photography by Andrea Rossetti via Sainsbury Centre

Kazuhiro Tanimoto, “Rain Blooms: Worlds Emerging from Computation”, opens at NEORT++, Tokyo, on May 15, 2026

Rain Blooms is a collaboration with the generative art platform Art Blocks Studio, where 128 pieces titled Rain Blooms will be released on May 22, 2026. Courtesy of Neort++

Tony Lyu joins the artist DeeKay for a Collector Conversation at Frieze House, Seoul, on May 9, 2026

Deekay, (Still from) Invisible Stories, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

Photo London introduces art film screening room for 11th edition, at Olympia, Kensington, May 13 to 17, 2026

Edward Burtynsky, Kambalda Tailings Pond #1, Kambalda Nickel Mine, WA, Australia, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Flowers Gallery

Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University makes open call for recommendations of texts for its Digital Art Resource Library

Installation view of “Hardwired: Foundational Works in Digital Art” at Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University, New York, until January 9, 2028. The museum’s Digital Art Resource Library is to be made available to visitors to the exhibition and beyond. Photography courtesy of Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University

Forthcoming

Serpentine, London, to hold solo exhibition of work by the artist and filmmaker Amar Kanwar, opening September 23, 2026

Amar Kanwar, (Still from) The Peacock's Graveyard, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

RETRO

Liquid Images | Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, and Tyler Hobbs discuss generative art and AI with Alex Estorick

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Infinite Images ∞ 1, 2021-22. Courtesy of Fellowship

In Italy, digital art is contemporary art

From the Venice Biennale to Palazzo Citterio in Milan to Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin — which opens a new venue on the Venetian island of San Giacomo next week — Italy is having a digital art moment.

The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale opens for previews on May 4 and to the public on May 9, with digital and interdisciplinary work woven throughout, most notably in the Vatican Pavilion, where FKA Twigs, Brian Eno, Dev Hynes, and more are presenting digital and audio pieces. Meanwhile, Palazzo Diedo will host “Strange Rules”, an exhibition curated by the artists Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon alongside Hans Ulrich Obrist and Adriana Rispoli, that will consider the concept of “Protocol Art“ — art that is designed to shape the rules of media and technology before they influence culture.

International foundations and museums are increasingly presenting digital practices not as novelty or experiment, but as means of coming to terms with the present moment. Venice has always been about identifying what matters in contemporary art. The fact that protocol-based work is being integrated across the Biennale suggests the mainstream art world is finally listening to what practitioners have known for years: that contemporary art, like life, depends on code, computation, and digital networks.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

What’s New at the Venice Biennale | From mystical gardens to rage bait and protocol art

Palazzo Diedo, Venice, home to Berggruen Arts & Culture, is staging “Strange Rules”, an exhibition of “protocol art” curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon and Hans Ulrich Obrist, during the Venice Biennale. Photography by Alessandra Chemollo

The Art of Computers | Apple’s 50th anniversary is a chance to reflect on the company’s impact on art and design

Dev Harlan, Untitled (The Dithering Series, Styrofoam Ethics Plus) (Detail), 2026. Courtesy of the artist

Trending

“Times have been hard” | fxhash eyes community model after scaling down its team

RETRO

The fx(hash) Conversation | Leading generative artists Ciphrd and Zancan discuss life on the platform

Happening

Please Respond, a collaborative artwork where ten generative artists share one algorithm, goes live on May 6, 2026

Tyler Hobbs initiated “Please Respond”, inviting nine other artists to pick up and then pass on a shared algorithm in the manner of the Surrealist “exquisite corpse”. Courtesy of Please Respond

“Auntiescapes” by niceaunties, a new body of work in the “Auntieverse”, opens at Load, Barcelona, on May 7, 2026

“Auntiescapes” explores the body as a living landscape. Courtesy of the artist and Load

“Keith Haring: More Light” opens on May 13, 2026, at Martos Gallery, New York

Delfina Foundation announces open call for artists based in the US and Canada whose practice centers on new media

The open call closes on May 11, 2026. Photography via instagram.com/delfinafdn

Maya Man’s performance-lecture “StarQuest” is at Roulette, Brooklyn, on May 6, 2026

Maya Man’s performance-lecture is linked to her show “StarQuest”, which closes at bitforms gallery, New York, on May 2, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and bitforms gallery

Awards

Voting for the 2026 Opline Prize, for artists working with AI, is open until May 31

Remembering

Georg Baselitz, who turned the rules of figurative art upside down, dies, aged 88

Georg Baselitz in Berlin, 1966. Photography by Elke Baselitz

Georg Baselitz, one of the most significant figurative artists of his generation, known for inverting his paintings, and upending his subjects, has died at the age of 88. His death was announced on April 30, 2026, by Thaddaeus Ropac, one of the galleries that represented him.

A leading figure in the German art world for over 60 years, Baselitz freighted his early work with the devastation wrought on Europe’s landscape and population by the Second World War. Speaking once of his early life, he stated: “I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society. And I did not want to restore order.”

He first inverted figures in his paintings, breaking the conventions of figurative art, in 1968; challenging the viewer to engage only with the formal qualities of his work. The hierarchy, where the sky is at the top and the ground below, he said in 1984, is one “that we absolutely do not have to believe in”.

His death was announced a week before the opening of an exhibition devoted to “Eroi d’Oro”, his series of monumental self-portraits and portraits of his wife Elke Kretzschmar, at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, in Venice. The exhibition, which opens on May 6, will run in conjunction with the 61st Venice Biennale.

Reading

100 Collectors release “Collecting Digital Art 101: Where to Start”

“Collecting Digital Art 101” is available as a free download

The year of new institutions

We are now one-third of the way through 2026 and already it is proving to be a year of new institutions in the expanding art world, where reimagined or newly established spaces are offering fresh frames through which to view the entanglement of art, design, science, and technology that has long been an editorial focus of Right Click Save.

The existence of new institutions such as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Arts and Humanities in Oxford—whose public culture program, rich in AI art, opens on April 25, 2026—offer new opportunities for cross-pollination between artists and academics. The hardware at the Schwarzman Centre, which incorporates an immersive audio set-up in its “Black Box” and a concave screen in its “White Box”, do full justice to the complexity and richness of Refik Anadol’s high fidelity aesthetics. It promises to be a space where speculative and emergent art practices fostered by other outstanding institutions such as Goldsmiths, Somerset House Studios, and the School of Digital Arts in Manchester, can meet the archival richness and humanities scholarship of Oxford University.

The long-term societal value of such physical and intellectual architecture lies in uniting artists, scholars, and critically engaged publics in shedding light on the global, indeed existential, issues of our times. This quest for critical insight remains the duty of universities as well as publications like Right Click Save to distill and disseminate.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

On Screens | Jefferson Hack and Susanna Davies-Crook survey 50 years of video art

Installation view of “Paradigm Shift” at 180 Studios with work: Tiger Strike Red (2022) by Sophia Al-Maria. Photography by Feiyang Xue, 180 Studios, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant

The collector Jehan Chu on the collective stewardship of blue-chip art

Beeple, HUMAN ONE (2021-present). Installation view of “BEEPLE: / INFINITE LOOP” at NODE, Palo Alto. Courtesy of the artist. Photography via x.com/kukulabanze

Trending

Ryan Zurrer announces co-ownership model of Beeple’s HUMAN ONE as survey of artist’s work opens at NODE Foundation

Opening

Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Arts and Humanities, Oxford University, features AI art in cultural program launching on April 25, 2026

The south entrance front of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Arts and Humanities, Oxford University. Designed by Hopkins Architects. The Great Hall and displays of digital art are open, free to all. Photography by Right Click Save

The Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Arts and Humanities, Oxford University, opens its public cultural program this week, after six months of establishing academic collaborations with nine university departments: English; History; Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics; Medieval and Modern Languages; Music; Philosophy; Theology and Religion; the Institute for Ethics in AI; and the Oxford Internet Institute.

The centre, the largest single building project ever undertaken by Oxford University—funded by the single largest gift ever given to the university, from the financier Stephen A. Schwarzman—is holding a free-to-all Open Day on April 25. The day features music, art, and pop-up performances across its multiple performance spaces and public areas, alongside the exhibition of new works by Anna Ridler and Refik Anadol.

The center’s openness to public access and exchange—in a university city where academic process has historically happened behind closed doors—is symbolic of a new kind of institutional porosity. At Right Click Save, we are looking forward to the raft of new cultural institutions opening in 2026 that are premised on the free flow of academic, creative, and physical access; of meeting people where they are.

Anna Ridler, A Perfect Language of Images (detail), (2026). Schwarzman Centre, Oxford University. Photography by Right Click Save

In January, NODE Foundation launched in Palo Alto, bringing digital art to Silicon Valley and with it technically and curatorially ambitious surveys of the work of Larva Labs and Beeple, central figures in the history of crypto art. In March, the New Museum, New York, reopened with a landmark exhibition of art made with technology, with double its previous exhibition space and permanent homes for the experimental and art-preservation practices of NEW INC and Rhizome. On April 19, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a long-standing champion of experiments in art and technology and of the conservation of digital art, opened its new Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries. This week Refik Anadol Studios announced an opening date for the new DATALAND museum of AI arts in downtown LA.

There is more to come with Canyon, a new home for time-based art and its preservation, with evening opening to match the lifestyle of Manhattan’s Lower East Side; a new UBS Digital Art Museum in Hamburg; and the $1bn Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, now scheduled to open in September 2026.

Both Ridler and Anadol, the first Schwarzman Centre Lau Fellow in Creativity and AI, worked with Oxford academics, and university libraries, in making their new works for the center. Ridler’s A Perfect Language of Images (2026), created in collaboration with Dr William Poole from the Faculty of English at Oxford University, is on show in the Great Hall of the Schwarzman Centre. It represents a three-part tribute to “An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language” (1668), an attempt by the Oxford scholar John Wilkins to classify all knowledge through a system of symbols.

For his new work, Archive Dreaming Large Nature Model — Oxford (2026), Anadol developed his Large Nature Model by working with Professor Stephen Harris from the Department of Biology on Herbarium data, as well as the Institute for Ethics in AI, to explore the ethical implications of generative systems. He is also in discussion with scholars from the Faculty of English around future literary datasets and ethical frameworks.

— Louis Jebb, Managing Editor, Right Click Save

DATALAND, Refik Anadol Studio’s museum of AI art in downtown Los Angeles, to open on June 20, 2026

Installation view of Machine Dreams: Rainforest at DATALAND, Los Angeles, which opens on June 20, 2026. © 2026 Refik Anadol Studio on behalf of DATALAND. Photography courtesy Refik Anadol Studio

Happening

Le Good Society launches global outdoor art exhibition on digital billboards to “Make Earth Day Every Day”

The “Make Earth Day Every Day” campaign running on the LG screen at Piccadilly Circus, central London, on Earth Day, April 22. The campaign, featuring work by artists including David Shrigley, Lora Zombie, Hayden Clay and Viola Hortova, runs in New York’s Times Square, until May 5, and across the Netherlands, until May 8. Photography via x.com/legoodsociety

Office Impart show Ana María Caballero and Lena Marie Emrich at Art Brussels until April 26, 2026

The Office Impart stand at Art Brussels, showing work by Ana María Caballero and Lena Marie Emrich: two practices, the gallery says in a statement, “in which language shifts into object, surface, voice, and space”. Photography courtesy of Office Impart

Mario Klingemann, “Conflict of Interest”, curated by Anika Meier, opens at SLEEK Art Space, Berlin, on April 27, 2026

Mario Klingemann, Weapons of Mass Disctraction 10, 2026. The artist will be in conversation with the curator Anika Meier at SLEEK Art Space, Berlin, at 10.30am on May 2, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and SLEEK

n-Space hosts “States of Exception” open day of experiment in art and technology, Somerset House Studios, London, on May 2, 2026

Somerset House, London, where the “States of Exception” open day on May 2, 2026, will feature contributions from the artists Damien Roach and Sarah Friend, the designer Ruby Justice Thelot, and the pioneer of post-disciplinary collective knowledge practices Wassim Z. Alsindi. Photography by Right Click Save

RETRO

N. Katherine Hayles and Jesse Damiani on rethinking cognition for the posthuman age

Damien Roach, Zoning (iv), 2024. Courtesy of the artist

The new identity of the artist

The idea of the artist as a public figure is nothing new, but their accessibility remains a refreshing hallmark of the digital art ecosystem.

Scroll through X or Instagram and you’ll find digital artists documenting their studio practices, debating terminology, sharing works in progress, and engaging directly with collectors as well as their artist peers. Walk through Zero 10 at Art Basel in Miami or Hong Kong and you’ll likely encounter artists such as Maya Man, Jack Butcher, Mario Klingemann, or Emi Kusano talking about their work, meeting audiences face to face.

This stands in stark contrast to the mainstream art world, where artists remain largely walled off from their publics, mediated instead through carefully worded gallery statements and the occasional profile. The digital art ecosystem has produced a different kind of hybrid subject: performative, participatory, and perpetually online. In our new interview with Maya Man, she addresses this phenomenon head-on, describing the internet as “a massive network stage” where posting is performance. She’s building a practice while documenting it publicly in ways that would have been unimaginable a generation ago—interrogating authenticity online while sharing the same stage.

The question isn’t whether artists should be so visible, but what this new kind of artistic license makes possible, and what it demands.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

The Interview | Maya Man on the role of language and randomness in building her “StarQuest” universe

Maya Man, StarQuest (Performance-Lecture) (2026) co-presented by bitforms gallery, SOOT gallery, and the Future Humans program at the Berggruen Institute at L.A. Dance Project. Photography by Yuchi Ma

Jordan Lyall on how Art Blocks “became a start-up again” to embrace AI Agents

The Crowley Theater, Marfa, Texas. The Art Blocks community gathers for its annual Marfa Weekend. Photography by Joana Kawahara Lino

Trending

Collectors look to retrieve NFTs after Foundation’s front end is shut down and handed back to co-founders

Opening

Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new $720m, Peter Zumthor-designed, David Geffen Galleries open on April 19, 2026

The new David Geffen Galleries building curves over Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. Courtesy of LACMA. Photography © Iwan Baan

Alexander Calder, Three Quintains (Hello Girls) (1964), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art Museum Council Fund, © Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photography © Fredrik Nielsen Studio

Carrie Mae Weems and Lawrence Lek among artists showing new work at opening of V&A East Museum, London, on April 18, 2026

Still from Carrie Mae Weems’s V&A East New Work commission, The Long Goodbye, in the V&A East’s Why We Make galleries. Photography © David Parry for the V&A

Lawrence Lek with Guanyin II: The Caretaker, his V&A East New Work commission on show at V&A East Storehouse. Photography © David Parry for the V&A

Happening

“BEEPLE: / INFINITE_LOOP”, a mid-career survey of the artist’s work, opens at NODE, Palo Alto, on April 18, 2026

“Beeple is the godfather of this movement. We are proud to bring his creativity to Silicon Valley,” Micky Malka and Becky Kleiner, founders of NODE, said in a press statement. Courtesy of NODE

Gagosian presents Nam June Paik, “Rewind / Repeat”, at APMA Cabinet, Seoul until May 16, 2026

Nam June Paik in Miami Beach, Miami, 1990. Artwork © Nam June Paik Estate. Photography © 1990 Brian Smith. Courtesy Gagosian

Phenomena bridges traditions with new project “Classical Revival” on Art Blocks

The “Classical Revival” release is made up of 100 unique artworks on Art Blocks. Courtesy of the artist and Art Blocks

Catalyst LA and Epoch Gallery present “Between These Black Waters”: Connie Bakshi and Nora N. Khan in conversation at El Cid, Los Angeles on April 21, 2026

The conversation “Between These Black Waters” is hosted by Catalyst LA and Epoch Gallery. Via instagram.com/epoch.gallery

Loving

Maya Man on the lessons that a digital artist learns from presenting at physical shows and art fairs

Installation view of Maya Man, “StarPower” at bitforms gallery, New York. Courtesy of the artist and bitforms gallery. Photography by Max C Lee

When Maya Man spoke to Right Click Save about her solo show “StarPower” at bitforms, New York, she addressed the difference it has made for her as a digital artist, in the past year, to be able to present her work in a gallery setting, in performance-lectures in New York and Los Angeles, and at the Zero 10 section of Art Basel Miami Beach. This passage was edited for length in the published interview.

It’s been really special to have these moments of presentation. Both have been at venues where they are in person and I am able to install the work in a very bespoke way that it would be impossible for someone to view looking at their computer.

It has marked a moment in my practice where I realize the value of presenting work in person. I’m an artist whose practice people understand to be very digital, that often runs natively on the internet. The primary medium is software. But it has helped me understand the direction I want to move toward, which is continued physical presentation of large-scale digital works, where I’m able to exercise this process of worldbuilding that I’ve used for “StarQuest“ or to approach it as an experiment in making an ecosystem of works that are all within the same conceptual framing. I’ve found that to be really productive.

I’d like to continue to use that methodology in the future because it’s been really exciting for me to have work span shows and mediums, and most importantly physical spaces. Within this body of work, I’ve also performed “StarQuest“ in New York and in LA. That has also been a lesson in translating my work into a new medium..

But for me, it’s also very much about understanding how to work with an audience’s attention span and how to understand that there are varying levels of attention or just varying time spans that people will spend with your work when it’s a performance, versus a physical show in a gallery versus a website online. Over the years, I’ve gained a better understanding of how to work with all of that to make the best work for each context.

— Maya Man is an artist focused on contemporary identity culture on the internet. Her work examines dominant narratives around femininity, authenticity, and the performance of self. Her exhibition “StarPower” is at bitforms gallery, New York, until May 2, 2026. Her performance-lecture “StarQuest”, followed by a conversation with Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, will be co-presented by Harvestworks and Roulette in Brooklyn, New York, on May 6, 2026.

Introducing ART & TECH, a new quarterly digest from Right Click Save

Our new downloadable publication is your space for slow reading in the attention economy

Born of frustration at the absurd pace of the attention economy, which seems to have precipitated a new age of illegibility, we decided it was time for a new quarterly digest that could be our space for slow reading in the expanding art world. ART & TECH is the result of the efforts of our new Managing Editor, Louis Jebb, formerly of The Art Newspaper, at bridging our online magazine with the experience of a physical print publication. 

The first edition—available now as a downloadable pdf—is dedicated to art’s new hybrid ecology, a fertile zone where artists are increasingly adopting interdisciplinary practices while everyone comes to terms with new ways of doing business across physical and digital domains.

Juliana Vezzetti introduces ART & TECH for Q2 2026 with an interview she conducted back in January with Jebb and Alex Estorick, Founding Editor of Right Click Save. Estorick reiterates one of the magazine’s long-held missions: “How can we foster a fairer and more inclusive cultural economy that reflects the digital condition rather than the analog ways of the past?”

In “The Trouble with Terminology”, the distinguished computer scientist and son of the artist Harold Cohen, Paul Cohen, appraises the language of digital art in one of a series of articles for Right Click Save. Meanwhile, Hans Ulrich Obrist reflects on his 20-year conversation with the celebrated painter David Hockney, which has shaped the artist’s new exhibition at Serpentine, centered on his iPad drawings for the frieze A Year in Normandie. What emerges most vividly from the conversation is Hockney’s long-standing use of new technologies to explore light and layering to painterly effect.

For the interdisciplinary artist Carla Gannis, interviewed by Eva Yisu Ren, technology has long been a lens that can refract, distort, or intensify elation and despair, love and anger, shame and redemption. “I’m less interested in what technology promises,” Gannis says, “than in what it reveals, amplifies, or obscures.” At a time when images have become fuel for deep learning, Danielle Ezzo argues in her latest essay that “photography hasn’t died. If anything, it’s multiplied. More images now move through the world under photographic conventions than ever before, whether or not a camera, in the traditional sense, was involved in their creation.” 

In the month that Apple celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding, the design of the ART & TECH cover pays technostalgic homage to the dialog windows of the Macintosh and PC desktop computers of the early internet age. It is also inspired by Jan Robert Leegte’s beguilingly skeuomorphic Window series of 2022, which Right Click Save featured in a 2023 article “Who Owns the News in Web3?”

The first edition of our new quarterly ends where it all began with an interview with a true crypto native collector: Ryan Zurrer. Having supported the recent acquisition by MoMA of Larva Labs’ iconic project CryptoPunks, the venture capitalist and owner of 1OF1 has done more than most to bring about the mass adoption of digital art. At a moment when the tectonics of the art world are shifting unquestionably in a digital direction, the time is right to slow down and reflect on how a group of outsiders changed the narrative.

‍Download your copy of ART & TECH. 

Features

Altered Image | Trailblazing artist Nancy Burson on her Quantum Entanglement Paintings

Nancy Burson, Quantum Entanglement Painting G (With Color) (detail), 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Heft Gallery

In Between the Art Worlds | Welcome to the first edition of ART & TECH, a space for reflection on art at the intersection

The computer scientist Paul Cohen’s essay “The Trouble with Terminology” is one of six articles in ART & TECH, a digest of recent content from Right Click Save, now available as a downloadable PDF

Trending

The Tezos community event #OBJKT4OBJKT runs until April 12, 2026

“Exist in Silence” by Agoria and Wen New Atelier, curated by Marlene Corbun, goes live on objkt one 

Happening

Ambie Drew, “Soft Bodies, Cold Machines”, is at arebyte, London, April 17 to August 2, 2026

“Soft Bodies, Cold Machines”, a solo exhibition by the British artist Ambie Drew, is part of arebyte’s Hotel Generation Programme. Courtesy of arebyte

Harm van den Dorpel, “Senescenence”, with Interface Gallery, is at Nguyen Wahed, New York, until May 2, 2026

“Senescenence”. brings together a body of generative animations, built upon a cellular automaton, and a series of plotter drawings. Courtesy of Nguyen Wahed

aurèce vettier, “du savoir-rêve”, curated by Dominique Moulon, is at ArtVerse, Paris, until May 13

aurèce vettier, “du savoir-rêve”, brings together an ensemble of previously unseen works. Photography courtesy of ArtVerse

Solienne, “Rented Gaze”, is at Espace Thorigny, Paris, April 17–19, 2026

For “Rented Gaze”, the semi-autonomous artist Solienne trained its neural network on portraits of ten humans, taken across ten countries, before generating its own. Photography via x.com/solienne_ai

Solo exhibitions of Diego Marcon, Xin Liu, June Crespo, and Lenz Geerk open at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, on April 15, 2026

The opening of four exhibitions on April 15, 2026 at Fondazeione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, will feature a panel discussion involving Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guido Saracco, Massimiliano Gioni, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Xin Liu and Diego Marcon

Loving

Louis Jebb on the choice of Kengo Kuma and Associates as architects of the new £350m wing at National Gallery, London

Kengo Kuma (left) and a rendering of his competition design for the entrance to the new wing for the National Gallery, London. Portrait photography by JC Carbonne. Rendering courtesy of Kin Associates

I am loving the fact that the National Gallery, London, has chosen Kengo Kuma Associates as architects of a £350m wing to be constructed adjacent to the existing main 19th-century gallery building, and the 1991 Sainsbury Wing. The new wing, which will provide temporary exhibition space as well as additional galleries for the main collection, will be achieved by building bridged links at upper levels over existing roads and pedestrian walkways.

The Tokyo-based Kuma said in a statement that the National Gallery‘s collection is “a treasure of humanity, and to be entrusted with the expansion that will hold these masterpieces is a responsibility we carry with the greatest care and humility.” He has already proved his museum chops with projects including the Besançon Art Center in France (2014) and the great ship-like V&A Dundee (2018) Kuma will work with two British-based design practices on the project: MICA, and Building Design Partnership (BDP).

The new building will house the National Gallery’s new ventures in collecting and displaying art of the 20th century—the collection has previously been limited to art made before 1900—one that holds the possibility, if not the guarantee, of the exhibition of digital art. To that end, it feels felicitous that Kuma’s work is characterized by the massing of small, particle-like elements, which carry overtones of both pixel art and flow-like generative art such as Fidenza by Tyler Hobbs.

Kuma, whose work is the subject of a new documentary, Particle Dance (2026), is an architect whose work feels well suited to the hybrid age of art.

— Louis Jebb is Managing Editor at Right Click Save.

The Troublesome Language of Digital Art

This week, we published a three-article series by distinguished computer scientist and son of the artist Harold Cohen, Paul Cohen, that questions the language applied to art made with computational systems. Together, these essays constitute a rigorous but accessible interrogation of such familiar “skunks” as aesthetic, autonomy, collaboration, and creativity.

In “The Trouble with Terminology”, Cohen asserts that artists are the most qualified people to define the language of digital art because they are the closest to what programs actually do. As a magazine that has always sought to use to the language of artists—rather than a class of intervening tastemakers—to evaluate art, this approach cuts to the core of Right Click Save’s mission.

Where today’s deep learning algorithms have often been criticized for precipitating an age of AI slop, Cohen’s essays on creativity and his father’s Freehand Line Algorithm highlight the vital importance of “dialog between program and programmer”, and between human and machine, to the future of digital art. They also prove that, in an age of large language models, words matter more than ever.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

The Trouble with Terminology | Why artists are best placed to define the language of digital art

Harold Cohen, Untitled, 1982. Coloured Dye over ink on paper. Courtesy of Gazelli Art House & Harold Cohen Trust

The Hand of AARON | Paul Cohen on feedback and randomness in early AI art

Harold Cohen, Untitled (i23-3543), 1971. Silkscreen print on paper with plotter drawing. Courtesy of Gazelli Art House & Harold Cohen Trust

On Creativity in Digital Art | Why Harold Cohen was right to focus on criteria rather than code

Harold Cohen, Machine Painting Series TCM #21 (detail), 1995. Dyes applied by Cohen’s Painting Machine to paper. Courtesy of Gazelli Art House & Harold Cohen Trust

Trending

Museum Ghost calls for more thoughtful discussion around an artist’s decision to leave the NFT space

In a recent post, “Sentiment Is the Last Liquid Market | On rage quitting, guilt collecting, and what $138 million lows do to a community’s critical faculties”, Museum Ghost (Joana Kawahara Lino) offered a thoughtful corrective to recent social media discourse. Her subject was the community’s failure to take the time to offer an art-critical framing of the decision by an artist, Lamia Eda, to announce that she was leaving the NFT space.

A collector had bought one of Eda’s works as a form of amends for the copy-meme heat that Eda’s exit post had received on X. This, Museum Ghost wrote, without criticizing the collector’s intentions, “makes [Lamia Eda] the recipient of a settlement rather than the subject of genuine critical attention. That is a subtler diminishment than the meme that preceded it”. Museum Ghost’s intention, she noted in a subsequent exchange on X, was not to analyze any individual’s behavior, but to show an interest in “what structures make certain behaviors the path of least resistance”.

Opening

SuperRare × objkt Digital Art Festival is at Offline Gallery, New York, April 16-29, 2026

The festival opens with Sasha Stiles, A Living Poem, at Offline Gallery, on April 16, 2026

The digital art marketplaces SuperRare and objkt have joined forces to host a Digital Art Festival at Offline Gallery in New York. The festival opens on April 16 with Sasha Stiles presenting a curated selection from A Living Poem, shown recently on the Digital Wall at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), followed by a solo show from Osinachi and a group exhibition spotlighting the emerging digital artists Yudho, Sares, Robinson St. George, Perfectl00p, Tiggarton, Macbeth, Neurocolor, Iness Rychlik, and Vestica.

Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University launches two digital art shows in April 2026

Nam June Paik, Robot, 1991. Courtesy of the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University. Gift of the Castellani Family

The Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University, New York State, is presenting two new digital art exhibitions in April 2026. Both ”Ctrl+Alt+Dream: Surrealism Then and Now” (April 7 to July 26, 2026) and ”Hardwired: Foundational Works in Digital Art” (April 22, 2026 to January 9, 2028) draw on the museum’s permanent collection of landmark works of digital and Minimalist art.

Chris Dorland, “Latent Stack”, is at Lyles & King, New York, April 10 to May 9, 2026

Chris Dorland, Untitled (encode), 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Lyle & Kings

Loucas Braconnier (Figure31) launches “throw0fDice”, an on-chain live animated collection on the Tezos EVM, curated by Grida

A territory map of “throw0fDice” showing the permutations of each throw (dots) within the full 435 million possible dice arrangements space. Courtesy of the artist and Grida

RETRO

The Generations of Generative Art | New histories of human-machine interaction at Gazelli Art House

Installation view of “GEN/GEN: Generative Generations” (2023) at Gazelli Art House, with works by Monica Rizzoli and Sougwen Chung. Photography by Deniz Guzel. Courtesy of Gazelli Art House

Reading

Louis Jebb on All Impossible Deeds: A Report on the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, 2014–2025

All Impossible Deeds: A Report on the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, 2014–2025 (2026) is edited by Joel Ferree

Genealogists of digital art can look forward to an instructive double-layer cake of art made with technology in All Impossible Deeds: A Report on the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, 2014–2025 (2026), edited by Joel Ferree and published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The title section of the book outlines work done under the Lab’s supervision, overseen by Amy Heibel, LACMA’s associate vice president of web and digital media and the Lab’s founding director, and Ferree, program director of LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab. Artists have been invited to apply for grants through an open call in a program that has been backed by big tech companies, including most recently the Hyundai Motor Company.

The many technical and conceptual highlights covered in 11 years of the present program include the projects that have led to breakthrough work on Nonny de la Peña and Alex Rivera’s experimental VR project Reaching the Shore (2016), Lawrence Lek’s Death Drive (2021-present day), Nancy Baker Cahill’s project with mycelial networks, Substrate (2022–25), and Lauren Lee McCarthy’s meditation on autonomous vehicles, Auto (2025). Ferree has commissioned a series of artists’ reflections on past projects that are of particular value and, in the case of Lek’s contribution, of a wonderfully disarming humor.

And then, for the technostalgists, there is the section on the museum’s original exercise in art and tech—and the inspiration for the present Lab — which was famously captured in A Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967–1971 (1971). That book, which inspired the new publication, and is analyzed and extracted to great effect in the new volume, has come to be regarded as a collector’s item and a classic of graphic design.

The 1971 reports are just that: granular, elegantly written, businesslike narratives on how the LACMA team of the 1960s engaged Californian corporations in order to work with a stellar line-up of invited artists to dream big dreams of art and technology. In 1969, Andy Warhol was engaged on 3D holographs then 3D printing. The James Turrell and Robert Irwin collaboration makes for a fascinating historical case study. While one of the most ambitious projects of all was Victor Vasarely’s unrealized proposal from 1971 for a machine of lights arranged in a grid that would generate millions of visual patterns related to his paintings; a concept that the IBM corporation deemed prohibitively expensive.

However, in a felicitous outcome that brings the two genealogical layers of art and tech elegantly together, the Vasarely project was eventually evolved as a concept and manifested in a digital space for LACMA by the artist Casey Reas in the form of the engaging interactive web piece METAVASARELY (2023), with a randomizing button (the letter R) and another that allows the online user to download their live outputs.

— Louis Jebb is Managing Editor at Right Click Save.

Digital art’s world tour continues

After its debut at Art Basel Miami Beach last December, Zero 10—Art Basel’s dedicated sector for art of the digital age—makes its Asia premiere at Art Basel Hong Kong this week.

Curated by Eli Scheinman, this second iteration brings together 14 exhibitors showing a diverse range of artists: AOTM (showing DeeKay); Art Blocks (Harvey Rayner); Asprey Studio (All Seeing Seneca, Qu Leilei, Tim Yip); bitforms (Quayola, Daniel Canogar); BottoDAO (Botto); Fellowship & ARTXCODE (Sougwen Chung); √K Contemporary (Emi Kusano); Nguyen Wahed (Kim Asendorf); Office Impart (Jonas Lund); Onkaos (Robert Alice); Plan X (Claire Silver, ThankyouX); Silk Art House (Jack Butcher); SOLOS (Laurie Simmons, Petra Cortright); and TAEX (Kevin Abosch).

The latest edition of Zero 10 spotlights a broad mix of AI- and blockchain-based practices, including the public debut of the decentralized autonomous artist Botto, one of a number of presentations that highlights the success of interactive works in Miami.

Beyond the booths, Art Basel’s Conversations program features a number of compelling panels, including “Who builds the canon? Infrastructure, authorship, and digital culture”, which features Right Click Save’s own Director and Publisher, Tony Lyu, alongside Kusano, Scheinman, and Sunny Cheung, Curator of Design and Architecture at M+. The conversation promises to be a welcome temperature check at a time when the tectonics of the art world are rapidly shifting.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

Zero 10 returns at Art Basel Hong Kong with artists and galleries embracing interactivity

Sougwen Chung presents RECURSION 0 (2026) on the Fellowship / ARTXCODE stand, Zero 10, Art Basel Hong Kong. Photography via x.com/halecar2

On Collecting | Ryan Zurrer, owner of 1OF1, and supporter of institutional acquisitions of digital art

CryptoPunk # 6965, acquired by Ryan Zurrer in 2025. The work is dubbed “Jungle Punk” by the collector, who uses it as his online picture profile. Courtesy of Ryan Zurrer

“Contemporary Perception is Hybrid” | Troika on the ancient origins of AI and their new show with Trevor Paglen

Installation view of “Chapter VIII: Hallucinations” at LagoAlgo, Mexico City, 2026, with work: Ultrared, Evergreen, Ocean Blue (2024) by Troika. Courtesy of the artist

Trending

Art Basel Conversations | “Who builds the canon? Infrastructure, authorship, and digital culture”, on March 28, 2026

Happening

Art Dubai rescheduled to May 14-17, 2026, with an adapted, more flexible, format

“The Scale of Civilization”, an exhibition of 40 recent digital artworks by Rui Huang, is at X Museum, Beijing, until May 5, 2026

X Museum is partnering with Stellaxis and Langyuan Station to present“The Scale of Civilization”. Image via instagram.com/xmuseum_official

“Run the Code” presents digital art from Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation at Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, until August 2, 2026

Marina Zurkow’s generative custom software animation Mesocosm (Wink, TX), 2012. Collection of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation. © Marina Zurkow

Forthcoming

Art Blocks invites artist submissions for Marfa Weekend, October 22-25, 2026

Artists have until June 12, 2026, to submit work for Art Blocks’ annual celebration of generative art, community, and creativity in Marfa, Texas

HEK and Tezos Foundation appoint Auronda Scalera and Alfredo Cramerotti as curators for inaugural virtual exhibition, opening June 12, 2026

Auronda Scalera and Alfredo Cramerotti’s virtual exhibition, on the concept “Earth_404”, addressing the error as metaphor and philosophical framework, will premiere on the virtual.hek.ch platform, with the accompanying release of Tezos-based NFTs on the objkt.com marketplace

Awards

Trevor Paglen, multidisciplinary artist with a special focus on mass surveillance, wins $100,000 LG Guggenheim Award

Trevor Paglen. Photography via instagram.com/trevorpaglen

RETRO

The founder of MUD Gallery on how generative art is igniting the Shanghai art scene

Installation view of MUD Gallery, Shanghai with works by Niceaunties, Raven Kwok, and Shi Zheng. Courtesy of MUD Gallery

Loving

Ryan Zurrer on building deep connections with the artists whose work he collects

Ryan Zurrer, owner of the 1OF1 collection. Courtesy of Ryan Zurrer

In this extract from his interview with Right Click Save, Ryan Zurrer, the venture capitalist, and owner of the 1OF1 collection, speaks about his approach to collecting.

I try to build a relationship with the artist and figure out something I can do to be helpful. Often that is working with major global cultural institutions to exhibit their work or helping them thoughtfully sprinkle cryptoeconomics and game-theoretical dynamics into their work. I’ll dive deep into their practice to understand their technical craft and their vision for how their practice will evolve.

Then I will take a “portfolio position” by either acquiring a set of significant works, like with Refik [Anadol], where 1OF1 owns 27 works. Or I will collect the “magnum opus” that is a career-defining masterpiece such as Beeple’s HUMAN ONE (2021) or Sam Spratt’s Monument Game (2024).

Primarily, I try to collect directly from artists after spending time getting to know them at their studios. Building relationships is the most rewarding part of collecting for me and I really don’t understand collectors that collect dead artists. It really is the friends and mentors that you make along the way that are the gift you get for embarking on the collecting journey.

— Ryan Zurrer is the founder of Dialectic, an agentic risk-controlled crypto yielding machine based in Switzerland. He was a very early investor in some of the best-performing venture investments of the last decade, particularly in the crypto ecosystem and led Polychain Capital’s private investments. He is the owner of an important digital art collection, 1OF1, including Beeple’s HUMAN ONE and works by Refik Anadol, and sits on the boards of trustees of MoMA and The Hip Hop Museum. His philanthropy focuses on helping a new generation of artists take their rightful place in art canon alongside his mission-driven work in mental health through his firm Vine Ventures. Previously, Ryan was CEO of a large Brazilian renewable energy firm.

Images in an age of anxiety

We’re living in an age of anxiety, drowning in images, starving for truth.

This week, we published two articles that considered the impact of new technologies on image culture. First, Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Artistic Director of Serpentine Galleries, discussed a new display of David Hockney’s A Year in Normandie, a 70-metre-long frieze printed on paper and assembled from some 100 iPad drawings made by the artist en plein air during the Covid-19 lockdown. Then, the interdisciplinary artist and writer, Danielle Ezzo, traced a brief but eloquent history of “post-photography”, a term that has recently been applied to works produced with generative AI.

According to Ezzo, “…if the photograph could never guarantee objective reality, accruing meaning through layered systems of mediation, inference, and interpretation, then truth today only exists as a mesh of implied meanings, by virtue of its being embedded in training data and entrenched in the image-generation process long before it reaches the viewer.”

If images have always had an elastic relationship to the truth, then Hockney’s digital paintings revel in the poetry of implied meaning. Rather than forcing viewers to choose between trust and suspicion, they invite us to hold both at once.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

Hans Ulrich Obrist discusses David Hockney’s first exhibition at London’s Serpentine Galleries

Exterior installation view of “David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting” at Serpentine North, 2026. © David Hockney. Photography by Right Click Save

In a post-truth era, nothing captures cultural anxiety like post-photography, argues Danielle Ezzo

Lucas Blalock, a physical feeling / melon fingers, 2014. Archival inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist

Happening

Art Basel Hong Kong to host conversation on canon-building on March 28 as part of Zero 10 digital section

If last December’s inaugural edition of Zero 10 at Art Basel Miami Beach ignited interest from traditional fairgoers in natively digital art, Art Basel Hong Kong (March 25-29) brings the conversation to a part of the world where digital and AI infrastructure are already ubiquitous.

A number of the new wave of galleries and platforms that participated in Miami are set to return next week, with Fellowship and ARTXCODE presenting new work by Sougwen Chung, Onkaos exhibiting Robert Alice, and Nguyen Wahed showing Kim Asendorf, while the Berlin-based Office Impart is making its Zero 10 bow with a display of works by Jonas Lund. According to the digital section’s curator, Eli Scheinman, “One thing we’re trying to do with Zero 10 is give these hybrid galleries and exhibitors a home. […] This is not to denigrate the important brick-and-mortar physical spaces that many Zero 10 gallerists also have, but to ask what it is to be an exhibitor today in an increasingly digital world.”

If one of the priorities of Right Click Save is to establish a common language for critical voices from both the contemporary and digital art worlds, Zero 10’s conversation series represents a necessary seasonal meeting. On March 28, the magazine’s Director and Publisher, Tony Lyu, will join the artist Emi Kusano and curator Sunny Cheung in a discussion about “Who builds the canon?…”, moderated by Scheinman. With the tectonics of the art world rapidly shifting, their conversation promises to be a welcome temperature check.

Arab Bank Switzerland announces open call for Digital Art Prize 2026 on the theme of “systems”

For its Digital Art Prize 2026, Arab Bank Switzerland is inviting artists worldwide to submit works that engage with the theme of “systems”. The deadline for applications is May 3, 2026.

Los Angeles Country Museum of Art invites 2026 grant applications for Art + Technology Lab, encouraging artists to test the edges of art and technology

LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab is presented by Hyundai and made possible by Snap Inc., and Anthropic. Image: Rashaad Newsome, Being, 2019-ongoing. Courtesy Rashaad Newsome Studio

Iskra Velitchkova, “I See Generative, Chapter 0: Wind” at Fellowship to April 5, 2026

Read RCS editor Alex Estorick on Iskra’s new series here. Image: Iskra Velitchkova, ISG 01 | Bird / Scarf, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

Artist Hiroyuki Hori launches Shiiba Kagura NFT Project, reimagining historic folk rite as digital art in earthquake affected zone of Japan

Shiiba Village is situated in one of Japan’s most remote regions

Opening

“Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body” is on view at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, March 14 to January 3, 2027

Barbara Hammer, Sanctus, 1990. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)

The Museum of Art + Light, Manhattan, Kansas, opens “EMULATION: Selections from the Art Blocks 500” until August 16, 2026

“EMULATION: Selections from the Art Blocks 500” features works by Sterling Crispin, Licia He, Loie Hollowell, Carolina Melis, Kelly Milligan, MountVitruvius, Grant Oesterling, Harvey Rayner, Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez, and Iskra Velitchkova. Image courtesy of Art Blocks

Nancy Burson, “Composite Portraits”, opens at Heft, New York, on March 21, 2026

Nancy Burson, “Composite Portraits”, is at Heft, New York, March 21 - April 11, 2026. Read about the artist’s place in the history of “post-photography” here. Image: Nancy Burson, Aged Barbie, 1994. Courtesy of the artist

Takayoshi Ohara, “Screen Flesh” is on view at NEORT++, Tokyo, to March 29, 2026

Takayoshi Ohara’s show considers how digital images are transformed into events that exceed the framework of subject and object, incorporating bodily presence and movement. Image: Installation view of “Takayoshi Ohara: Screen Flesh” at NEORT++, Tokyo, 2026, with work: Suspensions (2026). Photography by NEORT. Courtesy of the artist

RETRO

How AI Alters Art History | The artist Ganbrood discusses his encounter with Steve McCurry, whose work he reinterpreted with generative AI, at Paris Photo

Installation view of Heft Gallery at Paris Photo 2025 with work (right): Ganbrood, The Second Gaze (2025). Courtesy of Heft Gallery

Reading

Alex Estorick on T. J. Demos’s Radical Futurisms

T. J. Demos’s book Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (2023) begins with a number of urgent questions, including: “What might life look like beyond the many ends portrayed in popular culture, dystopian sci-fi, climate science, and more? How can we play a role more than mere witnesses to this cascading of catastrophes?” In the author’s view, addressing such existential problems “requires politicizing time itself, disrupting its naturalizations and seeming inevitability.” Despite its proximity to what Demos terms, “libertarian technoscience”, blockchain has also disrupted traditional notions of time, leaving its native community well placed to recognize genuinely radical futurisms when they encounter them.

T. J. Demos, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (London: Sternberg Press, 2023)

Demos sees a “postcapitalist horizon of collective emancipation” emerging from “recent experimental visual culture, new media expressions, aesthetic practices, and social movement formations” rooted in the Black radical tradition, anti-capitalist socialist opposition, “chronopolitical diplomacy”, and Indigenous decolonial praxis. His analysis of a broad spectrum of practices, from the Time Travel Experiments (2017) of Black Quantum Futurism, through Cannupa Hanska Luger’s public artwork Future Ancestral Technologies: We Survive You (2021), to photographic documentary-fictions such as Arrival / Visitation: Cape Kiwanda by Super Futures Haunt Collective (2114) are representative of a vital genealogy of media.

— Alex Estorick, Founding Editor of Right Click Save.

Redistributing attention, agency, and power

March is Women’s History Month, and instead of rehashing the same conversations about visibility and representation, I would like to highlight someone actually doing the work.

Kika Nicolela has curated a massive collection of Female Artists That You Need to Know on objkt.com. This is not a token gesture or a top ten list, but a serious, wide-ranging survey of work that functions as both celebration and correction. This kind of thoughtful labor should not fall to individual curators, but it does because the default mechanisms of visibility still militate against inclusivity.

This week, we published a conversation between the curator Anika Meier, the anonymous performance artist, OONA, and the artist duo, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, on The Art of Hacking Surveillance Systems. The article explores how artists are turning surveillance infrastructure against itself, exposing the logics of capture, control, and commodification that structure digital life. It is subversive, precise work that asks what resistance looks like when power operates algorithmically.

Such projects represent different approaches to the same underlying problem: making visible what tends to stay hidden. Whether that is undervalued artists or invisible systems, the work is about redistribution: of attention, agency, and power.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

The artists OONA and !Mediengruppe Bitnik on the Art of Hacking Surveillance Systems

!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Random Darknet Shopper, installation view, “The Darknet — From Memes to Onionland. An Exploration”, Kunst Halle St Gallen, 2014. Photography by Florian Bachmann

Art on the Blockchain | Valérie C. Whitacre’s new history of the crypto avant-garde

Valérie C. Whitacre. The author of Art on the Blockchain worked in the traditional art market before entering the world of blockchain and crypto art. Courtesy of the author

Dancing with Algorithms | Ben Luke on Alexander Whitley’s hybrid work with AI and choreography

Alexander Whitley, Rite of Spring, 2026. Photography by Oskein

Trending

Kika Nicolela’s objkt curation “Female Artists That You Need to Know”

Happening

Art Basel and UBS’s Art Market Report shows gender parity in artists represented by primary-market galleries as the number of big collectors acquiring digital art rises

IX Shells, No Me Olvides. Fellowship and ARTXCODE stand at Zero 10, Art Basel Miami Beach. Courtesy of the artist, Fellowship, and ARTXCODE. Photography courtesy of Art Basel

The number of leading collectors buying digital art grew in 2025, according to the latest edition of Art Basel and UBS’s Art Market Report, written by Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics, and published on March 12, 2026. The annual report, treated as a benchmark by auction houses and art dealers, also showed women artists reaching parity in the number of artists represented by galleries operating exclusively in the primary market.

The global art market grew by 4 per cent in 2025, the report finds, to an estimated $59.6bn, following two years of declining overall value.

“Across dealers working solely in the primary market and those in both the primary and secondary markets,” McAndrew’s report states, “the share of female artists represented grew by 4% in 2025 to 45%, its highest level to date. Galleries operating exclusively in the primary market have driven much of the increase since 2018 and, in 2025, reached parity between male and female artists on average. While those operating in both the primary and secondary markets remained lower at 41%, this represented a 5% increase on 2024 and is up from a low of less than one third (32%) in 2018.”

The report surveys 3,100 high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) across ten global markets which found that, across art formats, “paintings remained the most-purchased medium and the one that HNWIs had spent the most on, but activity levels and the share of spending across other mediums was higher in 2025 than in previous years”. Of the collectors surveyed who had bought fine art in 2025, “67% had purchased a painting, and 56% a sculpture, aligning with previous years”. The next most popular purchase, the report says, “with a large uplift in 2025”, was digital art, “with just over half (51%) of the sample having bought a digital artwork”.

These figures for the number of HNWIs making digital art purchases reinforce the trends reported in the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting in 2025 published on October 23, 2025. The Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report is published two weeks before the Art Basel art fair giant holds the second iteration of its Zero 10 section dedicated to art of the digital era, at Art Basel Hong Kong (March 27-29, 2026), following its debut at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2025.

Casey Reas’s “Ex Nihilo” is showing in dual formats on Art Blocks and Feral File

Casey Reas, (Still from) Ex Nihilo (Cosmos). Custom software (color, silent), computer, screen or projector, NFT registration. Courtesy of the artist

Hito Steyerl’s “The Island” is at Fondazione Prada, Milan, until October 30, 2026

Hito Steyerl. Photography by Leon Kahane via instagram.com/fondazioneprada

“My Body Language”, curated by Olena Yara, opens at Artverse, Paris, on March 20, 2026

Pace gallery announces representation of the cross-disciplinary artist Anicka Yi

Anicka Yi’s work is featured in the reopening exhibition at the New Museum, New York, “New Humans: Memories of the Future” from March 21, 2026. Photography courtesy of Pace Gallery

RETRO

Dancing with Computers | Analivia Cordeiro on how the human body can find freedom in technology

Analivia Cordeiro, One of the earliest motion captures: Samba, 1984. © Analivia Cordeiro

Reading

Charlotte Kent on Niklas Luhmann’s Art as a Social System

Niklas Luhmann’s Art as a Social System (2000) applies his broader systems theory to the domain of art. I’ve been told that he’s unreadably dense, but the core idea is that art is not mainly about artists or values like beauty, or particular genres or practices—art is a self-reproducing communication system within society. The point is not to position subjects as performing behaviors. Rather, systems thinking emphasizes mutual relationality: actions and behaviors producing entities/objects/things and, likewise, things generating behaviors due to their milieu. 

As in his earlier work, Social Systems (1984/2013), Luhmann provides arguments to deontologize things. As he says, an “adequately stable system is composed of unstable elements,” explaining that the system owes “its stability to itself, not to its elements; it constructs itself upon a foundation that is not ‘there’, and this is precisely the sense in which it is autopoeitic” (1984/2013, 48). Luhmann’s autopoiesis refers to the self-referential and self-generating qualities of a system. His language presents the system as if it were a singular entity, but the point is a fluid set of relations that emerge into a system—that is the “foundation that is not ’there’” and which must be remembered. 

For Luhmann, systems are not static entities but plural moving parts and relations that coalesce and release. In this way, relationships and activities become significant to the things we see as distinct objects. This change requires us to consider what gestures, things, and ideas coalesce to (in)form the object of our study. Instead of thinking in terms of objects, Luhmann calls us to think of momentary confluences and focus on the network rather than the node. 

— Charlotte Kent is an arts writer and associate professor of visual culture at Montclair State University. With a background in philosophy and literature, she brings an interdisciplinary approach to visual art and digital culture with a current research focus on the absurd.

What does it mean for technology to heal rather than extract?

As a publication dedicated to making sense of emerging technologies and how they stand to impact society—a task often best executed by artists—Right Click Save has always valued the work of scholars who confront the risk of perpetual colonialism.

Recently, Mass MoCA, in North Adams, Massachusetts, opened an exhibition that directly confronts “the colonialist logic, racism, and violence embedded in and produced by corporate-developed technologies and datasets.” Featuring artists working across media including Lauren Lee McCarthy, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, and Roopa Vasudevan, the show offers visions of what a technological future could look like if it were built on principles of inclusion and liberation rather than extraction and control.

This week, we published a conversation between Kalie Granier, Edward A. Shanken, and Louise Ramirez of the Esselen Nation, on Indigenous Wisdom and Technoshamanism, exploring how artists are using digital tools to support land reclamation and language revitalization. Language itself is a technology, one that preserves knowledge systems, world views, and histories that colonialism has actively worked to erase. Their conversation reiterates the importance of asking who gets to shape technology, whose knowledge systems are valued, and what it would mean to build digital tools rooted in care, reciprocity, and relationship rather than surveillance, profit, and domination.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

On Indigenous Wisdom and Technoshamanism | How art can support land reclamation and language revitalization

Kalie Granier in collaboration with Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation, The Nature Conservancy, and MBARI-Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, A’ai, 2023. Courtesy of the artist

In Emergent Fields | Iskra Velitchkova distills her generative vision through a sublime world of shadows

Iskra Velitchkova, ISG 01 | Bird / Scarf, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

Slow Digital | Conversations at LACMA reveal the fine art of media archaeology

“Conversations on Digital Art” at LACMA, February 25, 2026, with speakers (from left): Linda Tadic, founder and CEO of Digital Bedrock; the artist Lauren Lee McCarthy; and Stacie Martinez, Director of Studio Daniel Canogar, in Los Angeles. Photography by Right Click Save

Trending

“Technologies of Relation” at Mass MoCA identifies colonialist logic, racism, and violence embedded in corporate technologies

Lauren Lee McCarthy, Lauren (2017), “Technologies of Relation’, is at Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, until July 2027. Photography by Right Click Save

Happening

Whitney Biennial 2026 opens to public viewing in New York on March 8, 2026

Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2026 (Whitney Museum of American Art, March 8–August 2026). Zach Blas, CULTUS, 2023. Photograph by Darian DiCanno/BFA.com. © BFA 2026

The Whitney Biennial 2026 opens to public viewing at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Sunday March 8, 2026. The exhibition, on show until August 2026, features the work of some 15 artists working with technology and at the border of the digital and physical, including Samia Halaby, Joshua Citarella, Ruanne Abou-Rahme; Ash Arder; Zach Blas; Leo Castañeda; Taina H. Cruz; Ignacio Gatica; Cooper Jacoby; Michelle Lopez; Isabelle Frances McGuire; Gabriela Ruiz; Jordan Strafer; and Sung Tieu.

Kelly Akashi’s Monument (Altadena), 2026 (left); Inheritance (Distressed), 2026; and Remnants (Constellations), 2026. Photography by Timothy Schenck

As part of the biennial, the Los Angeles-based artist Kelly Akashi presents the Hyundai Terrace Commission on the Museum’s fifth-floor outdoor gallery. The project brings together a new sculptural installation and an outdoor-screen animation in response to the Los Angeles wildfires of January 2025. Monument (Altadena) (2026) is a reconstruction of the chimney piece from the artist’s home, the only element to survive the Eaton Fire. On the outdoor screen, the artist’s Remnants (Constellations) (2026) extends Akashi’s investigation of trace, memory, and aftermath into moving image.

The biennial also saw the Whitney launch Leo Castañeda’s digital art project Camoflux Recall Grotto, available on artport, the Museum’s online gallery space for Internet art. Camoflux Recall Grotto invites players to take part in a web-based game in which they cultivate a garden within a surreal, primordial landscape.

Leo Castañeda, Camoflux Recall Grotto. Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art

Wen New Atelier live-scribe with artist and DJ Agoria at Musée d’art contemporain, Lyon

Agoria (right) and Wen New Atelier (left) livescribe in the MacBar, in the main hall at the Musée d'art contemporain, Lyon. Photography by Right Click Save

Julia Stoschek Foundation presents “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem” of time-based works at Variety Arts Theater, Los Angeles until March 20

“What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem" is at Variety Arts Theater, Los Angeles until March 20. Photography via instagram.com / juliastoschekfoundation

Vadehra Art Gallery presents Hylozoic/Desires, “Soap of the Sages, Sun of the Sea”, at No. 9 Cork Street, London, March 6-28, 2026

Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser), I and Thou, 2024. The artists’ works for “Soap of the Sages, Sun of the Sea”, digital collages on aluminium, reference satellite data as it interacts with a “glitching” Ikat weaving loom. Photography courtesy of Vadehra Gallery

RETRO

Luke Hespanhol on whether Web3 technologies can avoid the risk of perpetual colonialism

Luke Hespanhol warns that the crypto ecosystem and its advocacy may risk, intentionally or not, perpetuating centuries-old colonial practices

International scholars ask if it is possible to decolonize the blockchain and NFTs?

Scholars find the computing phenomenon itself is “inherently colonial as it is founded upon, and continues to embody aspects of colonialism”

Ana María Caballero, Kalen Iwamoto, Sasha Stiles, and Ross Goodwin on poetry in a posthuman age

Sasha Stiles, POETRY IS THE ORIGINAL BLOCKCHAIN, 2021. Courtesy of the artist

Digital art’s existential questions

This week, LACMA hosted a day of expert conversations on the conservation, preservation, and display of digital art, and Right Click Save was proud to be a media partner. The room was packed with artists (Rebecca Allen, Refik Anadol, Tyler Hobbs, Maya Man, and RCS contributor Zsofi Valyi-Nagy among them) alongside conservators, technologists, and curators who shared what it takes to keep digital works alive. The obsolescence of file formats as well as the restoration of code-based creations are not abstract concerns, but central to determining which works survive the decade.

Speaking of digital culture, this week we have devoted a special section of the magazine to a particular kind of digital identity: the non-player character (NPC). In partnership with LAN Party (Vienna Kim and Benoit Palop), we are pleased to be able publish three essays from their book, Non-Playable Characters (2025), that considers how behavior encoded into digital infrastructure shapes culture. On that score, Nora O’ Murchú examines NPCs as infrastructure, while Alex Quicho considers the untouchable NPC, and the book’s editors imagine the secret lives led by NPCs when no one is watching.

As ever, we will continue to foster dialogue about how to preserve digital worlds, as well as the lived experience of those who dwell therein.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

Lan Party’s Vienna Kim & Benoit Palop on The Secret Life of an NPC

Non-Playable Characters is edited by LAN Party (Vienna Kim & Benoit Palop). © 2025 LAN Party and the authors. © 2025 Ruby Bailey for all visuals and layout

Alex Quicho on the Unapproachable, Unplayable, and Untouchable NPC

Visual by Ruby Bailey for Non-Playable Characters. © 2025 LAN Party and the authors. © 2025 Ruby Bailey for all visuals and layout

Life with Assets | Nora O’ Murchú on NPCs as infrastructure

Simone C Niquille, duckrabbit.tv, 2023. Photography by Silke Briel. transmediale 2023

My Frankenstein | David Salle’s AI Experiment Comes to Los Angeles

Installation view of “David Salle: My Frankenstein” at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers. Photography by Robert Wedemeyer

Trending

LACMA hosts Digital Leaders’ “Conversations on Digital Art” in Los Angeles on February 25, 2026

“Conversations on Digital Art” during Frieze LA set out to focus on the evolving landscape of digital art conservation, preservation, and display. In the first panel, a conversation between LACMA director Michael Govan and Rhizome’s executive director Michael Connor, Govan set the tone for the day with the idea of “slow digital.” When everything is moving so fast in digital art and culture, how do we preserve the past, present, and future? The subsequent conversations looked backwards as much as forwards, slowing down in the face of “upgrade culture” to examine what we can do to preserve digital media as well as the conversations happening around them. It’s important for us to think about digital art not only as objects to preserve or files to back up, but also, as Connor emphasized, as elements of an ecosystem, interdependent on the communities that make and maintain them. This is especially crucial given digital art’s precarious status on the margins of the mainstream art world.

One such community, spotlighted in the second panel, are art institutions’ in-house media technology experts, such as Mark Ayala (LACMA’s Manager of Gallery Media), Hannah Kirby (Tech Supervisor for Exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, LA), and Andreas Korte (Head of Exhibitions at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin). To bring digital art, old and new, to life in the gallery space (life and death were big themes here) Ayala reminded us that digital art exists not simply as an abstraction—software and files—but also in physical form. Collaboration and communication between AV experts, both within and outside of art institutions, artists and their estates, and curators is key.

The third and final panel focused on “preservation in practice”. LACMA’s digital preservation manager, Joey Heinen, spoke with the artist Lauren Lee McCarthy, Linda Tadic (Founder and CEO of Digital Bedrock) and Stacie Martinez, director of Studio Daniel Canogar’s LA outpost. Tadic—who brought a “show and tell” bag of physical data storage formats, including a DNA data storage drive not yet available to consumers—spoke on the importance of environmental sustainability in the face of technological obsolescence. Overarching themes were the importance of documentation and the need to bridge the communication gap between digital art, film and television, the corporate sector, and third-party tech companies.

McCarthy emphasized the need for work not to be defined by its platform or technology, whether it be the blockchain or an early iteration of an AI model, and the importance of tinkering and hacking as more tools and APIs are closed off from their users. For McCarthy, documentation is important not just from a technical perspective but for our future selves to be able to “look back on and hold a different key to understanding what was happening” now.

— Zsofi Valyi-Nagy is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and art historian, and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Art History at Scripps College in Claremont, California

Happening

“Repeat After Me II”, from the Polish Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, is at Nguyen Wahed, London, until March 3, 2026 

Open Group (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga), Repeat after Me II, 2022-2024. Installation view at Nguyen Wahed London. Courtesy of Nguyen Wahed and the artists. Photography by Reece Straw

Repeat After Me II (2022–2024), a two-channel video installation by the Ukrainian art collective Open Group (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga) is on show at Nguyen Wahed, London, until March 3.

The piece, curated by Marta Czyż, presents two films from different stages of a war that is still being waged four years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The two-video piece made international headlines in 2024 when it was presented in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The presentation at Nguyen Wahed has coincided with the fourth anniversary of the invasion and the continuing conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

In two videos, from 2022 and 2024, Open Group “gave the floor to war witnesses,” according to a statement on the artists’ website, “who were able to salvage their lives through their ability to recognise the sounds of weaponry”. The participants imitate these sounds of war and invite the audience to do the same. In the 2022 film, the participants are Ukrainians displaced from east to west Ukraine in the early stages of the invasion. In the 2024 film, the testimonies shift to an international context, with the protagonists in cities across Europe.

“This work may be understood as both a warning and a manual of specialised knowledge, which survivors of war pass on to their audiences—their potential successors,” the gallery says in a catalogue essay. “Repeat After Me II is a manifesto against all armed conflict, delivered in a peaceful form today.”

Adam Peacock, “Resisting Optimisation”, and Hilde Frantzen, “Alternative Atlas”, are at SKOG Art Space, Oslo, until March 1, 2026

Adam Peacock, Resisting Optimisation 00-3, 2026. At SKOG Art Space, Oslo. Photography by Jon Gorospe @jg.videolab via instagram.com/skogartspace

“collapse: data.models.worlds”, opens at Saigon space, Athens, on March 5, 2026

“collapse: data.models.worlds", a group show organised by Vektor Athens and curated by Daphne Dragona, and Katerina Gkoutziouli, addresses the role of technology, and in particular AI, in the exploitation of human and natural resources

Rachel Maclean, “They’ve Got Your Eyes”, and ONLY SLIME, “AFTERLIFE”, open at FACT Liverpool on March 20, 2026

ONLY SLIME, AFTERLIFE (2023). Film still. Courtesy of the artists

RETRO

A Tribute to the Extraordinary Artists of Ukraine, from February 2022

Serene_Raccoon, (Still from) PolySerenita #57, 2021

Listening

David Salle on discussing the “mechanics” of the artist’s craft with Alex Katz and Roy Lichtenstein

David Salle. Photography by Robert Wright

During an interview with Right Click Save about “My Frankenstein”, his new show of paintings at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, made using proprietary AI as a composing tool, David Salle recounted conversations with his fellow artists Alex Katz and the late Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97) about the mechanics of painting. He also discussed his latest encounter with Jasper Johns’s “Crosshatch” paintings, which mark their half-century in 2026. The passages below did not make it into the final article published on February 27, for reasons of space.

“We see each other fairly often,” David Salle says of Alex Katz. “He is 98 years old, but he’s incredibly sharp. And we always talk about everything we’re seeing. And he said something to me about my work that was very interesting. He knew I’d been working on a series. [That] I was really deep into the process. And that it was a ‘lot’. He said, [and] I am paraphrasing: ‘You’re really good at the mechanics of a painting. And most people looking at painting, they’re not even aware of how good you are. And then sometimes you’re so good at the mechanics that it’s maybe even at the expense of the styling.’ What he means by styling, I think [...] is simply how the thing looks, the surface of the painting. The sum total of every visual thing in the painting is the styling, in Alex’s terminology.”

The conversation with Katz reminded Salle of a similar encounter with Roy Lichtenstein, “because Roy was also a compositional artist. He wasn’t a drawer. He couldn’t paint a likeness. He couldn’t make ‘the one thing’ like Barnett Newman [could]. But [...] he was brilliant at composing space, pictorial space. That was the focus from the beginning, and that was where he remained a master. And [Roy] said something similar to me: ‘You’re also a compositional artist. You’re someone who composes a picture.’ And what does that mean? Managing the relationships within the picture plane.”

Salle was moved by these themes to comment on how good painting actually works, “how dense and how complex, yet how just visually refreshing a painting can be”. For him, this is demonstrated by a loan show of Johns’s “Crosshatch” paintings, a genre first shown by Leo Castelli in 1976, now on at Gagosian, New York: “Between the Clock and the Bed” (until March 14, 2026). Salle knows the “Crosshatch” works well “but they’re still for me kind of touchstones of how someone can get thinking into a painting without any overt reference [to] anything except itself. They’re just brushstrokes but they have a gravitas and a sense of mental conundrum, let’s say, that’s so palpable. At the same time, they’re just beautifully decorative paintings that look great on the wall.”

— Louis Jebb is Managing Editor at Right Click Save.

Rebuilding Bridges Between Art Worlds

When the New Museum, New York, reopens on March 21 following a two-year, $82 million rebuilding program that has doubled the contemporary art museum’s exhibition capacity, its first thematic exhibition, “New Humans | Memories of the Future”, will explore artists’ concern with what it means to be human in the face of technological change.

It will also be a reminder that the New Museum, founded in 1977 and closed for refurbishment in spring 2024, is a nimble, experimental home to contemporary art that has long served as an on-ramp for artists of the digital age. The institution has initiated cutting-edge programs, most notably Rhizome, the museum’s digital arm since 2003, and New Inc, its incubator for art, design, and technology, launched in 2014. An entire floor of the new extension, which has been designed by OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, is to be dedicated to New Inc and Rhizome, giving both programs a permanent home at the institution for the first time.

In the same week that the New Museum announced its full artist line up for “New Humans”, arebyte Digital Art Centre, London, hosted the art press to unveil its plans for “REBOOT: Recoding Reality”, a two-year program to reimagine more equitable worlds where humans have agency over technology and care for their environments. Attendees also got to see a solo exhibition by groundbreaking net artist and digital sculptor Auriea Harvey: “(This Room is a Sculpture Called) PROPHECY” (on view through March 1, 2026).

On the same day, another UK space, the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, announced its support for the next generation of digital sculptors with the upcoming “Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age” (May 15-August 30, 2026), an inspiring instance of a foundation left by a notable artist of the modern age supporting the future of sculpture in a transdisciplinary art ecosystem.

As Massimiliano Gioni, the Edlis Neeson Artistic Director at the New Museum remarked to Right Click Save this week—reflecting on a remarkable year for new and relaunched art institutions around the globe—all this activity says something for institutions with a radical edge, spaces that act as a bridge between past and present, contemporary and digital: “We seem to be necessary.”

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

The New Museum, New York, goes back to the future to give new technologies an art historical context

Cao Fei, (Still from) Oz, 2022. Courtesy Sprüth Magers and Vitamin Creative Space

Swirls of Fortune | How the culture of circus clowns has inspired art collective The Sphere

Lene Vollhardt, in character as the Pierrot-like Network Clown. On-set portrait for Swirls of Fortune (2025). Courtesy of the artist and The Sphere. Photography by Polinkasam

Trending

Art and technology community celebrates the launch of arebyte Digital Art Centre, London, on February 18

Happening

V&A Museum, London, acquires an early watch page for YouTube and the platform’s first video, “Me at the zoo”, uploaded April 23, 2005

YouTube watch page on display at V&A South Kensington. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Matt Clark projects “Hidden Order” on facade of Casa Batlló, Barcelona, to launch Gaudí Year centenary celebrations, on February 1, 2026

Hidden Order, mapping by United Visual Artists at Casa Batlló, 2026. Photography by Eric Yanguas

Forthcoming

Kim Hankyul’s immersive underwater light and sound installation “Shore” opens at Munch Museum, Oslo, February 27, 2026

Kim Hankyul. Photography by Vegard Landsverk. © Munchmuseet

Genesis Kai’s solo exhibition “The Tension That Holds” opens at Artverse, Paris, February 27, 2026

“The Tension That Holds”, is the Korean-Chinese artist Genesis Kai’s first solo exhibition in Europe

RETRO

Auriea Harvey discusses her career, from Web1 to Web3, and the future of digital sculpture with Emann Odufu

Auriea Harvey, mother/child (prototype), 2022. Courtesy of the artist

Loving

Louis Jebb celebrates Henry Moore Institute’s focus on emerging digital sculptors in “Phantasmagoria”, opening May 15, 2026

Joey Holder, The Woosphere, 2025. Courtesy of the artist, Vienna Digital Cultures: Foto Arsenal Wien and Kunsthalle Wien

I am loving the news that the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, will be showing some of the most creative sculptors working today in “Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age” (15 May-30 August, 2026).

The exhibition will examine the conjunction of folklore and contemporary digital culture through the work of emerging artists including Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Nina Davies, Joey Holder, Joe Moss, Most Dismal Swamp, Steph Linn, and Philip Speakman, Isaac Lythgoe, and Rustan Söderling. These artists, only one of them over the age of 40, make work with a rich interconnection of folk traditions, myth, and occult practices, as well as AI, gaming, and social media; expressed in a mix of virtual and tangible sculptures, drawings, and simulations that blend digital and handmade production.

“Phantasmagoria” is a reminder that the Institute, like its parent organisation, the Henry Moore Foundation, supports innovative sculpture projects and public appreciation of the visual arts, while at the same time maintaining Moore’s artistic legacy. Both a multi-hyphenate sculptor and a “public artist” for the newsreel and television age, Moore left a transdisciplinary tradition as a teacher, creator of an atelier model for the late 20th century, and interpreter of the intersection of art and municipal life.

That legacy is accessible at the extraordinary artist’s archive, run by the Foundation at Moore’s home and studio at Perry Green, Hertfordshire. The large bronze-cast sculptures in the garden and surrounding fields are a reminder of the editions model of plaza-scale sculptures that ultimately enabled Moore to fund the Foundation; while the maquette collections in his former studio, and temporary exhibition of sketches, drawings, and textile work, are a reminder of where the timelessly arresting magic of this most intentional of artist’s work is to be found.

— Louis Jebb is Managing Editor at Right Click Save.

What happened to radical inclusivity?

This week served up a dispiriting reminder that old habits die hard, even in spaces that were supposed to be different.

A widely circulated list of influential works of digital art featured predominately male artists. A group exhibition was announced with no female artists. And while individual instances might be dismissed as oversights, a pattern is becoming impossible to ignore: that the supposed democratization and inclusivity promised by blockchain technology is now giving way to the same exclusionary dynamics that have plagued the art world for centuries.

This is particularly frustrating because female artists haven’t merely participated in digital art history—they’ve helped to define it. From Vera Molnar’s groundbreaking works of generative art to Samia Halaby’s explorations of the personal computer to Carla Gannis’s investigations of posthuman identity, the canons of digital art are rich with voices that are still being shamefully overlooked.

This is precisely why initiatives such as FEMGEN that ensure visibility for women and non-binary artists continue to matter. It’s not only about representation: it’s about safeguarding a future currently under threat from the same structural unfairness and ignorance as the past.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Features

The Interview | Carla Gannis discusses the power of humor and hybrid media with Eva Yisu Ren

Installation view of “Carla Gannis: wwwunderkammer” at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, 2023. © Rick Rhodes Photography. Courtesy of the artist 

Recent Institutional Acquisitions | From Emi Kusano to Shahzia Sikander

Shahzia Sikander, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles (still), 2026. Co-commissioned by M+ and Art Basel, presented by UBS, 2026. Photography courtesy of the artist

Future Facing | Manuel Rabaté to lead India’s largest private museum

Manuel Rabaté, newly appointed Chief Executive and Director of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA).Photography by Mathilde Magnier

Trending

Digital art lists and exhibitions raise questions

RETRO

Candid Conversations | FEMGEN and the fragile vision of a brave new art world

Danielle King, Artificial Polaroid #2, 2023. Courtesy of the artist

Lynn Hershman Leeson discusses how art can confront cultural prejudice with Carla Gannis

Lynn Hershman Leeson, CyberRoberta, 1996. Courtesy of the artist

The Delusion | Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s game-based Serpentine show invites audiences to ask difficult questions

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. Photography by Talie Rose Eigeland. Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine Galleries

Forthcoming

Artists and galleries announced for Zero 10 section at Art Basel Hong Kong, March 25-29, 2026

Details have been published of galleries and artists taking part at Art Basel Hong Kong in the Zero 10 section dedicated to art of the digital age, form March 25 to 29, 2026. This is the second iteration of Zero 10, curated by Eli Scheinman, after its debut at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2025. The section will occupy 12,000 sq feet in the conference center home to the fair, Scheinman posted on X, showing a mix of “robotics, painting, sculpture, generative, ai-based and interactive works”.

Zero 10 at Art Basel Hong Kong will include works presented by Nguyen Wahed (Kim Asendorf); SILK Art House (Jack Butcher); Fellowship Trust and ARTXCODE (Sougwen Chung); Onkaos (Robert Alice); AOTM Gallery (DeeKay); Plan X Gallery (Claire Silver and ThankYouX); BottoDAO (Botto); bitforms (Quayola, Daniel Canogar); Asprey Studio (Seneca, Tim Yip, Qu Leilei); TAEX (Kevin Abosch); Art Blocks (Harvey Rayner); Solos Gallery (Petra Cortright, Laurie Simmons); Office Impart (Jonas Lund); and Root K Contemporary (Emi Kusano).

SILK Art House will present Jack Butcher’s “Work / Luck” in collaboration with Asprey Studio in the Zero 10 section of Art Basel Hong Kong. via instagram.com/silkarthouse

LACMA to host Conversations on Digital Art on February 25, 2026

Right Click Save subscribers can apply direct to attend the LACMA Conversations on Digital Art, or apply to Right Click Save, the event’s media partners, at info@rightclicksave.com

​LACMA’s Digital Leaders are to host the next Conversations on Digital Art during Frieze LA. On the morning of February 25, 2026, they are hosting a private event focused on the evolving landscape of digital art conservation, preservation, and display.

The speakers include Mark Ayala, Manager of Gallery Media, LACMA; Daniel Cánogar, Artist; Michael Connor, Executive Director, Rhizome; Jim Fetterley, Technology Manager, Dataland; Technical Director, Hammer Museum; Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, LACMA; Joey Heinen, Digital Preservation Manager, LACMA; Lauren Lee McCarthy, Artist; Linda Tadic, Founder and CEO, Digital Bedrock.

Right Click Save are media partners for the event, and we have some tickets to share with our newsletter subscribers. Please contact us on info@rightclicksave.com if you will be in LA and are interested in attending.

Happening

“Ryuichi Sakamoto | seeing sound, hearing time” opens at M+, Hong Kong, on February 14, 2026

Ryuichi Sakamoto, async–immersion tokyo, 2024. © 2024 KAB Inc. Photo: Takeshi Asano. Courtesy of M+

“Against Outer Space” is at Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine, until February 28, 2026

Installation view of "Against Outer Space" at UCI Beall Center for Art + Technology. Photography by Yubo Dong

“StarQuest”, an installation and performance-lecture by Maya Man, is at LA Dance Project on February 28, 2026

Man’s performance draws on the reality television series Dance Moms and the artist’s own experience growing up as a competition dancer to reflect on the aesthetics of optimization, generative AI, the staging of the self on social media

The immersive exhibition “Leandro Erlich” is on show at Amos Rex, Helsinki, until April 6, 2026

Leandro Erlich, Classroom, Photography by Tuomas Uusheimo / Amos Rex

Loving

Carla Gannis shares four quotations dear to her art

Installation view of “Carla Gannis: wwwunderkammer” at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, 2023. © Rick Rhodes Photography. Courtesy of the artist

There are four quotations I’ve kept tucked in my brain for well over 20 years that consistently resurface when I’m asked about my practice. They encapsulate a stance of depth, skepticism, and refusal that I attempt to embody in all of my work.

Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t. Behind every story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear. Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.

― Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure (1995)

I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force—a wild pain and decay—also accompanies everything.

— The film director and artist David Lynch

Her father, long ago, in Arizona, had cautioned her against jacking in. You don’t need it, he’d said. And she hadn’t, because she’d dreamed cyberspace, as though the neon gridlines of the matrix waited for her behind her eyelids.

— William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)

Take an object / Do Something to it / Do Something else to it. [Repeat]

— The artist Jasper Johns, 1964.

Quite literally, this is my mantra.

— Carla Gannis is an artist working with an array of media, known for using humor as a tool for exploring complex issues. Her work has been exhibited globally in exhibitions, screenings, and internet projects. She also teaches “healing-edge” technology as an Industry Professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering in the Department of Technology, Culture, and Society.