Trevor Paglen Will Curate Art Basel’s ‘Zero 10’ Digital Initiative
8May 12, 2026
“Zero 10,”Art Basel’s relatively new global initiative dedicated to platforming digital art, has a curator for its third edition at Art Basel in Switzerland:Trevor Paglen, an artist, geographer and author best known for his artistic engagement with themes of surveillance technology.
Paglen will curate the wide-ranging program alongside digital art strategist Eli Scheinman, which will feature twenty exhibitors. It will be the largest iteration of “Zero 10” to date. Paglen and Scheinman will curate the program around the theme “The Condition,” thereby examining life in a world saturated by digital media and AI. The presentation will bring together historical and contemporary voices across digital, generative, and media art.
Among the exhibited works will be Hito Steyerl’s Green Screen, 2023, a large-scale installation that features an LED wall that uses recycled bottles as “pixels,” and living plants. There will also be work by Vera Molnar, the late digital artist who in the late 1960s was one of the first artists to create algorithmically generated art.
“The art market is expanding, and the audiences driving that expansion are digitally native, globally connected, and looking for platforms that speak their language,” Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz said in a statement. “Zero 10 at our Swiss flagship is our most ambitious answer to that challenge yet – a clear signal of our commitment to digital art as a cornerstone of our go-forward strategy.”
“Looking across the last 50 years of instruction-based and computational work, from postwar experimentalism through today’s generative practices, I see a continuous thread: a body of work that understands the digital as a medium with its own properties, possibilities, and demands,” Paglen said. “The showcase becomes an intergenerational conversation about what it means to be alive in the digital era, led by artists who were thinking seriously about these questions long before the rest of the world caught up.”