Inside Zero – Zero 10 at Art Basel turned digital art into a sensory experience—five works stood out for turning algorithms, screens, and surveillance logic into something you could feel in your body.
The first thing you notice in Zero 10 isn’t a label. It’s the way the space pulls you in—sound tightening, images shifting, light and code behaving like living things. In Basel, this is what the digital-art fair rarely manages: the works don’t just explain technology, they make you inhabit it.
Curated by Eli Scheinman and Trevor Paglen under the theme The Condition. Zero 10 is Art Basel‘s global initiative celebrating art of the digital era. In its largest form to date. it brings together established as well as up-and-coming artists. galleries and interdisciplinary practitioners. offering lenses on the links between art. technology and culture.
This year’s Zero 10 in Basel was especially sonically immersive and visually memorable. Computational art sat beside textile pieces. photography beside interactive installations. and the conversation visitors kept returning to was simple: these works were whimsical. innovative and thought-provoking—and they made a case for having a dedicated space where digitally-themed art can do more than sit behind glass.
The most hypnotic was Infinite Garden (2025) by Leander Herzog. Nguyen Wahed presented an alluring infinite botanical garden that behaves like an ecosystem with no stable “now.” It’s generative and ever-shifting. so no single moment ever repeats itself. The rhythm lands somewhere between art and game: navigating it feels like moving through a first-person view of a magical. infrared garden.
Herzog’s conceptual richness shows in the method, too. He doesn’t work with conventional 3D geometry. Instead. he uses the equivalent of digital mark-making: lines held at a consistent 1-pixel width. points that remain square. always facing the viewer. Those deliberate constraints are what create the flickering quality—an artwork that seems to breathe because it can’t settle.
The most immersive moment arrived as Green Screen (2023) by Hito Steyerl. Presented jointly by Esther Schipper and Andrew Kreps. the installation stretched into a large-scale environment that mixed LED spectacle with living presence. An LED wall made from recycled glass bottles sits alongside living plants and AI-generated imagery.
What makes it more than a pretty hybrid is how it listens to biology. Bioelectrical signals from the plants drive the work’s soundscape. while low-resolution animations of blooming flowers cycle through the visual field. Living organisms and digital technologies aren’t treated as separate layers here; they feed one another. creating an environment that keeps passersby from moving on.
The most thought-provoking work was Panoptic Chiasma (2026) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Presented jointly by Max Estrella and bitforms gallery. it doesn’t present surveillance as a distant threat—it treats it as a system built into the everyday act of being seen. Using interactive works that track viewers’ facial features. heartbeat. thermal signatures and movements in real time. the series exposes the mechanisms of AI and surveillance that are often invisible. yet shape how we see and how we are seen.
Standing in front of it, the question stops being theoretical. Your presence becomes data, and the artwork makes that transformation unmistakable.
John Gerrard’s contribution offered something quieter but harder to shake. His triptych—STANDARD (2023). Flare (Oceania) (2022) and Western Flag (Spindeltop. Texas) (2017)—was presented by Fellowship and centered on environmental collapse. fossil fuel extraction and systems of power. Generated continuously through custom software, the works exist in constant motion. Wind, smoke, fire and light unfold as meditative processes.
Viewed side by side, the triptych sharpens the emotional math. Each panel isn’t just an image of crisis; together they intensify the reflection on energy and the environmental crisis, turning simulations into a kind of persistent witnessing.
Then there was the kind of stillness you rarely get at a fair like this: Ocean V (2010) by Andreas Gursky. With its immense scale, the work offers a rare pause amid sensory overload, inviting viewers to confront their smallness against the vastness of the natural world.
Part of the artist’s ongoing series of digitally constructed oceanic landscapes, Ocean V draws on satellite imagery to transform oceans into something unfamiliar. It also drags darker realities into view, drawing attention to themes of global conflict and the climate crisis.
Zero 10’s most lasting effect at Art Basel wasn’t a single idea—it was the way the program made technology feel physical. From Herzog’s pixel-held constraints to Steyerl’s plant-driven soundscape. from Lozano-Hemmer’s real-time tracking to Gerrard’s continuously generated environmental collapse. the works didn’t ask audiences to think about the digital era from a distance. They turned it into an experience you could walk through, feel in your attention, and carry out the door.
Art Basel Zero 10 The Condition digital art computational art Leander Herzog Infinite Garden Hito Steyerl Green Screen Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Panoptic Chiasma John Gerrard STANDARD Ocean V Andreas Gursky