HEK (House of Electronic Arts) and the Tezos Foundation are launching 404_LAND, a group exhibition curated by Auronda Scalera and Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti.
The show, premiering on virtual.hek.ch on June 12th, will run through August 9th, 2026 and is the first of two virtual exhibitions produced as part of the 2026 partnership, with one more to follow, alongside an outdoor presentation at the museum during Art Basel.
The six artists participating, Gabriel Massan, dmstfctn, Varvara & Mar, Hind Al Saad (with Martin Juras and Levi Hammett), Kat Zhang the Poet Engineer, and Alida Sun, work across machinima, generative systems, interactive simulation, machine vision, AI dialogue, and speculative worldbuilding.
From Gabriel Massan’s solo show at Serpentine to dmstfctn’s residency at Somerset House Studios, and Varvara & Mar’s exhibitions at ZKM and the V&A, this cohort questions and complicates the systems, behaviors and structures which shape our society.
Taking its name from the HTTP 404 error, 404_LAND treats the error not as a dead end but as an entry point. The exhibition answers the question about what kinds of artistic, political, and poetic life emerge when the address fails: when an image is no longer stable, when a body becomes data, when a world disappears from view.
Each of the artists enters the 404 condition from a different angle: as political disappearance, computational misunderstanding, embodied mistranslation, encoded selfhood, distributed memory, and planetary instability.
Gabriel Massan’s Victims, from his ongoing Ball Of Terror series, situates the error inside the violent architectures of power. Developed through research into state violence and the psychological infrastructures of fear, the machinima work constructs a looping world of falling bodies, gunfire, and suspended motion, where terror is embedded into the temporality of routine rather than appearing as an exceptional event. Massan, a Berlin-based artist with solo exhibitions at Serpentine, BOZAR, and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, has form when it comes to creating works on Tezos, as a previous collaboration with the Serpentine saw visitors receive Tezos-based digital collectibles generated through a custom computer game.
dmstfctn (Oliver Smith and Francesco Tacchini) contribute The Models, an infinite interactive simulation staging two AI-driven characters, modelled on Commedia dell’Arte masks, improvising across 26,880 possible scenes, with dialogue generated using access to Supercomputer Leonardo. The work makes machine intelligence visible as theatrical behaviour: agents that perform knowledge, obedience, and absurdity without ever quite understanding. The London-based duo, n-Space fellows at Somerset House Studios since 2025, have previously exhibited at Serpentine, Berghain, and transmediale.
Varvara & Mar present Everything Is In Your Hands, a webcam-based net.art piece in which visitors navigate a glitch system through hand gestures, signs of love, protest, and refusal becoming keys, data, and misreadings in equal measure. The work plays with the fragile boundary between human expression and algorithmic interpretation, referencing the absurd intimacy of video-call gesture recognition. The duo, whose works have been shown at the V&A, Barbican, and ZKM, stage participation itself as exposure.
Hind Al Saad, in collaboration with Martin Juras and Levi Hammett, presents SELF(ENCODED), a video of an interactive work placing the viewer inside a recursive conversation with a machine. The visitor’s facial features feed a loop, pixels becoming features, features becoming patterns, patterns becoming language, until the signal becomes illegible to both human and machine. The work asks what remains of the self when a face is no longer seen as a face but as extractable data.
Kat Zhang, the Poet Engineer presents Hypomnemata: Memory is a Flock of Birds, a video game-like landscape rooted in the mathematics of associative memory. Drawing on Hopfield networks, where memories exist as valleys in an energy landscape, distributed across neurons the way a murmuration is distributed across birds, the work stages remembering as drift, erosion, and imperfect reconstruction. The missing image or corrupted memory becomes not a failure but a starting point for new forms of relation.
Alida Sun’s The world isn’t ending / Their world is ending expands the exhibition’s horizon from computational systems to planetary and social instability. The work resists the universal language of apocalypse, asking instead whose world is ending, who is forced to adapt or disappear, and who is allowed to continue. Central to Sun’s practice is her continued daily creation of hand-coded generative systems, ongoing for more than 2500 days.
Together, the six works construct 404_LAND as a cartography of error, imagination, and unstable belonging. The virtual exhibition at virtual.hek.ch embodies this condition; there is no home screen or map. Visitors enter mid-stream and navigate by drift, moving through six artistic zones that bleed into one another through thresholds, fragments, and atmospheric transitions.
Accompanying the exhibition, each artist will also release NFTs on Tezos through objkt.com.
A dedicated kiosk inside the HEK lobby in Basel will offer public access throughout the run. A virtual opening tour with the curators takes place on June 12th; full details at hek.ch.
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Image Credits: HEK, Tezos, Canva
