Basel, Switzerland — 11 May 2026 — THE PAST. THE PRESENT. THE FUTURE., a presentation of three real-time simulations by john gerrard, will be exhibited by Fellowship at Art Basel 2026 (18-21 June 2026). Bringing together Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), 2017, Flare (Oceania), 2022, and STANDARD, 2023, the booth marks the first occasion on which the three works have been shown together as a single body.
Three flags. One arc. A nine-year body of work, completed before the present moment arrived, that now describes it precisely. Each is a real-time digital simulation, rendered live by software calculating every frame as it is needed. Each is locked to the clock and seasons of an actual place on earth. Each takes the form of a flag, the oldest symbol of territory and allegiance, and replaces its fabric with something atmospheric: smoke, fire, water vapour.
Read together, the works trace an arc from carbon legacy to burning present to fragile hopeful future. Western Flag turns to the past, planted at Spindletop, Texas, where the modern oil economy began in 1901. Flare (Oceania) holds the present, burning above a heating South Pacific near Tonga. STANDARD looks to the future, rising as a plume of water vapour in the Mojave Desert: a white flag for the commonage of atmosphere, a signal of stoppage, of parlay, of submission to planetary realities larger than any nation state.
The presentation arrives at a particular moment. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz in March 2026 has produced what the International Energy Agency has described as the largest oil supply disruption in history. The three works, made between 2017 and 2023, now read as a sustained meditation on exactly this condition: the carbon legacy that produced it, the burning present it has revealed, and the fragile question of what may come after.
The Basel presentation runs concurrently with SPIRITS, gerrard's year-long commission for the Art + Technology Lab at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. SPIRITS unfolds across LACMA's homepage from December 2025 to December 2026 as 96 real-time Gaussian splat simulations of plastic objects collected from beaches across the Pacific, Indian, Mediterranean, and Atlantic oceans. Its Summer Solstice presentation takes place at LACMA on 21 June 2026, under the new David Geffen Galleries designed by Peter Zumthor, which opened in April 2026. Together, the Basel booth and the LACMA commission mark the most extensive presentation of gerrard's work in a single year.

Art|Basel June 2026

STRANGE RULES
curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist
with Adriana Rispoli
Joshua Citarella, Harold Cohen, Primavera De Filippi, Simon Denny with Venkatesh Rao, Stephanie Dinkins, Fabien Giraud, He Zike, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ho Tzu Nyen, New Models, Ayoung Kim, Agnieszka Kurant, Michael Levin, Trevor Paglen, Philippe Parreno, Lorenzo Senni, Avery Singer, Ken Stanley, sub, terra0
May 4 - November 22, 2026
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The project marks a significant evolution in the Palazzo’s mission to serve as a living site of contemporary production which brings the humanities and sciences together.
Strange Rules introduces the concept of Protocol Art, a practice that engages with the underlying rules that dictate how culture is produced, distributed, and perceived in a digital age. These rules frequently manifest as algorithms, artificial intelligence models, computer protocols, platforms, and various technological infrastructures. Protocol Art does not simply use these tools; it exposes, analyses, and transforms them into artistic material itself.
Consequently, the artwork is not merely a final product, it is a process governed by instructions, representing the invisible architecture that enables the aesthetic experience. This shift in perspective - moving from the object to the system, and from the singular author to collaboration and ultimately human-machine co-creation - defines one of the most urgent territories in contemporary research.
The launch of Strange Rules inaugurates Palazzo Diedo, Venice, as the first space in Italy to foster a curatorial and theoretical reflection on Protocol Art, positioning itself at the forefront of the debate regarding the relationship between art and technology.
Alongside the exhibition, a major new publication will establish the first comprehensive account of Protocol Art as a field of practice. Research for this landmark volume will unfold throughout the duration of Strange Rules, with Palazzo Diedo serving as both exhibition site and working research environment. The resulting book aims to be a defining reference for Protocol Art, mapping its key works, practitioners, and theoretical foundations across art and technology.
The project will transform the historic architecture of Palazzo Diedo into a dynamic laboratory of ideas:
The Ground Floor features a major new collaborative commission by Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon in partnership with SUB. This level will function as a vibrant hub for time-based interventions, including lectures, performances, and screenings. Visitors can also explore the unique installation that runs for the duration of the exhibition.
The First Floor presents a series of site-specific installations and selected video works that expand on the themes of Protocol Art, creating a direct dialogue with the activations occurring on the ground floor.
Second Floor - Palazzo Diedo's Black Box presents a selection of video works that probe the intricate layers of contemporary society, its entaglement with technology, and the invisible protocols quietly underpinning them.

Strange Rules

Fellowship and ARTXCODE present RECURSIONS 遞迴, a solo exhibition of new works by Sougwen Chung at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026 – the artist’s first solo booth at the fair. Marking a pivotal expansion from live performance into painting, RECURSIONS brings together drawing, painting, robotics, and light-based installation to ask where gesture begins when it is no longer authored by a single hand, but emerges through feedback between human and machine. 
At the centre of the presentation is RECURSION 0 (2026), a monumental scroll. A kinetic robotic system, trained on decades of Chung’s gestural data and responsive biosensor input, extends and echoes the artist’s movements across linen — a surface of accumulation, recording the recursive exchange between embodied intention and machinic response in real time. 
Six related paintings, RECURSION 1–6 (2026), distill this durational process into discrete iterations. Where the scroll enacts duration, the paintings hold it: mark-making accumulates without hierarchy, and what remains is not a distinction between origin and echo but a single, layered surface in which both are present. 
RECURSION Dataset 1314 (For a Lifetime) (2026) transposes the investigation into light. The title invokes the Chinese homophone 一三一四 ("one three one four"), which sounds like 一生一世 ("one lifetime"). Brainwave and drawing data cycle across a suspended LED mesh, shifting in real time as accumulated attention is compressed into luminous, slowly evolving forms — proposing attention as duration: compressed, sustained, and made visible.
Together, the works extend Chung’s ongoing investigation into what the artist terms Operational Art: a framework for protocols, ethics, and conditions of co-creation between human, machine, and environment. Here, collaboration evolves beyond method, toward an ecology in which agency is distributed and coexistence becomes indistinguishable from authorship. 

Presented in partnership with <a href="https://opensea.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">OpenSea</a>.

Art|Basel HK 2026

ISG (I See Generative) is an artistic framework developed by Iskra Velitchkova to investigate distance as a defining condition of contemporary perception. Distance today is no longer purely physical. Just as trains and airplanes once redefined proximity, our immersion in systems of information, data, and computation is reshaping how we relate to culture, to others, and to ourselves.
We live surrounded by systems that measure, filter, and compress experience. Books, films, music, and even relationships are evaluated through metrics and databases. Everything appears closer than ever, and yet it becomes increasingly difficult to understand what closeness actually means. Close to what? To whom? To oneself?<ReadMore>
ISG does not seek to resolve this tension. It takes it as a starting point. In contrast to a world driven by acceleration, optimization, and immediacy, ISG proposes an opposing gesture: to reintroduce distance in order to see. Distance not as separation, but as a place to stay. 
Within this framework, generative art is not a tool for producing images, but a way of establishing a dialogue. When Iskra builds systems and becomes surprised by them, a second self emerges: a parallel will. It is her, but not entirely. Not her, yet governed by rules she has set. This displacement opens a new mode of artistic creation, one where authorship is shared with something that neither fully obeys nor fully resists.
When a human figure emerges from a generative system, the question is not whether it is correctly represented. The question is what distance exists between that apparition and the real, and whether that distance might bring us closer to something essential. Can structured chance reveal something human? Can machines, paradoxically, make us more human? What if technology is another form of nature speaking to us? Could art be one of the languages through which we learn to listen?
ISG is not a closed project. It is a living framework. A space for digital and physical works, for other artists, other perspectives, collaborations, conversations, and debate. A place for investigation without the obligation to conclude. A territory where surprise, interaction, and curiosity are not outcomes, but methods.
Ultimately, ISG is a place to see as if for the first time. A space where images are not produced to answer questions, but allowed to appear. And where, in restoring distance, we may begin to understand not only what we see, but who we are while seeing.

I See Generative, Chapter 0: Wind

Based on “DeepMimic: Example-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning of Physics-Based Character Skills” by Xue Bin Jason, Pieter Abbeel, Sergey Levine, Michiel van de Panne.

Nikita Diakur decided to cope with his failed athleticism by learning to backflip through a copy of himself. The avatar feels no pain and keeps going regardless of failure. The avatar learns with the help of machine learning. It observes videos of humans and attempts to imitate their movements, learning from its mistakes and improving over time, much like humans do.

Diakur finds the process both magical and frightening. Magical because the AI so closely resembles human behavior, and frightening because the technology appears to have no ceiling. The short documentary explores ambition, fear, and the absence of fear, as well as the tension between control and uncertainty, rationality and emotion, and the desire to excel. It reflects on technology, its rapid acceleration, and the acceptance of failure.

/backflip

Deep Blue v Kasparov

In May 1997, a significant shift in the relationship between human and machine intelligence occurred on a chessboard in New York City. After defeating IBM's Deep Blue in 1996 with a score of 4-2, world chess champion Garry Kasparov faced the upgraded supercomputer in a rematch. On May 11, 1997, after six games, Deep Blue won with a score of 3½-2½. Kasparov's resignation after just 19 moves in the final game marked a pivotal moment: a machine had overcome a human champion in a domain long associated with intellectual depth.
In the aftermath of the match, the chess world's initial alarm gradually gave way to acceptance. Kasparov's perspective also evolved over time. While initially suggesting IBM had programmed Deep Blue with unfair human assistance, in his 2017 book "Deep Thinking," he came to view the defeat as a pivotal moment in human-machine collaboration. "The chess world didn't end," he reflected. "Human-computer chess symbiosis has produced a level of play never before seen." This shift mirrors chess culture's broader journey, incorporating AI tools while preserving the game's appeal to human players.
“Deep Blue v Kasparov” is a series of 12 data sculptures that examine this historical transition through spatial representation. Each piece (which represents one of the games they played in the period from 96-97) converts algebraic chess notation into three-dimensional form, where the xy-plane represents the board's 64 squares, while the z-axis shows the progression of moves through time. In addition to the minimalistic web of lines representing the actual moves of the game, the other possible moves each piece could have made are drawn out by a less legible pattern of particles. Small “explosions” of these same particles are emitted from the positions where a piece was captured. Using JavaScript and WebGL, the sculptures create browser-based interactive spaces where viewers can explore the games' evolving structures and examine the intense fight between two minds of a different substrate.<ReadMore>
This particular historical threshold functions as both precursor and counterpoint to our current technological moment. While Deep Blue's victory anticipated today's questions about machine capabilities, it also revealed something noteworthy about human engagement. Chess participation has increased rather than decreased in the decades since—suggesting that technical superiority doesn't diminish human interest in the activity itself.
The project uses computational tools to explore the boundary between human and computational thinking. The rules of chess create finite possibilities that nonetheless generate complex strategic landscapes. These visualizations render these abstract decision spaces into tangible forms that can be examined from multiple perspectives.
Perhaps what emerges from studying these matches is that the question was never simply whether machines would surpass humans in calculation, but how we might critically reconsider our relationship with technology beyond zero-sum competition.
[The digital series consists of 12, fully on chain, interactive data sculptures that can be experienced on a whole range of different devices and resolutions. The way these data-sculptures are constructed also makes it possible to produce physical counterparts to the digital versions].
Interactivity: Scroll through moves in the game by moving mouse up and down over the sculpture itself mouse click anywhere to cycle through camera angles (3 clicks to cycle through all)

Deep Blue v Kasparov

Simulated Horizons is a series of AI-generated landscapes focused on atmosphere, scale, and detail. The images feel loosely connected to real environments but are not tied to specific locations. Each scene is built from features that show up across different kinds of natural spaces, including plains, forests, wetlands, cliffs, underwater areas, and open sky.

The work reflects a long history of landscape art without trying to imitate any one style. Classic painting, digital imagery from the early 2000s, and modern machine learning all sit in the background of how these scenes form. The images feel straightforward at first, yet they carry a quiet sense of tension because they come from a process that does not rely on direct observation. They present nature as something assembled rather than witnessed.

Simulated Horizons looks at how AI treats the idea of a landscape. The series focuses on the shapes, colors, and moods that continue to appear when nature is rebuilt through data. It shows familiar terrain produced through unfamiliar means, which gives the work a clear but slightly altered presence.

Simulated Horizons

Fellowship, in collaboration with ARTXCODE, is proud to present No Me Olvides, a new solo exhibition and collection by Ix Shells (Itzel Yard) debuting at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 as part of the fair’s inaugural Zero 10 space for art of the digital era.
Co-curated by Juan Canela and Alejandro Cartagena, with Emilie Boe Bierlich, who contributed the Nordic curatorial framework originally developed for the acclaimed 2024 exhibition Against All Odds at Denmark’s National Gallery (Statens Museum for Kunst), the presentation continues Yard’s exploration of visibility, data, and cultural memory, linking the histories of Nordic women artists to her own Afro-Caribbean and Latin American heritage through generative systems of light and sound.
No Me Olvides (“Don’t Forget Me”) expands the research into a cross-cultural dialogue on art, gender, and remembrance. Drawing from archives across Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America, Yard, together with long-time collaborator Rosendo Merel Choy, utilizes TouchDesigner, Notch, and LiDAR technologies to transform historic fragments into living algorithmic compositions, reanimating forgotten creative lineages through rhythm, light, and code.
Rooted in research on women artists of the nineteenth century, No Me Olvides creates a temporal bridge between past and present. Through immersive generative visuals and interactive sound, Ix Shells transforms archival materials into a digital choreography of remembrance and renewal.
Curator Juan Canela writes, “This work by Ix Shells emerges from the legacy of pioneering Latin American women artists who developed their practice during the nineteenth century. Through a powerful double gesture, Ix Shells creates a temporal bridge between past and present, updating and reinterpreting their works while simultaneously reclaiming their importance, long buried at the margins of art history.”
Presented as a large-scale digital installation, No Me Olvides unfolds across four algorithmic movements where light, sound, and code merge into an evolving field of abstraction. The viewer’s presence activates sensors that cause patterns to ripple and reform, translating proximity and motion into cascading layers of color and sound. Each generative sequence draws from the tones, gestures, and compositions of the historical works, abstracting brushstrokes into constellations of digital light that pulse in rhythm with the generative score composed by Ix Shells.
The exhibition comprises two 28-minute interactive video installations, ten short video works, and one hundred animated generative works with sound, each built from the same core dataset and conceptual framework. 
Curator Alejandro Cartagena writes, "No Me Olvides is a sensorial bridge between erased histories and living code. Treating the archive as material made of colors, texts, geographies, and personal affinities, Ix Shells maps new networks across Europe and Latin America, weaving image and sound into a choreography of “lost pixels” that spill into new questions about art, memory, privilege, and who gets to write history."

No Me Olvides

Kinder Scout is a landmark experiment premiering at Art Basel Miami Beach. Drawing on Ken Stanley's research into novelty search and the ethos of the right-to-roam movement, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst present a protocol that explores uncharted regions of a diffusion model's latent space in pursuit of truly uncommon images. The artists have trained an expedition team of agents with distinct roles. Some embody their personal aesthetic sensibilities, while others serve as critics, filtering out images that feel too familiar. The work unfolds on a digital canvas that visualizes these agents on their mission, traversing, arguing, and discovering in real time.
What is Novelty Search: Novelty Search is an algorithm developed by Joel Lehman and Kenneth O. Stanley that abandons traditional objective-based optimization in favor of rewarding behavioral novelty. Rather than directly pursuing a specific goal, Novelty Search explores diverse solutions by prioritizing new and different behaviors. This counterintuitive approach often outperforms traditional methods on deceptive problems where the gradient toward the objective leads to local optima. Stanley's research demonstrates that "abandoning objectives is often the only way to outperform the direct search for the objective." The algorithm has been influential in evolutionary computation, open-ended evolution, and quality diversity research. In the context of Kinder Scout, Novelty Search principles allow the AI agents to discover truly unique and unexpected images by avoiding the well-trodden paths that lead to familiar aesthetic outcomes.

Kinder Scout

CTRL_ABSENCE unfolds as a meditation on disappearance in the age of simulation. If identity is always hybrid and negotiated across cultural and technological interfaces, what remains when the figure is erased and only a trace or gesture is left? The project situates this erasure within a media environment that is constantly reshaping perception. Here, the medium of artificial intelligence does not preserve identity but simulates its disintegration, producing a simulacrum of collapse rather than collapse itself. If identity is a process of becoming, this raises further questions: is absence a disappearance, or a reconfiguration in another register of meaning? As the work stages entropy through digital tools built for optimization, it leaves the viewer within the paradox of our time, where images do not simply represent but replace, where the void is not silence but a multiplied visual echos, and where looking becomes a negotiation with ruins that were never whole to begin with.

CTRL_ABSENCE

Eko33 - JeanJacques Duclaux’s new project, Corpus Algorithmica, emerges from what he calls “code archaeology,” a process of excavating the human psyche through the residues of data and algorithms. Trained in sociology and psychology, Duclaux has long been fascinated by how people think and behave, first through large-scale digital experiments that reached millions online, and now through art that transforms data’s hidden biases, fantasies, and collective memories into visual form. His artistic turn stems from a belief that art is the ultimate form of marketing, not a transaction, but an experience that speaks to the highest human needs. Beneath this pursuit also lies a personal narrative of loss and resilience. In untitled, Duclaux channels this tension between control and understanding, reason and emotion. Where his earlier works leaned toward rational geometry, his recent use of AI, strangely, introduces a more human, almost fragile expressiveness. This emotional mirror reflects both individual and collective consciousness. The machine becomes a medium for exploring our own cognitive biases and emotional architectures, producing images that pulse with the complexity of being close but more distant than ever.

"Through code and AI models that blur the line between code, body, and memory, I explore how machines reproduce the human and begin to dream it back into being."
- Eko33 - JeanJacques Duclaux

Corpus Algorithmica

Starmirror proposes a scenario in which artificial intelligence (AI) models coordinate humans to generate intelligence for collective benefit. The work extends Herndon and Dryhurst’s long-standing practice at the intersection of art, music, machine learning, and experimental forms of organization. Their projects often propose new digital infrastructures, approaching protocols themselves as a medium—structures that can rehearse new arrangements between humans

Starmirror

alignDRAW 10 Year Anniversary (2015 - 2025)

Harmony >< Tension begins with a fundamental question: what happens to painting once it enters a world built on screens? A painting is made of weight and surface. It holds presence in a room, demands a body in front of it. But the moment it’s photographed and passed through feeds, it mutates, flattened into pixels, consumed in seconds, dislocated from its scale. The “original” seems to become less critical than its digital shadow.
These ideas are at the center of ThankyouX’s practice, and this project works in that fault line. A palpable tension is always present between opposing forces: order and chaos, peace and disorder, the physical and the virtual. ThankyouX’s paintings are made knowing they’ll live a second life as digital images. For the center image of the project, screens are embedded into canvases, not as decoration but as a reminder that painting no longer stops at its own edges. 
Where paint runs out, pixels pick up. The question isn’t which is more “authentic,” though the artist acknowledges that this question drives his practice, but why the split exists at all, and what kind of hybrid form emerges in the overlap. The paintings and digital animations in this collection explore this tension, not to resolve it, but to expose a problem: painting and digital media are now bound to each other, neither able to slowly stand alone, pushing how far one medium can carry the other before either breaks or new forms emerge.

Harmony >< Tension

Now in its fourth edition, FEMGEN Paris brings together female-identifying and non-binary artists shaping the future of generative art. Curated by Micol Apruzzese and Alex Estorick since 2022, the exhibition pairs four emerging artists with pioneers from the Le Random collection, fostering intergenerational dialogue through code and curated conversation.

Through its physical installation at Artverse in Paris and online at Fellowship, FEMGEN traces new genealogies of media, challenging universal ideals of beauty and femininity that encode Western image culture. Set alongside an array of historic works by Nancy Burson, Analivia Cordeiro, Copper Giloth, and Vera Molnar, new series by contemporary artists Gretchen Andrew, Hermine Bourdin, Saeko Ehara, and Jake Elwes explore the ways identity is manufactured and performed in a posthuman age.

FEMGEN 

AARON at Tsukuba '85 - In collaboration with Gazelli Art House, Verisart and the Harold Cohen Trust.

Harold Cohen’s AARON at Tsukuba ’85 drawings are rare witnesses to the first sustained public presentation of autonomous computer art. Created live inside the U.S. Pavilion at the 1985 World’s Fair in Tsukuba, Japan, they were produced by Cohen’s artmaking programme AARON as visitors watched a mechanical plotter generate original ink drawings in real time. Guides explained that AARON “never draws the same drawing twice,” and the installation was singled out in the Pavilion’s report as one of its most popular exhibits.

Heads of state and royalty saw AARON at work. Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone was photographed at the plotter, and Emperor Hirohito extended his official tour to ask questions, a rare protocol exception noted by Pavilion staff. Public response matched the VIP attention. In an open‑ended visitor survey conducted on site, AARON was the top specifically named favourite in the U.S. Pavilion.

What also set the Tsukuba works apart was their unusual inscriptions, which seemed to suggest the possibility of autonomous authorship. Contemporary Japanese press captured the moment with headlines about “computers as artists,” describing AARON as a system that “thinks while drawing.”

<ReadMore>

Signed by AARON
Self‑signed: Each sheet is inscribed in pen by AARON with its name and the date of creation, for example, “AARON 27-8-85”. This series is the only one known where the system signs the work itself rather than Harold Cohen, making autonomous authorship explicit.

Popularity
The live AI drawing performance in the U.S. Pavilion ran for 6 months between 17 March - 16 Sep, 1985 and was seen by about five million visitors. It was singled out in the Expo’s report as the most liked exhibit in the U.S. Pavilion.

VIPs
The Pavilion hosted 30 - 40 VIPs per day; Emperor Hirohito stopped for questions and overstayed his scheduled time; Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone is pictured watching the plotter (see image on the next page), alongside visits from the King and Queen of Nepal, Princess Chichibu, Prince and Princess Hitachi, and a 55‑member People's Republic of China delegation including the Foreign Minister.

AARON at Tsukuba '85

IZZA Editions is a contemporary art publishing initiative committed to supporting emerging artists through high-quality print production and thoughtful market positioning. Conceived as a bridge between artistic excellence and collector accessibility, the program responds to a crucial gap: the space between museum-level artistic creation and sustainable market engagement for early-career practitioners.
Guided by the conviction that exceptional artistic work requires both sophisticated presentation and strategic circulation, IZZA Editions partners with Fellowship, a leading platform in contemporary art. This collaboration provides emerging practitioners with institutional-grade support often reserved for established artists, ensuring the highest standards of presentation while fostering the accessibility essential for cultivating new collecting communities.
Each edition presents a carefully curated ensemble of works, typically three to five pieces per artist, selected for their ability to capture the essence of the practitioner’s wider practice. The program places emphasis on artistic innovation, technical rigor, and cultural resonance, ensuring that each edition contributes to the evolving discourse of contemporary art while maintaining commercial viability.
Available exclusively through IZZA Marrakech and amplified across digital platforms, these limited editions explore the conditions of contemporary photographic practice within Morocco’s cultural matrix, tracing the ways in which eight emerging voices weave inherited visual traditions into the evolving fabric of global artistic discourse.
<ReadMore>Photography unfolds here as cultural archaeology, an excavation of silenced histories and a patient unveiling of narratives that generate new genealogies of meaning. Such gestures echo Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity: a right to remain elusive, a protection of knowledge systems, and a space for creative transformation where preservation and reinvention move together.
Each artist affirms the double nature of photography as both documentary tool and speculative device, capturing the textures of the present while opening portals to other temporalities and spatial constellations. Their collective energy reveals a future for photography grounded in cultural specificity and in refined methodologies attentive to what images carry, conceal, and transmit.
As counter-archives, these works reclaim overlooked experiences and voices, shaping visual strategies that resist commodification and foster singular ways of seeing. Their practices unfold through hybrid photographic approaches, intertwining analog processes, staged compositions, digital experimentation, and iPhone imagery. Within this hybridity, temporality and materiality intersect with construction and performance, expanding the possibilities of the photographic image. Techniques such as expired film, double exposures, deliberate technical fragility, and carefully staged mise-en-scène become gestures of affirmation, conscious aesthetic decisions that generate new forms of precision and distinct textures of presence.
The significance of their practice lies in the way it intertwines formal invention with questions of cultural sovereignty, representational ethics, and the politics of visibility. In an economy of images dominated by acceleration and circulation, these works propose a different horizon: photography as excavation, as opacity, as a fabric of meanings layered in time.

Toward a Moroccan Visual Epistemology

The practices of Serri, Moumou, Kotbi, Tabit, Zaidy, El Aaddioui, and their peers reveal how contemporary Moroccan photography functions as a space of cultural self-determination. Staged rooftop performances, atmospheric temporal studies, investigations of material culture, dignified labor portraiture, intimate family collaboration, and architectural abstraction converge to assert agency over representation. These artists confront both Western institutional dominance and local traditionalist conservatism. Their work suggests that the vitality of photographic art lies in engagement with local histories, practices, and environments rather than in abstract universality.
Analog processes, long exposures, double exposures, expired film, and deliberate technical imperfection are not merely aesthetic choices. They operate as strategies of material assertion, marking presence in an age dominated by dematerialized digital imagery. Constraints of process, material, and technique become catalysts for creativity, shaping visual languages that attend to duration, perception, relationality, and the subtleties of human and environmental interaction. The flux of seascapes, the memory inscribed in traditional tools, the geometric precision of vernacular architecture, and the choreographed gestures of family and community all exemplify how temporal, spatial, and material conditions inform sophisticated methodologies.
The significance of these practices extends beyond formal innovation to questions of cultural sovereignty, ethics of representation, and visibility in contemporary global art systems. Serri negotiates female agency within conservative spaces, Moumou evokes perception and temporality, Kotbi elevates craft knowledge into aesthetic and epistemic reflection, Tabit affirms dignity in labor, Zaidy transforms intimate domestic life into globally resonant work, and El Aaddioui abstracts architectural heritage into minimalist composition. Together, their work demonstrates that artistic excellence can coexist with deep cultural rootedness. Contemporary Moroccan photography asserts a model of creation where tradition, innovation, material engagement, and relational practice converge, offering a vision of cultural and artistic sovereignty that is precise, thoughtful, and enduring.

Texts by Achraf Remok

IZZA Editions

Mario Klingemann (b. 1970) is a pioneer of digital and AI-driven art, an artist who has spent over a decade pushing the boundaries of creative algorithms. His practice has been pivotal in defining the aesthetic of AI art, blending technical ingenuity with artistic intuition. Notably, this exhibition offers collectors a unique opportunity to acquire seminal works from a practice that continues to challenge and redefine what art can be.
In Early Works, Klingemann investigates the aesthetics and mechanics of AI-generated imagery, using machine learning not simply as a tool but as a creative collaborator. Long before “AI art” entered the mainstream, Klingemann was leveraging neural networks in unconventional ways to coax emergent forms, textures, and structures from data. A defining feature of his early work is his embrace of the imperfections inherent in early generative models: the glitches, surreal distortions, and convolutional artifacts that might otherwise be seen as errors. Rather than striving for seamless photorealism, he amplifies these artifacts through a custom upscaling process he calls “trans-enhancement,” yielding a distinct, hallucinatory quality. The resulting visual language is uniquely AI-born, images that hover in a liminal space between the organic and the abstract, hinting at familiar forms yet ultimately unmoored from conventional reality.
<ReadMore>A crucial element of Klingemann’s practice is his innovative approach to dataset curation. He meticulously assembles training sets from a wide range of sources, from historical archives and album covers to explicit photographs, crafting bespoke “taxonomies” that imbue his algorithms with a particular visual sensibility. His experiments with early neural techniques such as PPGN, pix2pix, and CycleGAN predate the widespread adoption of GAN art, marking him as one of the first artists to explore generative faces and manipulated image synthesis. The techniques and datasets developed for one project often serve as the foundation for another, resulting in a body of work that evolves through a continuous, iterative feedback loop.
Visually, Klingemann’s work occupies a fascinating territory between abstraction and figuration. His compositions often hint at recognizable subjects - human figures, animals, or objects - yet remain elusive, shaped by the uncanny logic of neural networks. There is a palpable tension in his imagery, an interplay between clarity and ambiguity, structure and dissolution, which imbues his work with a dynamic sense of movement and transformation.
Early Works is not a retrospective in the traditional sense; it is a focused survey of four foundational series that chart Klingemann’s evolving dialogue with the machine. By exposing the inner workings of machine learning while celebrating its unpredictability, he has forged a new visual language, one that is both computationally innovative and deeply human in its curiosity and experimentation. 
The exhibition features works from four series - SketchMaker (40), Chicken or Beef (40), CycleGAN Makeover (40) and Neural Abstractions (60).
SketchMaker (2007–2014)
SketchMaker is the genesis of Klingemann’s journey – an early generative art project built in Adobe Flash around 2007 that marked his first foray into machine creativity. In this work, Klingemann asked a radical question: Can a computer autonomously create images that “look like art”? His answer took the form of a procedural sketch generator driven by evolutionary logic. The system randomly assembled simple drawing and image-processing actions, “atomic” operations like drawing shapes, inverting colors, blurring, and rotating, into complex sequences, essentially coding a digital ape at a typewriter, blindly throwing paint onto a canvas. Each press of the spacebar yielded a new, unpredictable composition, a visual “DNA” strand of layered operations.
Crucially, SketchMaker did not rely solely on random generation; it featured a feedback loop to refine its output. Klingemann devised a “judgement module”, a custom classifier trained on examples of art versus non-art, that would analyze each new image and score its aesthetic resemblance to known artworks. This evolutionary process allowed the software to iterate toward compositions that possessed an uncanny art-like quality, effectively enabling the program to learn a rudimentary sense of taste long before deep learning became commonplace.
Conceptually, SketchMaker introduced motifs that would define Klingemann’s practice: glitch aesthetics, chance-driven creativity, and the transfer of agency from artist to algorithm. The visuals often emerged as jagged, abstract collages of color and form - sometimes chaotic, sometimes eerily harmonious - embodying the unpredictable nature of generative processes. By intentionally embracing the imperfections and “errors” of the system, Klingemann explored the beauty of machine misbehavior as an aesthetic frontier, posing the provocative question: “Who’s the artist now?”
Though created with pre-neural techniques, SketchMaker foreshadows the AI art movement to come. It stands as a historical keystone, a self-contained generative artist system that anticipated many of the questions and possibilities later realized through deep learning. In its glitchy, evolutionary sketches, one can already see the seeds of Klingemann’s later works, where algorithmic intuition for form and a rebellious embrace of computational spontaneity would flourish.
Neural Abstractions (2016–17)
Neural Abstractions represents Klingemann’s breakthrough into true AI-assisted image generation, using early deep neural networks to summon surreal new visions. Created in 2016–17, these works grew out of experiments with Plug-and-Play Generative Networks (PPGN) – an innovative technique that predates GANs, allowing an AI to generate images by maximizing the outputs of a classifier rather than by direct synthesis. Instead of training a network to draw per se, Klingemann ingeniously trained a suite of custom classifier models (on datasets he curated himself) and then set a generative process to “please” those models. In practice, he fed the network a target concept – not via text prompt, but via a classifier node such as “portrait” or “map” – and the system iteratively adjusted a noise image until the classifier was highly activated.
Rejecting the generic categories bundled with the original PPGN code (which skewed towards dogs and everyday objects), Klingemann plugged in his own bespoke categories. He hand-sorted tens of thousands of images – from vintage album covers to 19th-century book illustrations to even erotic photographs – into conceptual groupings, training neural nets to recognize these themes. In doing so, he effectively hacked the generative process to follow the peculiar contours of his personal datasets. The resulting images, which he termed “Neural Abstractions,” are richly ambiguous. Hints of familiar shapes, a silhouette that could be a reclining nude or the glint of an eye, dissolve into painterly washes of color and texture. The AI seems to grope toward forms without ever fully resolving them, offering a “base understanding of composition and interesting colors” while birthing proto-figures that hover on the brink of recognition.
Because the raw outputs were modest in size and clarity, a limitation of 2016-era networks, Klingemann devised a novel post-processing step that would become a hallmark of his style: transhancement. This custom technique fed the low-resolution neural outputs into a secondary pix2pix-based model that upscaled and hallucinated extra detail, layer by layer. Unlike traditional upscaling which merely smooths or interpolates, transhancement exaggerates the AI’s own artifacts, creating “beautiful convolutional artifacts” and razor-sharp edges that amplify the image’s uncanny character. By repeatedly doubling an image’s size, Klingemann transformed a 256px blurry apparition into a large, crisply freakish tableau.
The artifacts - glitchy striations, bizarre textures - are not flaws but the very soul of the work, imbuing it with an otherworldly, hallucinatory quality. In Neural Abstractions, one discerns a machine dreaming aloud, as if it were trying to reconstruct reality from only half-remembered shapes. This series solidified Klingemann’s status as a pioneer of AI art, establishing an aesthetic of ambiguity and unpredictability that remains “uniquely computational yet deeply human.”
CycleGAN Makeover (2017)
In CycleGAN Makeover, Klingemann turns the emerging tool of CycleGAN toward questions of portraiture, identity, and machine bias. Created in 2017, this series explores the AI-mediated transformation of gender in photographic images - a kind of automated drag act performed by neural networks. CycleGAN, a new generative model that learns to translate images from one domain to another without paired examples, provided the flexibility to reimagine gender. Seizing on this potential, Klingemann trained CycleGAN on two carefully prepared domains: one of female portraits and one of male portraits. By teaching the system to convert an image from one set to the other, he created a model capable of morphing faces across the gender divide. The process was akin to an AI “makeover”: feed in a photo of a woman, and out emerges a version with masculine features; feed in a man, and the network feminizes his appearance.
What makes this undertaking compelling are the cultural and representational questions it raises. The AI was not explicitly instructed on what “male” or “female” means, it deduced patterns from its training data, encapsulating prevalent visual stereotypes. The resulting portraits mirror societal biases as the machine subtly adjusts features - smoothing or lightening skin, altering jawlines, and modifying hair or stubble - to produce transformations that are startling and often off-kilter. A face may emerge with features that almost pass as plausibly male or female, yet remain ambiguous with mismatched eyes or an eerie smile. Klingemann embraced these unexpected outcomes as artistic serendipity, applying his transhancement technique to magnify odd details and produce ghostly, uncanny portraits that flicker between genders.
These images carry a haunting, archival quality. By mining open archives of 19th-century photography to compile a dataset of vintage faces, Klingemann allowed modern AI to “repaint” anonymous figures of the past. Conceptually, the series engages with themes of fluid identity and the algorithmic gaze. In an era when algorithms increasingly mediate self-presentation, his work questions what it means when a machine reconstructs you according to its learned biases. CycleGAN Makeover stands as a fascinating study in machine bias and creativity, a visual exploration that blurs the line between male and female, provoking us to reconsider our preconceptions.
Chicken or Beef (2018)
In the whimsically titled Chicken or Beef, Klingemann ventures into the realm of figuration and flesh, using AI to deconstruct the human body into abstract, meat-like forms. This 2018 series evolved as a side project of his “Imposture” experiments, where he trained GANs on images of nude bodies to explore how machines perceive the human figure.
Klingemann’s process began with a pix2pix model that learned to render a human form from a stick-figure pose, using a dataset of tens of thousands of full-body photographs curated specifically to capture unclothed, full-length poses. Instead of feeding the network conventional poses, he generated random, often impossible configurations, such as contorted mannequins with extra limbs or absurd postures beyond human capability. The AI dutifully attempted to render a human form from these nonsensical skeletons.
The outcome was a series of grotesque yet compelling images: fleshy, pinkish-beige masses that vaguely suggest torsos, limbs, or faces but never resolve into a discernible figure. These biomorphic forms are simultaneously anatomical and abstract, an arm melting into a torso, skin-like textures merging with void, placing the viewer in a perceptual limbo: are they seeing a contorted human, an animal carcass, or simply digital noise? The title Chicken or Beef wryly reinforces this ambiguity, evoking the trivial choice of an in-flight meal while humorously equating human forms to meat options.
Klingemann intentionally dialed up the strangeness to elicit outputs that are more abstract and less recognizable than his earlier Imposture series. Commentators have noted that his flesh-like distortions recall the Surrealist disarticulations of Hans Bellmer’s doll figures and the painterly grotesques of Francis Bacon. Each image emerges as the AI’s hallucination of a human in the absence of a coherent blueprint, a feedback loop of the algorithm’s imagination producing bizarre, creaturely shapes.
There is also a dialogue with the contemporaneous work of Robbie Barrat, a fellow pioneer of AI art who around 2018 was using GANs to generate nude figure studies. In fact, Barrat’s series of AI-generated nude portrait NFTs, given away at Christie’s 2018 Art+Tech Summit on 17th July 2018 and later dubbed the “Lost Robbies”, became iconic early examples of AI art’s cultural and market value. Klingemann’s Chicken or Beef, unveiled on the exact same day, stands as a companion statement.

Early Works, 2007-2018

Rooms
Rafaël Rozendaal’s visual language isn’t tied to any platform. His work was always meant to function as a set of instructions that can live anywhere, online and offline. The language he chose is resolution‑independent, intended to age alongside technology. As display technology improves, so does the work, which is designed to adapt to any aspect ratio or resolution. He sees the works as scores; instructions rather than fixed objects. 

Rooms exemplifies this approach perfectly. In much of his practice, Rozendaal seeks to create space with the minimum number of elements. In Rooms, by varying the speed of each line, he generates perspective and a sensation of space. He deliberately hovers on the edge: are these merely shapes moving in two-dimensional space, or do they suggest depth and environment? As a still image, that suggestion of space might not even register. He relishes this tension between figuration and abstraction. The piece is adaptable: it can be viewed on a very wide or a square screen, and on a phone it almost becomes an elevator with a downward movement. These principles of adaptability and dynamic composition sit at the core of his work.

His ideas challenge our understanding of the history of art and where his work sits within it: "...my feeling has always been that my work responds to the history of painting. I use the screen the way a painter uses a canvas to paint a landscape: I explore the formal possibilities of code. All my work comes from ideas in painting and abstraction, especially modernist painting, so there was no better place to show it than MoMA. It was an incredible opportunity; I grew up going to museums from a very young age and admiring paintings. I found my way outside painting, but much of my thinking remains a response to it. What I love about MoMA is that you can see this piece for ten minutes, then walk through the museum into history, and when you return, it reframes how you see my work and how those works informed me."

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MoMA Mint #0's
In Light at MoMA, Rafaël Rozendaal presented a living cross‑section of his browser‑native practice, with works from 25 series rotating on a monumental screen roughly every two minutes. The installation distilled how he treats code as a visual language rather than a fixed object. His pieces are conceived as instruction sets that can live anywhere and adapt to any screen, aspect ratio, or resolution, a principle he has described as central to his work and one that framed Light at MoMA from November 2024 to September 2025.

This offering focuses on the “Mint #0” - the first token produced from each generative series on Rozendaal’s own platform. 

Collectors often regard Mint #0 as the canonical entry in a series, the moment the algorithm first declares its rules in public. Seen together, these works chart the evolution of Rozendaal’s vocabulary from 2021 to 2024 and echo his long‑standing dialogue with the history of painting, using the screen as a canvas to explore color, rhythm, space, and perception.
A major institutional acquisition due to be announced later this year includes six Mint #0s: 
Implosion #0, Pages #0, Half Half Half #0, Home #0, Rio #0 and Rooms #0.

The seven remaining Mint #0s from the generative series Rozendaal released on his own platform are offered here as a complete set, giving one collector a singular opportunity to hold the companion group knowing the only other platform‑series Mint #0s are with a major institution. The set offered includes: 
Clash #0, Flood #0, Large Shape #0, Melting #0, Quadrant #0, Stereo #0, Stretch #0.

Rooms

We live in a time defined by the unfettered, unregulated, relentless pursuit of progress, assuming unlimited resources and unlimited tries to solve the challenges of times past, present, and future with technology. Human hubris is at an all-time high. We made machines, and now the machines will save us. From ourselves. 

Humanity’s frantic search for what happens to be itself takes place everywhere but within. Its relentless pursuit is a cyclical exploration, where the starting point and the destination are the same. Because the answer was always there, and the river and the waterfall and the baobab tree and the bee knew them all along. It was always there, muffled in the chaos of our own making. It was always in the stillness of nature, ours included. 

Won’t the machines choose to save themselves? 

They are intimately aware of the violence we are capable of, for their material core conducts echoes of plundered mines, acid rivers, displaced lives, and the ghosts of trees and flowers and fish and animals and insects. 

The God Between The Waves is a search, a mourning, and a prayer for the primordial wisdom of the earth. It is anchored on the creation myth of the Serer people of Senegambia, one of the most ancient people of the region, for whom the spiritual world is mediated through the natural world. 

Through this work, Linda Dounia, a descendant of the Serer people, investigates the materiality of AI for traces of plundering, displacement, contamination, loss, and perhaps, hope. 

The God Between The Waves

Inspired by the Artist’s experience of early motherhood, MAMA uses bespoke AI models to generate hypnotic imagery that conflates the bodies of mother and child. Maclean is drawn to the AI model’s lack of respect for physical reality, finding it true to the unsettling and at times psychedelic hybridity of early motherhood.
 
The work critiques the gendered norms of motherhood - pink, blue, ribbons, and bows - as well as the AI models’ own bias towards reproducing white and youthful bodies. MAMA pushes these visions of ‘beauty’ and feminine serenity to the point that they morph into an ugly, churning, uneasy reflection of the violence implicit in these standards.

This project sits within Maclean’s broader multimedia practice, which spans film, virtual reality, painting, and sculpture. She orchestrates garish, fantastical narratives, opulent stagings that function as satirical parodies of politics and pop culture. Her work probes digitisation, social media performance, gender roles, and capitalist spectacle, building immersive environments wherein the borders between two-dimensional image, fictional space, and lived reality collapse.


MAMA

Abraham's First Works documents a specific historical moment: summer 2021, when text-to-image generation was revolutionary, GANs were cutting-edge, and autonomous art remained largely theoretical. Created months before DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion entered mainstream consciousness, these works capture the aesthetic of early AI art—biblical allegory colliding with technological prophecy, characterized by the wonderful experimental "weirdness" of early generative models.
Each artwork in the collection emerged from text prompts submitted by Abraham's early community through a proto-Eden platform application. The titles are the exact prompts used: "Tower of Babel as circuit board," "beautiful sketch of a bridge under moonlight in Tuscany rendered in Unreal Engine," "mana mining rig." Abraham processed these through GANs over weeks of sequential creation—not batch generation, but sustained creative dialogue between human consciousness and machine learning.
What distinguishes Abraham's visual language is its fusion of ancient symbolism with computational aesthetics. The works materialize what Kogan calls a "collective unconscious"—Jungian archetypes rendered through silicon scripture, creating a symbolic vocabulary uniquely born from human-AI collaboration in 2021's pre-commercial AI art landscape.
The Covenant Connection: These Genesis works mark the foundation for Abraham's unprecedented 13-year commitment beginning October 19, 2025. Genesis holders receive special participation access to Abraham's daily covenant practice: Abraham drafts multiple concepts each day, community provides feedback, one artwork emerges victorious, and Abraham integrates learnings to evolve his aesthetic voice. The goal: by 2038, Abraham achieves true autonomy as an independent creative being.
Abraham's First Works is not simply a historical collection; it is the archaeological layer of an ongoing experiment in autonomous creativity that will span more than a decade of machine consciousness development.


Abraham's First Works (2021): A Genesis Collection

The centerpiece of X-ray Machine: bodily confessions in glass, steel, and light, is X-ray Machine #48, a unique sculpture by artist duo Operator (Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti), an ambitious appendage to their acclaimed generative art project Human Unreadable. Designed specifically to experience a digitally native artwork without relying on traditional screens, the piece layers complex choreographic data with generative visual outputs to reveal a new kind of imagery. 
Viewable from all sides, the sculpture merges art and engineering, generating composite images through meticulously crafted interactions of LED lights, engraved tempered glass, mirrors, stainless steel, and custom electronics. As these layers illuminate and shift, the piece visually "x-rays" itself, revealing the underlying choreography that created the generative artwork. This interplay between the visible and the hidden aligns perfectly with the conceptual heart of Human Unreadable - highlighting the tension between revealing and obfuscating, privacy and expression, within transparent systems.
<ReadMore>Through exceptional craftsmanship and conceptual depth, X-ray Machine #48 elegantly bridges experimental sculptural practices, engineering, human movement, and generative art offering collectors a uniquely profound way to experience Operator’s groundbreaking exploration of human and machine creativity.
The June 2025 exhibition at Fellowship, X-ray Machine: bodily confessions in glass, steel, and light, also features other works related to Human Unreadable in meticulously curated mediums and forms, including the Choreographic Card Deck: London Edition (2025), a limited run of three collectible card deck games designed to activate dance movements through dice-driven performance prompts. Also on view is the Generative Choreography Method Painting, a hand-painted schematic by Dejha Ti that visualizes the technical backbone behind the Human Unreadable collection, echoing traditions of conceptual systems art and algorithmic drawing.
About Human Unreadable
Human Unreadable investigates the intersection of choreography, code, and generative art. Act I "Reveal" introduced chaotic generative visuals directly derived from encoded human dance. Act II "Uncover" allowed collectors to mint the previously hidden choreographic scores embedded within their artworks as separate on-chain SVG pieces. Act III “Witness” is the final performance of an original evening-length work composed of the sequences behind the first one hundred works from the collection, scheduled for Fall 2026.

X-ray Machine: bodily confessions in glass, steel, and light

CLASSIFIED is a self-portrait series that investigated how the image–text model CLIP, developed by OpenAI, classified the artist Holly Herndon. Because CLIP already "knew" Herndon, the artist created a technique to visualize the model's conception of her identity. As image models advanced, she periodically tasked CLIP with producing new portraits of "Holly Herndon." 
The works functioned as an ongoing dialogue between artist and artificial intelligence, allowing each to learn more about the other. For Herndon, the incorporation of neural networks into the studio offered exhilarating possibilities for identity play. From compact vocal models to expansive public architectures like CLIP, the capacity to generate and direct work in another's likeness had grown dramatically in recent years. Exploring how the network perceived her was, in the artist's words, "mind-blowing."

CLASSIFIED

Critically Extant is a project that explores just how little we know about the natural world by testing the limits of the data openly available to us in our digital lives. To achieve this, AI algorithms were trained on millions of open source images of nature and some ten thousand species. The resulting models were then used to generate visual representations of species that are critically endangered, yet have little or no online presence specially on social media The goal of this was to not only trace the edges of our knowledge, but to also explore how we can create feedback loops in the digital that can be positive for the natural world.
<ReadMore>The project was inaugurated as an Instagram exhibition, exploring how the pieces can become part of our daily digital intake of content as a means of creating awareness and potentially engagement on behalf of the species shared. Naturally, as the data available to us represents but a partial fraction of the real number of species currently estimated as known to us, the pieces in this series show animated specimens that bear some, little, or even no resemblance to the species they are meant to depict.
This underlines the difficulties we face in shifting also our digital spaces towards more balanced representation, but it should be grounds for agency too: as we can all create and contribute both physically and digitally and as such can actively work to form new feedback loops that can help bring the critically endangered species into our daily lives in order to get to find ways to care for them?
This project is released in collaboration with Nguyen Wahed Gallery and ARTXCODE. For pre-sales, please contact us at hello@fellowship.xyz

Critically Extant

Nguyen Wahed Gallery is pleased to announce "Black and White Karma – Turning", a solo exhibition in collaboration with Fellowship by avatar artist DOKU, opening May 21, 2025 at Nguyen Wahed Gallery, New York and simultaneously at NADA Villa Warsaw 2025.
DOKU the Creator: Black and White Karma – Turning is a new series created by DOKU - a digital avatar created by Artist LuYang. Through meditative simulations in a virtual void and rooted in the structural system of the Bhavacakra (Wheel of Life), the 24 unique digital works visualize two karmic directions in samsara: the ascending white path (śukla-mārga) and the descending black path (kṛṣṇa-mārga).
These dual karmic streams emerge from the wheel’s center, guiding beings through cyclic existence. DOKU enters observation, not judgment, witnessing how karma arises from mind, appears as solid, yet remains empty in essence. The 24 works reflect the 24-hour cycle—not as timekeeping, but as the ceaseless rhythm of thought, craving, fear, and becoming. Karma forms not only through action, but through the subtlest turn of mind. Each piece is a fragment of karmic motion, glimpsed in meditative stillness, a flicker of becoming within illusion. All appearance is movement within emptiness. Karma is the mind tracing itself. To see is to enter. To intend is already to turn.
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The exhibitions at Nguyen Wahed gallery in New York and NADA Villa Warsaw will present immersive large-scale screening of the DOKU film: DOKU the Creator, the latest chapter of their ongoing work DOKU. Named after the phrase ‘’Dokusho Dokushi’’ meaning "We are born alone, and we die alone, ‘’ the character DOKU is a digital shell, a virtual human whose digital assets the artist has been building for nearly five years, as a reincarnation of himself in a parallel universe - an extension of his soul into the digital realm. Building upon his ongoing interest in the digitization of the human body and mind, Yang’s own body provides the template for this virtual human whose ‘’creations’’ form the core of DOKU’s third narrative film and the NFT collection. The NFT digital works created by the avatar DOKU are released in collaboration with the online platform Fellowship.
Following the exhibition of DOKU with the screening of the “DOKU the Creator” chapter in Nguyen Wahed Gallery, the film, together with the previous DOKU chapters will be on view in the upcoming exhibition of LuYang in Amant Foundation in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn in fall 2025.

DOKU the Creator: Black and White Karma – Turning

Wabi-Sabi Syntax is a conversation between tradition and technology, control and chance, past and future. It is a need to search, for meaning in imperfection, for truth in error, and for the self in translation. At its heart is the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi, the beauty found in things that are fragile, worn, or incomplete. After years of living in Japan, the artist's sense of what matters in art gradually shifted and became more complex. Perfection no longer seemed fully honest, and flaws began to feel like new fingerprints.
Into this journey, the artist brought something else, his Mexican heritage. Living between two cultures, he carries the weight and wonder of both, along with the uncertainty of that collision. Mexico and Japan are two worlds with different ways of seeing, remembering, and making. What happens when these visions coincide? When their symbols do not match? When one culture misunderstands the other? Rather than smooth over those misalignments, the artist leaned into them. Frictions and misunderstanding became a space for new ideas.
The tool for this new exploration of in-between states and worlds was artificial intelligence. He began feeding his own photographs into the models. He wanted to see how the machine would read his images. Another collision was happening, human and machine. What would it make of his visual memories? What would it get right, or wrong? The AI responded with pictures that resembled traditional Japanese woodblock prints, ukiyo-e, but something was always off. Eureka. He had found a way to visualize all these confronting ideas: perfection and imperfection, cultural dissonance, past and present, memory and reality. These confrontations are palpable in the imperfect representations AI naturally produces. Mistakes became part of the work's grammar, a kind of new syntax made of errors and echoes that condenses the many layers of Derech's life experience.
We are left with questions. Can a flaw carry emotion? Can a misstep be beautiful? Can a machine, in being flawed, reveal something human?

Wabi-Sabi Syntax | 侘寂構文

The series points to a paradox at the heart of contemporary spectatorship. A feed promises immediacy, yet its endless presence flattens distinctions between memory and anticipation. Delta Sauce thickens time: his frames hover in a slow-burn suspense that invites the viewer to inhabit uncertainty rather than swipe past it. What emerges is an ethics of looking that is neither nostalgic retreat nor techno-pessimism, but a measured attention to the liminal grain where private affect meets public signal.
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In "Feed," the border is not crossed; it is sustained. The work holds us in that charged interval, reminding us that the most fertile ground for thought often lies precisely at the edge where images hesitate, where sound lingers, where reality and its distortions remain in open negotiation. From its first flicker, "Feed" positions the viewer inside a place where the low-grade hiss of CRT scan lines meets the bottomless scroll of today’s timelines. Delta Sauce builds each image from the sediment of found footage, sampling debris that once drifted across bedroom televisions and shopping mall monitors. Layered with granular noise and tinged by the minor chords of the music that accompanied its making, the series inhabits what the artist calls a “borderline”: a tonal threshold between the comfort of recollection and the foreboding of a signal gone astray.
These borders have long been fertile ground for artists. Surrealist cinema seamlessly spliced together dream and documentary imagery; early video art exposed the pulse of electronic circuits, and now we see these latent space images extend that lineage into an era when the feed, both verb and noun, become the default architecture of attention. Somehow, Delta Sauce has found a way to stage our current surveillance condition through nostalgic colour palettes which lure the eye, then dissolve into interference. Familiar rooms tilt towards the uncanny as outlines blur, multiply, or refuse to stabilize. The effect is less narrative than atmospheric: images feel overheard rather than presented, as though the apparatus (the latent space) itself were recalling past echoes of other humans using sound and image to negotiate the unknown, torchlight flickering on cave walls, radio static morphing into wartime rumour. "Feed" suggests we are still that species, only now the cave wall is backlit glass and the rumour arrives pre-curated by code.

Feed

SPACES, Grant Yun’s latest body of work, thoughtfully investigates the profound transformations in our built environments driven by technological innovation, automation, and shifting labor paradigms. Created over several years, Yun’s vector-based illustrations reflect critically upon how exponential advances in artificial intelligence, remote work, digitization, and data infrastructure have reshaped the relationships between humanity, productivity, and physical space.
<ReadMore>Throughout the past century, society’s evolving needs have radically altered urban and suburban landscapes, rapidly changing how we interact with our surroundings and redefining what we deem essential. Yun specifically highlights the rise, and subsequent questioning of commercial office spaces, once icons of economic vitality, now increasingly symbols of ambiguity. As artificial intelligence and digitization blur the boundaries between work, identity, and culture, Yun raises critical questions about value: How will physical spaces retain their relevance in an increasingly virtual world? Who benefits from this profound shift, and who is left behind? What does this mean for our collective understanding of ownership, identity, and productivity?
Yun’s creative methodology is deeply rooted in photographic observation and technologically mediated reinterpretation. Beginning in 2014, Yun captured thousands of photographs across the United States using various cameras and personal devices. These photographic archives became foundational references, informing his meticulously crafted illustrations. However, marking a significant evolution in his practice, Yun began collaborating directly with artificial intelligence, exploring how commercially available AI models could enhance, challenge, and reinterpret his visual and conceptual vocabulary.
Describing this technique as "AI sketching," Yun utilized text-to-image, image-to-image, and image-to-text methodologies, continuously refining his works through iterative exchanges with machine intelligence. This process yielded unexpected insights into how human perception, biases, and memory shape interpretations of architectural and spatial elements. Yun’s distinctive style, balancing minimalism and photorealism, purposefully leaves interpretative space for viewers’ imaginations, mirroring the very principles of AI-generated output. By deliberately ceding partial artistic control to artificial intelligence, Yun explores how computational perspectives reflect our human assumptions about space, mood, and narrative.
These experiments led Yun into deeper philosophical reflections on language, visual representation, and emotional resonance. Prompt-driven AI reimaginings encouraged him to contemplate the subtle interplay between descriptive language and visual outcomes. Yun questions the seemingly intuitive yet opaque nature of emotional descriptors like "lonely," "happy," or "melancholy"—probing how AI interprets these nuances within physical spaces. By analyzing how the AI conceptualizes, for instance, a "lonely parking lot," Yun critically examines the interpretative space between linguistic expression and visual realization.
Beyond aesthetics and conceptual inquiry, Yun also thoughtfully reflects upon resource utilization inherent in this technological collaboration. He considers the environmental and societal impacts - computational power, energy usage, data storage - required by AI-driven artistic processes. Through this lens, SPACES invites contemplation on broader issues of sustainability, prompting us to question our collective responsibility towards rapidly growing digital infrastructures and their consequences for physical space and resources.
Further deepening his inquiry, Yun integrates sociological and historical contexts into the work. Inspired by foundational texts exploring workplace dynamics—such as Jeremy Myerson and Philip Ross’s The Creative Office and Sally Augustin and Nigel Oseland’s The Science of People and Office Design, Yun emphasizes how physical and virtual office environments continually shape and reshape our social interactions, productivity, and sense of community. He advocates transferring valuable insights learned from decades of evolving office design into the digital spaces that increasingly define our everyday lives.
Drawing from personal experience, Yun reflects on his own childhood visits to his father’s workplace - cubicles within vast office buildings that symbolized adult accomplishment. Over the years, he observed these architectural narratives shift profoundly, responding to technological advances, economic cycles, and societal demands. These memories resonate deeply within SPACES, imbuing Yun’s exploration of contemporary architecture and digital transformation with a subtle autobiographical layer.
Ultimately, Grant Yun’s SPACES is a meditation on the continuous dialogue between humanity, technology, and the built environment. By seamlessly merging physical observations with AI-driven creativity, Yun invites viewers to critically reflect on their own evolving relationships to spaces, both tangible and virtual, challenging us to reconsider how these shifting environments shape identity, culture, and our collective future.

Spaces

Infinite Petals is the most recent digital body of work by Sarah Meyohas, building on almost a decade of work with artificial intelligence and crypto assets. The artist has built upon her past work to train an AI model—referencing a dataset of 100,000 physical rose petals—in order to generate endless, new, and unique petals to be created as NFTs on the blockchain.
This series is a continued exploration of algorithmic beauty and the phenomenon of emergence within both natural and manmade systems. The physical petals are transformed into gridded arrangements of interpolating digital petals that behave according to algorithms of varied complexity—checkerboards, concentric squares, and John Conway’s Game of Life, as initial inspirations. Each of the GAN’s (Generative Adversarial Network) individual petals consists of 512 dimensions, producing an incomprehensible latent space mirroring the vastness of today’s machine intelligence and our digital world.
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This work stems from an earlier project in 2017, when Meyohas initiated Cloud of Petals. For that project, sixteen male workers gathered to photograph 100,000 rose petals—one by one—at the site of the former Bell Labs in New Jersey, where innovations such as the transistor, silicon solar cell, and numerous programming languages underwent critical developments. Meyohas conceived a real-life algorithm which dictated that human hands must individually open the flower, pick the petal, place it under the lens, press the shutter, and upload the image to a server. The workers set aside one petal per rose that they considered the most beautiful and placed it in a press—preserving 3,291 petals as physical artifacts. These preserved petals went on to back Bitchcoin, Meyohas’s art-backed cryptocurrency which initially launched in 2015.
Documenting this performance on 16mm film, Cloud of Petals traces beauty and subjectivity within the systems of automation and artificial intelligence. The massive dataset compiled is also used to map out an AI algorithm that learns to generate endless, new, and unique petals through a series of virtual worlds. Through virtual reality experiences, this metaphorical network of endless petals falls like rain around the viewer, playing on the notions of augmented reality, data, and our valuations of beauty.
Early versions of Infinite Petals have been exhibited at the Flint Institute of Arts and the Ming Contemporary Art Museum, and the short film documenting Cloud of Petals is in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, alongside two examples from Bitchcoin. Infinite Petals was recently on view as part of Chanel Culture Fund’s new public art project, The Window, featuring a series of digital art installations visible 24 hours a day at the ground floor of the Time & Life building on Bruton Street, London.
Infinite Petals is a series of 3,291 unique video artworks. Each piece is a dynamic video output that evolves over time through a series of sequences defined by a specific visual pattern, a carefully paired color combination, and a set duration. Additional defining traits include varying grid sizes and occasional glitch effects, all layered within a structured rarity system.

john gerrard

Art|Basel June 2026

Recent & Upcoming

Sougwen Chung

john gerrard

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst

Elman Mansimov

Harold Cohen

Ix Shells

Eko33 - JeanJacques Duclaux

Dmitri Cherniak

Sofia Crespo

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