- HEK and the Tezos Foundation are launching 404_LAND, a virtual digital art exhibition opening June 12 and running through August 9, 2026.
- The exhibition is curated by Auronda Scalera and Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti.
- Six artists are participating: Gabriel Massan, dmstfctn, Varvara & Mar, Hind Al Saad, Kat Zhang the Poet Engineer, and Alida Sun.
- Each artist will also release NFTs on Tezos through objkt.com.
HEK and the Tezos Foundation will open 404_LAND, a new virtual group exhibition examining digital error, unstable identity and algorithmic interpretation.
The exhibition opens on June 12, 2026, on HEK’s virtual platform and runs through August 9, 2026. It will also have a physical presence at HEK in Basel during Art Basel week, according to the details shared with AlexaBlockchain.
The show brings together six artists: Gabriel Massan, dmstfctn, Varvara & Mar, Hind Al Saad, Kat Zhang the Poet Engineer, and Alida Sun.
Curated by Auronda Scalera and Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti, 404_LAND takes its name from the HTTP 404 error.
But the exhibition does not treat the broken link as a dead end.
Instead, it uses the error as a way to explore political disappearance, machine misreading, fragmented memory, data extraction and planetary instability.
HEK’s website lists 404_LAND as the first virtual exhibition in its 2026 partnership with the Tezos Foundation. The broader collaboration includes digital art programming, virtual exhibitions and an outdoor presentation tied to Art Basel 2026.
Art Basel’s Basel edition is scheduled for June 18–21, 2026, placing the HEK presentation inside one of the global art market’s most closely watched weeks.
The exhibition reflects a wider push by cultural institutions to treat blockchain not only as a market infrastructure for NFTs, but also as a distribution, preservation and public-access layer for digital art.
Tezos has positioned itself strongly in that field.
The blockchain has previously been used in cultural programs involving institutions including Serpentine, Musée d’Orsay and LAS Art Foundation.
The project fits the institutional focus for HEK.
The Basel-based House of Electronic Arts is a museum and Switzerland’s national centre of excellence for digital art, with a program focused on technology, media art, conservation and public education.
404_LAND’s participating artists work across machinima, generative systems, AI dialogue, machine vision, interactive simulation and speculative worldbuilding.
Gabriel Massan’s Victims, from the ongoing Ball Of Terror series, places the idea of error inside systems of violence and fear.
The machinima work builds a looping world of falling bodies, gunfire and suspended motion, presenting terror as routine rather than exception.
Massan has previously worked with Serpentine on Tezos-based digital collectibles connected to a custom computer game.
The London-based duo dmstfctn, made up of Oliver Smith and Francesco Tacchini, contributes The Models.
The work is described as an infinite interactive simulation featuring two AI-driven characters modelled on Commedia dell’Arte masks.
The characters improvise across 26,880 possible scenes, with dialogue generated using access to Supercomputer Leonardo.
The piece uses theatre to expose how machine intelligence can appear knowledgeable while still performing obedience, absurdity and misunderstanding.
Varvara & Mar present Everything Is In Your Hands, a webcam-based net.art work.
Visitors navigate a glitch system using hand gestures.
In the work, signs of love, protest and refusal become keys, data and misreadings, turning participation itself into a form of exposure.
Hind Al Saad, working with Martin Juras and Levi Hammett, presents SELF(ENCODED).
The work places the viewer inside a recursive exchange with a machine.
Facial features are converted into pixels, patterns and language until the signal becomes difficult for both human and machine to read.
The work asks what remains of the self when a face becomes extractable data.
Kat Zhang the Poet Engineer contributes Hypomnemata: Memory is a Flock of Birds.
The game-like landscape draws on Hopfield networks, a model of associative memory where memories exist as valleys in an energy landscape.
The work frames corrupted or incomplete memory not as failure, but as the beginning of new forms of relation.
Alida Sun’s The world isn’t ending / Their world is ending expands the show’s focus from computational error to climate, social and planetary instability.
The work questions who is forced to adapt, who disappears and who gets to continue when systems collapse.
Sun’s practice includes daily hand-coded generative systems, which the announcement says she has continued for more than 2,500 days.
The exhibition’s interface also follows its theme.
404_LAND will not have a conventional home screen or map. Visitors enter mid-stream and move through six artistic zones connected by thresholds, fragments and atmospheric transitions.
Each artist will also release NFTs on Tezos through objkt.com.
A kiosk inside HEK’s Basel lobby will provide public access during the exhibition run, while a virtual opening tour with the curators is scheduled for June 12.
The above article “HEK and Tezos Turn the 404 Error Into a Digital Art Exhibition” was first published on AlexaBlockchain. Read the complete article here: https://alexablockchain.com/hek-and-tezos-turn-the-404-error-into-a-digital-art-exhibition/
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Image Credits: HEK, Shutterstock, Canva, Wiki Commons
