Photo by Caroline Tompkins, Courtesy of Art Basel

TAEX | Interview with Trevor Paglen, Co-Curator of Art Basel Zero 10

Rethinking digital art beyond hype, spectacle, and slop.

Editor&rsquo;s Note: Art Basel's embrace of digital art has evolved steadily over the past decade, from early experiments with blockchain-based initiatives and collaborations within the Tezos ecosystem to the Digital Dialogues co-hosted with TAEX, to, finally, the launch of Zero 10, its dedicated fair section for digital and media art. In this interview with Trevor Paglen, co-curator of Zero 10 Basel 2026, Sarp Kerem Yavuz, the contributing editor of The Art Newspaper, uncovers the ideas behind this year's edition.
Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work has explored some of the defining technologies of our time. From photographing classified military sites and tracking surveillance infrastructure to investigating artificial intelligence and machine vision, his projects have been exhibited internationally and even sent into space. Recently appointed as a co-curator of Zero 10, Art Basel&rsquo;s platform dedicated to digital art, Paglen joined me to discuss the inaugural Basel edition and the evolving landscape of art and technology.&nbsp;
Acronyms:
Sarp Kerem Yavuz: SKY
Trevor Paglen: TP
SKY: If you had to define digital art today, how would you describe it?&nbsp;
TP: I will describe it in terms of the criteria that we use for the curatorial process of Zero 10: We define digital art as any artwork where at some point, a significant part of the process involved the creation of a digital form. So that could be Andreas Gursky having a Photoshop file as the original of a photograph that he was going to print, or somebody who's mocked up a sculpture in Blender or ZBrush, 3D-printed that, and then cast it. Or it could be work that&rsquo;s entirely natively digital.
SKY: How would you describe AI-generated or assisted art?
TP: I don't really make a distinction between AI generated art or AI-assisted art&hellip; I think those distinctions are becoming really blurry in the sense that at least my colleagues and a lot of artists are writing code bases to run their installations. Everybody&rsquo;s using coding agents to do that. Is that AI art? Maybe. AI is too distributed across the stack to cohere into an easy definition, especially at this point.&nbsp;
SKY: I get the impression that people view there to be a hierarchy between digital art made by people, and digital art created using AI.
TP: I don't think about AI art as just being some stuff that came out of a LLM. I&rsquo;m generally not a big fan of prompted images, but that's not the entire range of AI-assisted art or what AI generated art can be.
SKY: I read an interview that you gave recently where you refer to AI-slop as &ldquo;media that is primarily designed to trigger engagement&rdquo; and I'm curious if that couldn't be said for most artists&rsquo; output today, when social media is the primary mechanism of distribution?
TP: Matt Dryhurst actually had a much better definition&hellip; something about [how] slop is media generated primarily by humans to conform to the incentive structures set by engagement algorithms, that's actually a better definition (laughs). So within that definition, again I don't think that that's true. I think there's plenty of digital artists that are doing something different, they are not trying to optimise for the maximum number of people engaging. I just don't think that's true.&nbsp;
There are other artists that take on slop as a form and try to use that as a form. BEEPLE would be the grandmaster of this. And that's valid too. So I don't want to put stuff in the little cubby holes. I just don't think that way and I don't like to think about art that way.&nbsp;
SKY: I think that the engagement component that you raised was interesting because I feel as though so much of digital art relies entirely on engagement to exist or to be visible. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the landscape of it today, especially on platforms like X, where people go very feral very quickly, and there's very little critical discourse. Considering that it's almost impossible to think about what we put out there on the web without thinking of the engagement that's going to follow, does awareness of that engagement impact or taint digital art today?&nbsp;
TP: Maybe I'll just talk about art that I like, right? Art that I like sometimes uses those mechanics, but I think it transcends them. For a while people were trying to do these pieces where you just pile on as many meanings as you possibly can into the same artwork, and that is very much a response to a kind of engagement economy, but I also think about that in the tradition of somebody like Albrecht Durer, where artists are looking at the piling up of signs and the piling up of signifiers to the point where they don't mean anything and asking what does it mean to live in a world where everything's real and nothing is real at the same time and nobody knows what's going&nbsp; on. That's me doing a generous read of digital art that's coming out of that slop tradition, or trying to capitalise on it.&nbsp;
SKY: Speaking of engagement, I think that one of the things that came out of the inaugural Zero 10 six months ago was that it was such a spectacle. I don't know if you had a chance to see it in person?
TP: I saw it on Instagram which I think was the appropriate platform (laughs).&nbsp;
SKY: What did you think of the first Zero 10 [Art Basel Miami Beach 2025]?&nbsp;
TP: In so far as I experienced it through social media&hellip; I could see what they're doing. They certainly succeeded in creating a lot of excitement, they succeeded in creating a lot of public engagement and bringing people into the fair who otherwise would not have gone.&nbsp;
I think at the same time they ruffled a lot of feathers and set up a little bit of an antagonistic relationship between some of the more traditional galleries and some of the presentations in Zero 10. I think that was appropriate, I think that was successful. But I think for the curation of Art Basel (in Basel), which is a much more of an institutionalised fair, much more conservative, I don't think that approach would work. So that's why we took a very different strategy with the curation of Basel Basel.
SKY: This particular iteration seems to be much more devoted to historical context versus spectacle and engagement.
TP: We wanted to have work that was fun and that was exciting to look at, but the curatorial strategy had three caps. One was: Artists that are either canonical art historical figures, or figures that were unambiguously early creators of this thing that we now call digital art. Like a historical category.&nbsp;
The second category is: Artists that are probably later in their careers, that are blue-chip artists that have been working with digital media for a very long time, who have gained a lot of institutional recognition and who have a history of rigorous critical practice.&nbsp;
The third cap was: Artists that have probably gained more exposure in the last 10 years, that are more associated with platforms than institutions, who nonetheless are making work that is at a very high-caliber, that you could put next to somebody in the other two categories and it would make perfect sense.&nbsp;
So we're trying to create a framework through which to read some of the newer participants in the institutionalised space, through an institutional eye, and then also to take some artists that we might not even think about as being digital artists and put them in the context where you can see that practice in a different way. Thinking about somebody like Andreas Gursky, for example. That was really the strategy, and it's a much gentler strategy curatorially, and it's a strategy that's meant to have a little bit more intellectual gravitas to it.
SKY: When you were building it out, were there any galleries or artists that you reached out to who maybe resisted the notion of being in Zero 10 versus the main fair, or any anyone that had a reaction to the idea?
TP: I think a lot of people had seen Miami and had written off the idea of wanting to participate in something like that. The good news is I'm friends with lots and lots and lots of artists. The other good news is I've built up a level of trust. I definitely called in a lot of favours from artist friends and asked them to trust me.&nbsp;
SKY: Are there going to be any NFT presentations during this Zero 10?&nbsp;
TP: Yeah, there's gonna be a few that are NFT-related. We didn't really want the focus to be &ldquo;Walk into a booth, come out with an NFT!&rdquo; That wasn't really a part of the physics of the exhibition that we wanted to have been so present. But certainly a lot of the newer school, digitally native artists are working in that space. And so those are certainly a part of the practice.
SKY: What do you think about NFTs today?&nbsp;
TP: I think they're really interesting. There's a lot of things that you can do with them, there&rsquo;s creatively a huge number of possibilities there. In terms of creating different economies or giving more people access to being able to collect and that kind of thing. I think it's fantastic. I've done obviously NFT projects, I've done traditional, gallery oriented projects&hellip; the audiences are super different, the kinds of conversations that you have are super different, and I'm all for as many people participating in culture as possible. So, big tent!
SKY:&nbsp; If you wanted to convey one message to the people coming at this from outside of the art world, from the the more digital space, and entering&nbsp; Zero 10 Basel for the first time and trying to understand what this digital art is versus a digital art that they may be more accustomed to, what would you like their takeaway to be?&nbsp;
TP: There&rsquo;s a lot of people that have been thinking about this for a very long time, and you're part of this tradition. You could think about what responsibilities you have to the past and to the future if you're going, you know, participate in this conversation.

Interview with Trevor Paglen, Co-Curator of Art Basel Zero 10

TAEX is an interdisciplinary platform for artists, curators, and collectors to discuss, showcase, and sell crypto art.

Interview with Trevor Paglen, Co-Curator of Art Basel Zero 10

Stay Tuned