The Digital Art Mile returns to Basel: 16 – 22 June 2025

• “The event shattered the conventions of digital art” – Artnet
• “The Digital Art Mile, the first of its kind, provided a groundbreaking digital experience during Art Basel” – Lumen Prize

Humanoid robots, historic drawing machines, autonomous AI agents, early computer art from the 1960s and a pioneering digital painting tool that revolutionized broadcasting and the MTV era provide a brilliant art experience in Basel, where first class art meets latest technologies. Experts from all over the world, leading galleries and platforms in the field of digital art and museum curators meet in Basel at the world’s most important fair for digital art.

“The Digital Art Mile,” organized by ArtMeta (Zug), is a landmark event set to transform Basel’s historic Rebgasse during Art Basel from June 16 -22, 2025 offering an art fair, a curated exhibition as well as a one-week conference program free to attend for the public.

PAINTBOXED

As part of the Paintboxed – Tezos World Tour, a series of events that travelled across Miami, Paris, and New York; ArtMeta, Objkt, the Tezos Foundation and Adrian Wilson archive are proud to bring the groundbreaking exhibition “Paintboxed” to Basel, showcasing leading digital artists and the rich history of one of the first digital painting devices in the history of digital art. The Quantel Paintbox defined the visual landscape of the 1980s and influenced film, television, and pop culture. Its work includes iconic variations of the MTV logo and music videos such as “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits, released in June 1985. In 1986, Quantel launched a photo-quality version of the Paintbox, establishing it as the gold standard in digital art creation for years. Without Paintbox, iconic dozens of album covers such as Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and movie posters for “Silence of the Lambs”, “Pulp Fiction”, and “JFK” would not exist. Before Adobe’s Photoshop became popularized in the mid 90’s, the verb for digital picture manipulation was “Paintboxed”.  

The Paintbox’s cultural significance reached new heights in 1987 when the BBC showed six very different international artists such as David Hockney, Jennifer Bartlett, and Sidney Nolan creating their first digital artworks on the series “Painting with Light”. Hockney’s first use of a digital painting tool was Paintbox, predating his coveted iPhone and iPad drawings by more than two decades. 

The Paintboxed show will feature contemporary artists such as Grant Yun, Bryan Brinkman, Justin Aversano and Ivona Tau, who have been creating new work on an original Quantel Paintbox lent by Paintboxed co-curator and Quantel historian Adrian Wilson, as part of Paintboxed – Tezos World Tour. The works will be presented as physical lightboxes for sale, paired with NFTs minted on the Tezos blockchain, and will be available on Objkt, the leading platform for digital art. 

DIGITAL ART FAIR

This year’s art fair will welcome some new exhibitors including Kate Vass Galerie from Zurich, who will present “Iconoclast”, a solo program by Nigerian digital artist Osinachi. The selection spans from early to most recent digital paintings (2019-2025), as well as a special project “Forgotten Relics” – series created during the artist residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy in 2025. LaCollection – renowned for their collaborations with institutions such as the British Museum and Monnaie de Paris – will show a solo exhibition with a new series of generative artist Tyler Hobbs, well-known for “Fidenza”. Mayor Gallery will present a tribute to the 100^th anniversary of Waldemar Cordeiro, who is widely regarded as the father of digital art in South America. He was the founder of “Ruptura” art movement in Brazil and a frequent participant at the “New Tendencies” in Zagreb. The gallery will present some of the most iconic artworks executed in the late 1960s in collaboration with Jorge Moscati on a IBM 360/44 computer at the University of Sao Paulo. Bright Moments from San Francisco is showing a group exhibition “Automata”, focusing on the evolution of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous AI agents. The Zurich based digital art platform Objkt is also presenting the group show “We Emotional Cyborgs: On Avatars and AI Agents”, curated by Anika Meier (The Second-Guess), explores how these virtual entities serve not only as reflections of our desires but also as agents that challenge our notions of identity amidst the collapse of trust and truth.

CONFERENCES

The digital art fair will be accompanied by a series of conferences held at Kult.Kino Cinema at Rebgasse 1 throughout the week on topics such as “The Digital Art Market”, “Corporate Collections in the Digital Age”, “Generative Art and AI” and “Museums and Digital Art”. Esteemed speakers include Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at Whitney Museum of American Art; Ian Charles Steward, Director of Toledo Museum of Art Laboratories; Sebastien Borget, COO and Co-Founder of The Sandbox; Prof. Dr. Thomas Girst, Global Head of Cultural Engagement at BMW.

THE FOUNDERS

“The Digital Art Mile” was initiated by Georg Bak and Roger Haas, two leading experts in the field of digital art and web3. Georg Bak is renowned for his groundbreaking work in exhibiting digital art, NFTs, and generative photography, being one of the pioneers in the evolution of the NFT market. Roger Haas is the founder of ArtMeta and co-creator of the Paintboxed – Tezos World Tour. His work focuses on the intersection of technology and creativity, contributing to the ongoing development of how art is made, presented, and experienced. With ArtMeta’s initiative, The Digital Art Mile, he has helped build a platform that brings together new generations of artists and audiences.

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