The Context Creator is a monthly newsletter that gathers recent developments in digital art and highlights connections and affinities with other projects.

Now you can curate an exhibition with a prompt. Kadist, an international art foundation, has collaborated with the AI developers WeDoData to prototype a system where users enter a description of an exhibition and, moments later, see it manifested with image files extruded in a virtual white cube, complete with an artspeak title and introductory text. Titled Unseen Forces 1.0, the exhibition engine is presented as part of ICA Pittsburgh’s “The Generative Museum,” an experiment with virtual programming ahead of the opening of its physical space at Carnegie Mellon University. The images in Unseen Forces 1.0 are drawn from Kadist’s collection of paintings and works on paper, along with works from private collections in Pittsburgh.

“The Generative Museum” is realized with the help of Epoch Gallery, which launched in 2020 to create more imaginative settings for online exhibitions at a time when “online exhibition” often meant nothing more than install shots in a PDF. Epoch’s shows have taken place in settings like an abandoned freeport or the ruins of LACMA’s decommissioned buildings, where the point-and-click navigation felt like a 1990s puzzle game. Unseen Forces 1.0 is included as a first-floor gallery in a rendering of the future ICA building, while upstairs you can find other AI-driven artworks. These include a tender, surreal video by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst about a dream Herndon had while in a coma after a difficult birth, and Morehshin Allahyari’s Moon-faced (2021–), a series of shimmering, gender-neutral portraits inspired by medieval Persian traditions. Also included is Monuments of the Disclosed (2022), Ahmet Öğüt series of 3D-modeled busts of whistleblowers, from the Kadist’s collection of digital art.

Works in “The Generative Museum” use AI models to generate imagery, whereas Unseen Forces 1.0 uses AI to remix and manage information. In this respect, it recalls attempts at algorithmic exhibition making, cataloguing, and classification from the early 2010s. Artsy’s Art Genome Project, a tagging system designed to create an Amazon-style recommendation engine for collectors, was an earnest effort to tailor the art market to user tastes. DIS Images, by DIS Magazine, took a more tongue-in-cheek approach, proposing readymade exhibitions modeled on stock photography libraries. Today, as users turn to generative AI for assistance with research and visuals, recommendation algorithms seem to have stalled in influence, and stock photography feels obsolete. Still, both projects marked important moments in thinking through how art connects with people, and how those connections are structured, rationalized, and mediated by machines.

Last month, the generative art platform Art Blocks released its final curated project: Quine by Larva Labs. The title refers to a computer program that outputs its own source code—a recursive loop of self-reference. It’s an apt closing note for Art Blocks, which helped establish a market for NFTs that store the very code used to generate their images. Founder Erick Calderon has long cited Larva Labs as an inspiration: their 2019 project Autoglyphs used a blockchain hash as the seed for its algorithm. If Autoglyph is a sign that writes itself, Quine goes one step further and makes its code the design.

In the outputs, characters from the program’s code appear as colored blocks that assemble into striking patterns. Collectors can rerun the program to generate alternate displays, echoing the idea that the act of collecting helps produce the work. John Watkinson and Matt Hall of Larva Labs discuss the project in more detail in an interview on Right Click Save.

The concept of the quine was named by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach, after the 20th-century logician Willard Van Orman Quine, who devised a self-referential linguistic trick: the sentence “Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation” yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

Quines have long captivated artists working with computation. Rhea Myers explored their connection to blockchain mechanics in Self-Identifying (2025), a series of programs that generate their own code on-chain, linking the idea of self-verification on the blockchain to the awkward titular phrase, sometimes used to describe trans people’s relationship to gender. Andreas Gysin’s svg.svg is a set of quines that not only reproduce their own output but animate it in shifting forms, turning code into kinetic structures. The title refers to the scalable vector graphics file format, which, once introduced as an option for minting on the NFT platform Hic et Nunc, made it possible to release works that run real-time code. The quines serve as demonstrations of this new potential. On his blog Esoteric Codes, Daniel Temkin writes about Yusuke Endoh’s quine relay, a legendary program that translates itself through 128 programming languages before returning to its starting point—an ouroboros of code that performs recursion at a monumental scale.

The NFT marketplace vvv.so launched in early 2025 and has already cultivated an active community of artists and collectors around a style known as gay NFTs or schizocollage—labels that remain intentionally fluid and informal. Many projects on the platform pack the NFT window with dense layers of imagery, but Heavy Liquid Graphic, a Halloween collaboration between Parker Ito and Evil Biscuit, stands out for its use of negative space. While still speaking the language of the maximalist digital collage, the artists lean into silhouettes and outlines to leave voids and absences, pulling viewers into the actual darkness of the screen. Figures and shadows seem to emerge from this depth, while iridescent pixelated grates cling to the surface, generating a tension between flatness and depth. The two artists discuss the project further in an interview for Le Random.

Ito and Biscuit have each released individual projects on vvv.so this year that twist the schizocollage format in unexpected ways. The scene grows out of an interest in pushing software like Hashlips and Bueno—typically used to produce large PFP editions with fixed “traits”—into something more chaotic. Instead of clean, modular PFP design, artists cram as many images as possible into the layers, producing editions that feel noisy and aggressively strange.

Ito’s Drilady revolves around fractured cartoon portraits of a Rule 34 Lola Bunny that bucks the sexlessness of PFP culture and laces it with art-historical Easter eggs. Biscuit’s Drifella III uses the collage generator’s depth of field to mimic exhibition views, where his past works appear as paintings hanging on a wall, while figurines stand below them on the floor—a self-conscious equation of art and collectibles in the same visual space. While Drilady and Drifella share etymological origins and lore that run deep in the vvv.so community, the essential point is that both artists contribute to a world of interconnected references while also making work that lands on its own terms.

MORE LINKS

The Internet Archive recently preserved its trillionth webpage. To celebrate this remarkable milestone, the essential service has partnered with Gray Area to commission websites by artists including Chia Amisola, Spencer Chang, and Rodell Warner. [Gray Area]

Art Basel Miami Beach will prominently feature ten booths displaying digital art in its new Zero 10 section, whose name refers not just to binary code but to “The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10,” organized by Kazimir Malevich in 1915—claiming avant-garde valor for the sale of digital art. [Art Basel]

In the Brooklyn Rail, Mark Amerika reviews Lynn Hershman Leeson’s book Private I, a memoir that details the author’s multiple personas in ways that parallel her art. [Brooklyn Rail]

Performa, a biennial for live art, has been running in New York for two decades. The current edition, now underway, features a number of commissions that explore the relationship between bodies and virtual space, including works by Pakui Hardware, Aria Dean, and Ayoung Kim, who also has an exhibition on view at MoMA PS1. [Performa]

Speaking of Ayoung Kim, two art magazines put the same photo from one of her exhibitions on their cover of their November issues, leading critic Domenick Ammirati to reflect on how a compelling installation shot can uplift a work. [Spigot]

Kevin Munger, a scholar of communication and political theory, synthesizes recent thinking about artists, technologists, and organizations who are strategically building communities for a “post-naïve internet.” [Never Met a Science]

Send a message if you have suggestions for items to include in future editions of Context Creator.