404_LAND Opening & Virtual Tour

​404_LAND marks the first exhibition in the HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel and Tezos Foundation partnership. The exhibition will premiere on virtual.hek.ch on 12 June.

During the virtual opening, curators Auronda Scalera and Alfredo Cramerotti will walk audiences through the platform and present each work to the public. The opening will be moderated by Isabella Maund.

Exhibited artists: Gabriel Massan, dmstfctn, Varvara & Mar, Hind Al Saad (with Martin Juras and Levi Hammett), Kat Zhang the Poet Engineer, and Alida Sun

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404_LAND begins with a browser error. The 404 code, that most familiar of digital failures, announces the absence of a destination: a page that should be there but is not, an address that leads nowhere, a promise of access interrupted by a refusal. Yet the 404 error is never simply nothing, it contains the residue of an attempt, the trace of a search, the ghost of an architecture, the expectation of a place and It marks a rupture between desire and arrival, between navigation and disappearance, between the map and the territory.

The six artists in 404_LAND enter the error, complicate it, and give it form. Their works span machinima, generative systems, interactive simulations, webcam-based gesture recognition, machine vision, AI dialogue, digital performance, and speculative worldbuilding. Each work approaches the 404 condition from a different angle: as political disappearance, computational misunderstanding, embodied mistranslation, encoded selfhood, partial perception, or planetary instability.