HEK (House of Electronic Arts) has partnered with the Tezos Foundation to launch 404_LAND, a virtual group exhibition that runs from June 12th to August 9th on HEK’s virtual platform. This marks the first of two shows planned under their 2026 collaboration, with an outdoor presentation also scheduled during Art Basel.
Curated by Auronda Scalera and Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti, the exhibition borrows its name from the HTTP 404 error—the message that appears when a web page can’t be found. But instead of calling it a failure, 404_LAND frames it as a gateway to explore ideas like political disappearance, computational misunderstandings, broken memories, and unstable digital identities.
The show features six artists: Gabriel Massan, dmstfctn, Varvara & Mar, Hind Al Saad (with Martin Juras and Levi Hammett), Kat Zhang the Poet Engineer, and Alida Sun. Their works cover machinima, AI dialogue, generative systems, interactive simulations, and worldbuilding.
Artists Dive into the 404 Condition
Each contributor approaches the “404 condition” from their own angle. Gabriel Massan’s Victims, part of his Ball Of Terror series, uses looping machinima environments filled with falling bodies and suspended motion to explore state violence and how fear is built into architecture. The London-based duo dmstfctn offer The Models, an endless AI simulation where machine-generated characters improvise dialogue across over 26,000 possible scenes, thanks to access to the Supercomputer Leonardo infrastructure. Meanwhile, Varvara & Mar’s Everything Is In Your Hands turns webcam gestures into glitch-heavy interactions, where human expression becomes readable yet misunderstood by algorithms.
AI, Memory, and Identity in Question
Many pieces in the show focus on how human identity clashes with machine interpretation. Hind Al Saad’s SELF(ENCODED) places viewers inside a recursive system that turns facial features into machine-readable patterns, until identity dissolves into abstract data. Kat Zhang the Poet Engineer’s Hypomnemata: Memory is a Flock of Birds treats memory as something that erodes and gets rebuilt imperfectly through AI-like associative systems. Alida Sun’s The world isn’t ending / Their world is ending expands the exhibition’s themes toward social and planetary instability.
The exhibition space itself avoids a typical homepage or fixed navigation. Instead, visitors drift through interconnected digital zones built around fragmentation and instability—perhaps mirroring the very errors the show celebrates.
Alongside the exhibition, each artist will release NFTs on the Tezos ecosystem through objkt.com. For HEK and the artists involved, 404_LAND treats the internet’s broken areas not as empty spaces but as territory—places where identities fracture, systems fail, and maybe new digital realities start forming.
