In a week that saw some great cross-chain chatter between the communities on Tezos and Solana, the collector Giannis Sourdis tells Right Click Save what has drawn him to Solana’s Avant Gay scene.

“I started collecting art on Ethereum in 2020,” Sourdis says. “Not late, but not too early either. I missed the early Tezos/HEN magic, though the community and art eventually pulled me in. Now on Solana, it feels like that spark isn’t just alive, it’s just beginning. The Avant Gay scene there feels native and very grassroots.

What drew me early on were the works themselves: chaotic, nostalgia-packed and messy in ways that felt alive. Out of that chaos came beauty, and sometimes even structure. NFTs weren’t just mimicking old art forms but developing their own language. Trait-maxxing felt native here, like a visual dialect born on-chain. And with Avant Gay, that energy turned into something more than style: it became a scene.”

As cross-chain conversations keep flowing, collectors like Sourdis remind us that the best scenes don't arrive polished—they grow from the ground up, messy and full of life.

—Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save.

The group show “Subject to Change”, at Gazelli Art House, London, from October 3, presents the work of nine artists who work critically with algorithms, datasets, and machine learning: Memo Akten, Nouf Aljowaysir, Morehshin Allahyari, Brendan Dawes, Primavera De Filippi, Jake Elwes, Entangled Others, Auriea Harvey, and Aziza Kadyri. The exhibition coincides with with the 10th anniversary of GAZELL.iO, the gallery’s online residency program, which has supported more than 100 artists since its launch.

Dancer in the Mirror Field (2025), a speculative fiction film by the Korean artist Ayoung Kim, is the latest Facade commission for the giant outdoor LED canvas at M+ museum, Hong Kong. It will be shown every night from October 3 to December 28 on what is one of the largest media screens in the world, overlooking Victoria Harbour. The work, exploring technology, labor, and identity, is commissioned with Powerhouse, Sydney, Australia, and presented by the Swiss wealth management group Julius Baer. It will be shown as part of an exhibition reflecting on mall culture following the opening of Powerhouse Paramatta next year, as part of the Powerhouse, Sydney, group of museums dedicated to the intersection of arts, design, science, and technology.

Kim, winner of the LG Guggenheim Award, New York, 2025, says the M+ Facade offers “an extraordinary platform that amplifies the concept” of the latest installment of her fiction series Delivery Dancer (2022–ongoing) “and invites viewers to glimpse fragments of their everyday lives within it.”

On October 4, Sunny Cheung, M+ Curator of Design and Architecture, will moderate a conversation with Kim at the museum on the making of Dancer in the Mirror Field, her collaborative motion-capture process, and her work with game engines and machine learning. They will be joined by Kim’s stunt choreographer, Cha-I Kim, who also worked on Squid Game.

The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, has acquired two paintings, Facetune Portrait—Universal Beauty, Puerto Rico and Facetune Portrait—Universal Beauty, USA (2025), by the US artist Gretchen Andrew. The works, from Andrew’s Facetune Portrait series—which examines the way technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing our perception of other people and of ourselves—was put forward for acquisition by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art. The Whitney’s acquisition committee “enthusiastically and unanimously voted to acquire the two paintings”, the museum said in a press announcement.

Andrew creates the paintings using two levels of technology. First, she applies popular social media AI filters—a process popularly known as facetuning—to photographs of beauty contestants. Then, in conjunction with the creative robotics company Matr Labs, she works with a robot that has been instructed in the differences between the original image and the “facetuned” version—to paint bold strokes at the points where lines have changed. The results hint at the idea that algorithmic ideals of beauty involve bodily erasure.

Paintings from the series have been shown this year at Heft Gallery in New York, through whom the acquisition was made, and at Hope93 Gallery in London. Andrew, who has been shortlisted for this year’s Lumen Prize, will be appearing as a panelist at the FEMGEN in Paris on October 21.

This summer I encountered Phreaking Collective, a new computational arts group who presented “Bit Rot” in August at Copeland Gallery, Peckham, south-east London. The exhibition brought together 19 artworks exploring narratives of digital decay and the impermanence of technological systems, offering new digital literacy tools to understand the notion of technological “expiry dates”. Their upcoming project, “Does Cloud Compute [Ever] Precipitate”, is scheduled for 2026, with dates to be announced in December.

More recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Erin Robinson, whose work XXX Machina received an Award of Distinction at the most recent Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, in September. I found the research underpinning Erin’s practice particularly compelling, and it resonated with Arvida Byström’s sculptures in Model Collapse, curated by Nadim Samman this past May, which also addressed themes of desire and artificial intelligence (AI).

Finally, I am keen to explore permacomputing further—particularly from a curatorial standpoint—and to consider how its principles, around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer technology, inspired by permaculture, might inform my own practice in the future.

—Bea Taylor Searle is Co-Founder and Director, with Matt McDonnell, of Peckham Digital, a creative computing festival in south-east London, founded in 2020. This year’s festival runs from Thursday 16 to Sunday 19 October, 2025.