The month ahead promises to be a whirlwind for digital art across the globe, with a flurry of exciting activity in Europe. Frieze London kicks off with a double dose of Harold Cohen: Gazelli Art House and Fellowship will both feature works by the pioneering artist and his program, AARON, cementing their ever-growing presence in the contemporary market.

From there, the circuit continues to Art Basel Paris, then eastward to Berlin for Art on Tezos, and north to Norway for The Lumen Prize Awards Ceremony. Pack your bags—or at least bookmark liberally—because you won’t want to miss what’s unfolding.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

The past month has been remarkable on Tezos. From preparing for the upcoming Art on Tezos: Berlin, a three-day celebration of creativity and community (November 6-9) to the inaugural objkt labs residency—a first of its kind—empowering 12 artists through mentorship and collaboration at the intersection of traditional art-world and blockchain-native best practices. The new partnership between the Tezos Foundation and the Processing Foundation, launching an educational series around p5.js 2.0, further cements the Tezos Foundation’s commitment to innovation and accessibility in digital art.

We also celebrated the Art on Tezos Photography Prize winners—whose work will be shown in Paris during Photo Week at Artverse Gallery—and presented Sutan's “PHŌS_ Our Fire” curation at the NXT Festival in Seville. Across these initiatives, Tezos ecosystem continues to champion innovation, inclusivity, and experimentation in the digital art space. Stay tuned for much more to come!

—Aleksandra Art is Head of Arts, Trilitech, the Tezos R&D Hub

The 24-hour auction for Larva Labs’ Quine—the final release on Art Blocks Curated—concluded on October 10. Two days before the auction, Larva Labs’ founders, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, announced that 25% of their proceeds for Quine would be donated to the NODE Foundation “and their mission of supporting the continued stewardship of CryptoPunks and the broader digital art space.” Yuga Labs had acquired the intellectual property (IP) to CryptoPunks in 2022. NODE foundation acquired the IP to CryptoPunks in May 2025. Hall and Watkinson—with Erick Calderon, founder of Art Blocks, and Wylie Aronow, co-founder of Yuga Labs—are on the NODE advisory board.

Yinka Shonibare, the London-based interdisciplinary artist—whose foundation in the UK capital embraced the challenge of the Covid-19 by creating Guest Projects Digital to support artists in the UK, Ghana, and Nigeria—has been holding the stage in London this week on behalf of two landmark events.

On October 7, Shonibare was one of 16 artists whose work was launched on digital billboards across the UK and Brazil as part of “It’s Not Easy Being Green”. The exhibition, curated by Bakul Patki, offers artists’ views of the climate crisis debate, presented on billboards normally used for advertising. The exhibition, one of a series run since 2022 by arts producer Artichoke and its project The Gallery, runs in partnership with British Council Brazil, and the Instituto Guimarães Rosa (IGR), part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brazil, in the leadup to COP30 in Belém this November.

At Tate Modern on October 9, Shonibare spoke to the novelist Ben Okri in front of a packed auditorium, to mark the opening of the much-anticipated exhibition “Nigerian Modernism: Art and Independence” (until May 10, 2026). Their conversation was moderated by Osei Bonsu, Jorge M. Pérez Senior Curator, International Art, Africa and Diaspora, who is curator, with Bilal Akkouche, of a landmark show featuring the work of artists including JD Okhai Ojeikere, Ben Enwonwu, and Jimo Akoto Fulani.

The Egyptian-born artist Wael Shawky, known for his large-scale multimedia performance and video pieces touching on historical and colonial subjects, has been talking about his role as Artistic Director of the first iteration of Art Basel Qatar art fair, which will run in the Gulf kingdom from February 3 to 7, 2026. The fair will depart, Art Basel said in a statement, from the traditional booth model “to present an open-format exhibition in which artist presentations respond to a central curatorial theme of ‘Becoming’.” “The theme ‘Becoming’,” Shawky said in a statement, “is a meditation on change, on how humanity reshapes the ways we live, believe, and create meaning.” The rival fair behemoth Frieze has meanwhile announced that it will launch an Abu Dhabi edition in November 2026 after arranging to take over the existing Abu Dhabi Art Fair.

“Replacement Character”, a show of work by Luke Shannon created using his custom-built plotter-scanner, runs until November 8 at Heft Gallery, New York. The series will also be shown at Paris Photo 2025, featuring 40 prints, 10 video works, and a limited number of commissions with the artist. A book of essays to accompany “Replacement Character” features the writing of Shannon, the designer David Reinfurt, the writer Rex Shannon, the artist Maya Man, the curator Sofia Garcia, and the media theorist Ruby Justice Thelot.

Heft Gallery announced the morning after the New York opening on October 8 that the show—which it describes as a “study of surveillance, portraiture, and hyper-documentation”—had sold out. It is “now offering a limited number of commissions for hour-long private sessions with Shannon and the plotter-scanner.”

“Persistent Worlds”, a solo exhibition by Alice Bucknell, the Los Angeles–based writer and artist working with video games, runs at Kunsthalle Praha, in the capital of the Czech Republic, until January 19, 2026. The show, which features the artist’s four most recent works, is curated by Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, research associate at ECAL Lausanne, and lecturer at University College London “The show suggests,” Nolasco-Rózsás says in a launch statement, “that digital worldbuilding does more than mirror reality: it unravels and unsettles it, opening space for speculation and for scenarios that might shape our shared future.”

With artists, curators, collectors and gallerists anticipating a feverish London art week centered on the Frieze art fair (October 14 to 18), there are some notable shows at the fair and beyond that address the intersection of art and technology.

In 2024, the star turn at Frieze London was John Akomfrah’s Becoming Wind (2023), a haunting 30-minute five-channel video piece shown in the LG OLED Lounge. In 2025, the Lounge—a tranquil escape from hubbub of Frieze’s giant, carpeted, tent—will be a family affair, with the work of leading Korean abstract ink artist Suh Se Ok, as reimagined by his sons, the contemporary artist Suh Do Ho, who has created digital art, and the architect Suh Eul Ho, who has worked on the exhibition space.

At Frieze Masters, across the park from the main fair, Gazelli Art House is presenting works by Harold Cohen, creator of AARON, the first autonomous artmaking program, and a pioneer of computer-generated art. The gallery will show Cohen’s original Drawing Machine (Desk) (1980) alongside a live screen display of the revived code. Meanwhile, Fellowship gallery is working with the Harold Cohen Estate, Gazelli Art House, and Verisart to place a selection of 100 AARON at Tsukuba drawings.

At one end of Park Lane, there is automotive glamour on offer with the BMW Art Car #14, designed by David Hockney 30 years ago, on display at The Peninsula London hotel on Hyde Park Corner from October 14 to November 3. At the other end of the Lane, at Moco Museum, on Marble Arch, digital artist Krista Kim launches Heart Space, a new immersive installation on October 17.

At Newport Street Gallery, across the river Thames from the Houses of Parliament, “Triple Trouble” brings together, in close collaboration, the work of the French street artist Invader, whose distinctive pixellated figurations are to be found tiled across the Marais district of Paris, with that of US artists Shepard Fairey and the gallery’s founder, Damien Hirst.

At the giant screens of Outernet immersive institution on Tottenham Court Road, there are several pieces marking Black History Month including Media Stream AI: Black to the Future, a celebration of AI innovation, created by Olivia Ema and Samuel Adjaye, that reimagines Black history as a living, evolving story; and Emoji Shower: A Celebration of Black Joy, marking the 10 years since Apple introduced racially diverse emojis. Programs vary daily and can be checked at Outernet’s What’s On section.

Memo Akten and Katie Peyton Hofstadter’s immersive installation and film Superradiance (2025) is also showing at Outernet, from 11am to 1pm on Wednesday October 15. “We augment our cognition using AI, built from our collective intelligence (and labor),” the artists told Right Click Save earlier this year. How can we flip this trajectory, and repurpose these technologies to reconnect to our planetary body, rather than further sever the connection? This is the starting point for our work Superradiance.”

The author draws on cellular automata, evolution, neural networks, and ecosystems, to emphasize that emergence and self-organization create patterns without central control. The book is not a grand unified theory, nor does it define complexity, but the author explains why that is a false goal: the cross-disciplinary story of ideas links physics (thermodynamics, chaos theory), biology (brains, ants, food webs), and culture (markets, population dynamics, social networks). This excellent and thorough primer requires study for those seeking to understand unfamiliar topics, but it is also an invitation to see creativity as a complex adaptive process, thriving between order and randomness.

—Charlotte Kent is an arts writer and assistant professor of visual culture at Montclair State University. With a background in philosophy and literature, as well as in ophthalmic publishing, she brings an interdisciplinary approach to visual art and digital culture with a current research focus on the absurd.

A few months ago, I discovered Genealogy of Violence by the artist Mohammed Bourouissa. What is to be seen in this film? A young racialized man is stopped by a policeman for an identity check while chatting in his car with a girl he seems to love. As the officer conducts a methodical frisk, the camera shifts from live action to 3D and enters the main character’s body. Entering inside your own body becomes the only refuge when there is no escape from violence.

Last July in Arles for the opening of the Rencontres Photographiques, I encountered Ho Tzu Nyen’s work at Luma. In One or Several Tigers, an old colonial painting—showing a British surveyor attacked by a tiger in the Malaysian forest—transforms into 3D animation. The tiger, once depicted as a wild beast, becomes a mythical were-tiger who speaks, unveiling the silenced history of forced labour that shaped Singapore.

This brought to mind Jeff Mermelstein’s photobook #nyc, in which the photojournalist focused on showing fragments of text-message exchanges captured in the streets of New York City. While it should feel odd to read these private conversations, they feel strangely familiar: we could be sitting on the subway, accidentally catching a glimpse of our neighbour’s screen in exactly the same way.

Perhaps the common thread between these works is the way technology permeates both our daily lives and the arts—transforming not only what we see, but how we see. A topic that the British writer John Berger had explored in the early 1970s in his TV essay series, Ways of Seeing.

—Kim Lê Boutin is the founder of New Ways of Seeing (Revoir le Voir), a symposium-meets-festival which runs in Paris, 25-27 October. It convenes artists, designers, researchers, and technologists to collectively reimagine how images are perceived and created in the digital age.