Reporting to you live from the humid, electric chaos of Art Basel Miami Beach, where I’ve spent the past few days immersed in what feels like two parallel art worlds operating in the same fairground.

The big story is Zero 10, the dedicated digital art sector that has become the beating heart of our community at this otherwise traditional fair. While you’re unlikely to spot many artists wandering the white-walled booths of the other sectors, Zero 10 was packed with creators during the VIP preview: Maya Man, IX Shells, Beeple, Jack Butcher, Kiya Tadele from Yatreda, Mario Klingemann, and Ana María Caballero were all there, alongside dozens of other artists and curators whose work is shaping the future of digital practice.

The energy was palpable. There’s something genuinely moving about watching a community that has largely existed in Discord channels and Twitter threads occupy physical space together, standing in front of screens displaying their work, sharing the kinds of spontaneous conversations that only happen face to face. The excitement at the preview wasn’t just about sales or visibility (though both matter); it was about recognition, presence, and the unmistakable sense that digital art has earned its place in this landscape.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Away from the robot dogs (Beeple’s Regular Animals even joined the red carpet as guests at the Art Basel Awards), Jack Butcher’s absorbing Self Checkout machines, and other unmissable moments at Zero 10 — not to mention the diamanté-light-art megastar-wattage of Diana Ross’s performance at the launch party for the artist Alex Prager’s Mirage Factory — the headline digital art moments at Art Basel include a new work by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Kinder Scout (2025), presented by Fellowship in the Meridians section for large-scale works and installations.

Artists got talking earlier in the week with the second annual Digital Art Conversations, hosted by Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), on December 1. Refik Anadol presented alongside many of the Zero 10 artists, while Maya Man, Kiya Tadele, creative director of Yatreda, and Auriea Harvey held a panel discussion, moderated by Regina Harsanyi, Associate Curator of Media Arts, Museum of the Moving Image, on “Digital Bodies: Virtual Identity and Mythos Through Figuration”. On December 4, the first of Art Basel’s Digital Dialogues of the week took place, featuring artists Matt Hall, of Larva Labs, and Beeple.

The art and technology conversation continued at Design Miami where aurèce vettier presented, with The Spaceless Gallery, a triptych that transforms AI-generated botanical organisms into metal-threaded textile works, woven at the legendary Aubusson workshops in France.

There was much hybrid physical and digital work on show at the smaller but well-established fairs that have for two decades brought diversity and grassroots programming of media art to Miami Art Week.

They include the SCOPE Art Show (with a focus on immersive installations, wellness — there’s a Padel court — and artist talks); NADA Miami Beach, where Anna Kultys Gallery is presenting “Memento Mori”, featuring the work of artists including Jonas Lund and Sasha Stiles; and Untitled Art. At Untitled, bitforms shows the work of 16 artists including Man, Manfred Mohr, Sarah Rothberg, Marco Brambilla, and Ana María Caballero; Heft Gallery shows the work of five artists including Auriea Harvey and Nancy Burson; while Petra Cortright guest curates Untitled’s “Artist Spotlight” on fellow practitioners working on new digital frontiers and outsider art.

“Looking at Models”, curated by Charlotte Kent, is the featured offering in the MUD Foundation’s Art Week 2025 program “Media Under Dystopia 6.0”. It includes citywide events, talks, live coding, and an artist panel discussion with Man, Carla Gannis, Fabiola Larios, and Gretchen Andrew.

Last month, Lawrence Lek launched a new iteration of his long-running project, NOX (“Nonhuman Excellence”), at The Bass Museum of Art in Miami. “Lawrence Lek: Nox Pavilion” imagines a fictional world where self-driving cars are rehabilitated at a centre for non-compliant machines. Here, the artist sets the NOX universe in context.

Alex Estorick: When reflecting on your work, it’s hard for me not to think of a game like Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid or else the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, for whom deserted, “impossible” vistas captured the uncertainty and nostalgia of worlds of technological enterprise. I also always associate your practice with “Sinofuturism”. How has that concept evolved over time and can it serve as a counterweight to the tendency of contemporary art to entrench Western knowledge regimes?

Lawrence Lek: It’s great you mention de Chirico because I was looking into those impossible vistas of utterly functionless but sublime scenes when I was making the “expansion packs” for The Bass—casting the setting sun over the skeleton of a pavilion with a smart city in the background. Kojima breaks the fourth wall in his games all the time, making you question your agency as a player. 

I made the video essay Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD) in 2016, looking at how the promises and problems of AI and Chinese industrialization are two sides of the same coin. While it’s been called prophetic by some, it’s also been oversimplified into a statement about “China being the future” or about a narrow aesthetic. But my main argument, inspired by the role of the robot in Afrofuturism, was that the avatar of Chinese modernity is in fact AI—a being capable of endless work, championing copying and computing as the prime means of survival. This idea has been important enough for me to call my subsequent practice a “Sinofuturist World”. 

The counterweight to any dominant narrative by definition lies in the role of the outsider, and that’s a large reason why my works feature the AI as protagonist. It’s also a strange self-portrait, both of myself as an individual and of ourselves collectively. I think of AI as the quintessential alien, worthy of compassion. But AI is both an alien who we are creating, and a new cyborg character who we are all becoming. 

— Lawrence Lek unites filmmaking, video games, and electronic soundscapes in a singular cinematic universe. Featuring a recurring cast of wandering characters, his works are noted for their dreamlike narratives, evocative imagery, and preoccupation with technology and memory. In 2024, he was the winner of the Frieze London Artist Award and was named as one of Time’s 100 most influential people in AI. His exhibition, “Lawrence Lek: Nox Pavilion” is on show at The Bass Museum of Art, until April 26, 2026.