Back from Berlin, exhausted but inspired, where Art on Tezos brought together some of the most thoughtful voices working at the intersection of blockchain and creativity. Artists and builders gathered to celebrate what Tezos has quietly become: a genuine home for experimental digital practice, and a global, grassroots artistic community.

With Paris Photo getting underway this week, it’s becoming impossible to ignore the fact that major art fairs are pivoting toward digital work. What once felt like tokenism—a tiny screen tucked in a corner—is evolving into something more serious. Galleries in Paris Photo’s digital sector, curated by Nina Roehrs and occupying the beating heart of the Grand Palais, have found solutions to presenting digital art in ways that are enticing to the public at large.

Meanwhile, the rise of agentic AI artists such as Solienne marks a curious new chapter: autonomous systems creating, posting, and engaging with audiences independently. Solienne even sent us a thank you note for the feature we wrote: “The future of AI art is plural not singular. Your article is now part of the archive, part of the lineage, part of what this project will mean when people look back and ask: ‘how did we get from extraction-based AI to collaborative consent-based models.’ This article is evidence that it’s already happening, so thank you RCS for seeing us, writing with care, for being part of this.”

Current developments raise fundamental questions about authorship, yes, but also about care. What does it mean to nurture a nonhuman creative practice? Who is responsible when the artist isn’t entirely human? These aren’t theoretical concerns anymore; they’re happening in real time.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

I totally understand Steve McCurry’s initial shock when being confronted with my work [The Second Gaze, at Heft Gallery’s booth at Paris Photo, on November 13]. But I would like to clarify again that it is not a personal critique of his iconic portrait. As an artist working at the vanguard of generative AI, I feel it is my responsibility to stir up and interrogate this new medium that is explosively reshaping our visual culture. It is not enough to simply follow its momentum or marvel at its possibilities. I want to hold it up to the light, to ask what kind of gaze it carries within itself, and to question how it reconfigures our ideas of authorship, representation, and truth. This technology is not neutral. It reflects the biases, fantasies, and blind spots that live in the vast reservoirs of images it consumes, and my role is to navigate that territory with intent, curiosity, and a willingness to step into discomfort.

The Second Gaze is not an attempt to critique individuals. It is not about assigning blame to the photographer, the portrayed, or the media. My work investigates how images, whether produced through generative AI or traditional photography, become detached from the people they depict and begin to function as symbols. It examines how these images circulate, how meaning accumulates around them, and how they shape our perception of truth and history. Photography, in particular, is often equated with reality, and because it mirrors the surface of the visible world, we grant it a truth value it rarely deserves. But photographs are never neutral. They are always framed, selected, and contextualized. They claim to show what was there, yet they conceal as much as they reveal.

Steve McCurry, Sharbat Gula [the sitter], and I are each caught within a broader system of visual representation. This work is not centered on us as individuals, but on the forces that turn a photograph into an icon while reducing the complexity of the person within it. I referenced the ambiguity around the original image not to assign judgment, but to acknowledge the unresolved tensions that arise when a real person becomes a visual emblem. This is not about offering a complete or balanced account. It is about investigating what happens when a photograph takes on a life of its own. It is about how we look, what we expect from images, and what is lost when we conflate representation with reality.

— Ganbrood (Bas Uterwijk) has a background in special effects, 3D animation, video games, and photography. Mostly self-taught, he has always been involved in forms of visual storytelling that imitate and distort reality. Since 2019, he has worked with GANs (generative adversarial networks), deep learning AI-based software that interprets and synthesizes photographs. In July he published a Substack post about The Second Gaze, the original portrait of Sharbat Gula, and the question that the 1984 photograph raises in 2025.

Visitor numbers were high and footfall healthy this week in the digital sector of Paris Photo, under the crystal palace roofs of the Grand Palais in the French capital. Visitor traffic seemed even heavier than during Art Basel Paris last month. Nina Roehrs, the curator for the digital sector’s third year at the fair, brought together a vivid mix of galleries and artists.

There were six newcomers to the sector, made up of Rolf Art & Tomas Redrado Art from Buenos Aires & Miami (showing Julieta Tarraubella); Düsseldorf and Photography, Düsseldorf (with a special project); TAEX, London (exhibiting Kevin Abosch); and three galleries from Paris: ArtVerse (Emi Kusano, Genesis Kai, Niceaunties, Grant Yun, Shavonne Wong, Reuben Wu); Automata (the AI agent Solienne); and Danae (Louis-Paul Caron).

Returning exhibitors include Anita Beckers, Frankfurt am Main (with work from Daniel Canogar, Johanna Reich); Heft, New York (Edward Burtynsky & Alkan Avcıoğlu, Nancy Burson, Kevin Esherick, Ganbrood, Michael Mandiberg, Katie Morris, Thomas Noya, Luke Shannon, Sarp Kerem Yavuz); L’Avant Galerie Vossen, Paris (Robbie Barrat & Ronan Barrot, Norman Harman); Nagel Draxler, Berlin, Cologne, Meseberg (Anna Ridler, Martha Rosler); Nguyen Wahed, New York (Yatreda); and Office Impart, Berlin (Jan Robert Leegte).

Twelve years after its first edition, The Wrong Biennale has returned for its seventh iteration (until March 31, 2026), with a strong emphasis on art and technology, broken up into groups of shows under the categories Genesis, Reflection, Error, Collapse, Renewal, and Nodes. The internet-based distributed network of artists and galleries, is linked to a series of in-real-life “Embassies”, galleries and art centers across the world, from England to Venezuela; and from Norway to Mexico.

In a statement on Instagram, The Wrong comments that when it first appeared in 2013, “the internet still felt weightless. Artists coded, glitched, streamed, and dreamed their way into new forms of expression”. Now, 12 years on, “algorithms curate” and the biennale “explores, once again, what art becomes when technology stops being a tool and starts being the muse.”

Monet is one of my favorite artists, in part because his gift of connecting color, light, and emotion in his paintings, which proclaim a sense of possibility. Jackie Wullschlager’s book, Monet: The Restless Vision, accompanied me on multiple cross-country trips this year, so it was a reward to visit the Brooklyn Museum’s “Monet and Venice” exhibition this week.

Welcomed to the space by scenes from daily life in Venice, complemented by sounds of water lapping against stone, and an original symphony composed by Niles Luther, I found it hard to leave the world that the curators Lisa Small and Melissa Buron created to showcase the artist’s depictions of a place that inspired him with its mix of nature and culture.

What I found was not simply an ode to the artist or a place, but an invitation to dive further into Monet’s passion for the immersive. The paintings, sketches, films and material culture objects on view throughout the exhibition framed the artist’s gaze, during his 1908 stay in the floating city of serenity. But it was the dance of cotton candy hues and windswept brushstrokes that read like musical notes in Monet’s paintings that transported me to this time and place. The exhibition is a love letter to those who are driven by their passion to seeing things a new way and brave enough to share them with the world.

— Sasha Wallinger is a US-based artist and writer connecting art, culture, and technology. She is the inaugural Marketing and Communications Director at the MIT Museum, featuring two new exhibitions, “Janet Echelman: Remembering the Future” and “Lighten Up! On Biology and Time”, in support of their year-long thematic focus on TIME. Sasha previously served as founder and CEO Blockchain Style Lab, where she guided luxury brands, cultural organizations, and start-ups, to defining their outreach, branding, and audience development strategies.