HEK and Tezos Launch Virtual Exhibition 404_LAND on June 12

HEK, the House of Electronic Arts, has teamed up with the Tezos Foundation to launch a new virtual group exhibition called 404_LAND. It opens June 12 on HEK’s virtual platform and runs through August 9. This is the first of two virtual shows planned under their 2026 partnership, with an outdoor presentation also happening during Art Basel.

The exhibition’s title comes from the HTTP 404 error — that message you see when a webpage can’t be found. But instead of seeing it as a failure, the curators, Auronda Scalera and Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti, frame it as a starting point. They want to explore political disappearance, computational misunderstanding, fractured memory, and unstable digital identity.

The exhibition 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 span machinima, AI dialogue, generative systems, interactive simulations, and speculative worldbuilding. Each artist tackles the “404 condition” from a different angle.

Artists Explore Glitch and Instability

Gabriel Massan’s piece, Victims, is part of his Ball Of Terror series. It uses looping machinima environments filled with falling bodies and suspended motion to explore state violence and the architecture of fear.

London-based duo dmstfctn contributes The Models. It’s an infinite AI simulation where machine-generated characters improvise dialogue across more than 26,000 possible scenes. They used access to the Supercomputer Leonardo infrastructure to pull this off.

Varvara & Mar’s Everything Is In Your Hands turns webcam gestures into glitch-driven interactions. Your human expressions become readable but also get misinterpreted by algorithmic systems. It’s a strange dance between intention and machine error.

AI, Memory, and Digital Identity

Several works focus on how human identity gets twisted by machine interpretation. Hind Al Saad’s SELF(ENCODED) places viewers inside a recursive system where facial features turn into machine-readable patterns. Eventually, identity itself becomes abstract data.

Kat Zhang the Poet Engineer’s Hypomnemata: Memory is a Flock of Birds looks at memory as erosion and imperfect reconstruction. It uses associative AI-inspired systems to show how memories get rebuilt and fragmented over time.

Alida Sun’s The world isn’t ending / Their world is ending pushes the exhibition toward social and planetary instability, expanding the themes beyond just digital spaces.

The exhibition space itself feels broken. There’s no homepage or fixed navigation system. Visitors drift through interconnected digital zones designed around fragmentation and instability. It’s meant to feel like you’re lost in the internet’s forgotten corners.

Alongside the exhibition, each artist will release NFTs on the Tezos ecosystem through objkt.com. For HEK and the participating artists, 404_LAND treats the internet’s broken spaces not as empty voids but as territories worth exploring. These are places where identity fragments, systems fail, and new digital realities begin to take shape.

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