HEK and Tezos Launch 404_LAND, a Virtual Exhibition Exploring AI, Glitch Systems, and Digital Identity

HEK (House of Electronic Arts) and the Tezos Foundation have announced 404_LAND, a new virtual group exhibition exploring machine intelligence, digital instability, and the hidden territories of the internet.

Launching June 12th on HEK’s virtual platform and running through August 9th, the exhibition is the first of two virtual shows planned as part of the organizations’ 2026 partnership, alongside an outdoor presentation during Art Basel.

Curated by Auronda Scalera and Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti, the exhibition takes its name from the HTTP 404 error — the message displayed when a webpage can no longer be found.

But instead of treating the error as failure, 404_LAND reframes it as an entry point into political disappearance, computational misunderstanding, fractured memory, and unstable digital identity.

Six Artists Navigating the “404 Condition”

The exhibition features works from Gabriel Massan, dmstfctn, Varvara & Mar, Hind Al Saad (with Martin Juras and Levi Hammett), Kat Zhang the Poet Engineer, and Alida Sun, spanning machinima, AI dialogue, generative systems, interactive simulation, and speculative worldbuilding.

Each artist approaches the “404 condition” from a different perspective.

Gabriel Massan’s Victims, part of his ongoing Ball Of Terror series, explores state violence and the architecture of fear through looping machinima environments filled with falling bodies and suspended motion.

London-based duo dmstfctn contribute The Models, an infinite AI simulation where machine-generated characters endlessly improvise dialogue across more than 26,000 possible scenes using access to Supercomputer Leonardo infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Varvara & Mar’s Everything Is In Your Hands transforms webcam gestures into glitch-driven interactions where human expression becomes simultaneously readable and misinterpreted by algorithmic systems.

AI, Memory, and Computational Identity

Several works throughout the exhibition focus on the unstable relationship between human identity and machine interpretation.

Hind Al Saad’s SELF(ENCODED) places viewers inside a recursive system where facial features are transformed into machine-readable patterns until identity itself becomes abstract data.

Kat Zhang the Poet Engineer’s Hypomnemata: Memory is a Flock of Birds explores memory as erosion and imperfect reconstruction through associative AI-inspired systems, while Alida Sun’s The world isn’t ending / Their world is ending expands the exhibition toward social and planetary instability.

The exhibition space itself reflects these themes. There is no homepage or fixed navigation system. Visitors instead drift through interconnected digital zones designed around fragmentation and instability.

Alongside the exhibition, each participating artist will also release NFTs on the Tezos ecosystem through objkt.com.

For HEK and the exhibition’s artists, 404_LAND ultimately treats the internet’s broken spaces not as absence, but as territory — places where identity fragments, systems fail, and new digital realities begin to emerge.