Jack Paul 
The House of Electronic Arts and the Tezos Foundation have launched a new virtual group exhibition called 404_LAND. It explores machine intelligence, digital instability, and hidden parts of the internet.
The show opens on June 12th on HEK’s virtual platform and runs through August 9th. This is the first of two virtual exhibitions planned under the organizations’ 2026 partnership. The second will be an outdoor presentation during Art Basel.
Curated by Experts
Curated by Auronda Scalera and Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti, the exhibition takes its name from the HTTP 404 error message. That is the message that appears when a webpage is missing or broken. But instead of seeing the error as failure, 404_LAND uses it as a starting point. The show looks at political disappearance, computational misunderstanding, fractured memory, and unstable digital identity.
Six Artists Exploring the “404 Condition”
The exhibition includes 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 cover machinima, AI dialogue, generative systems, interactive simulation, and speculative worldbuilding.
Each artist approaches the “404 condition” from a different angle. Gabriel Massan’s Victims, part of his Ball Of Terror series, looks at state violence and fear through looping machinima environments with falling bodies and suspended motion. London-based duo dmstfctn created The Models, an infinite AI simulation where machine-generated characters improvise dialogue across more than 26,000 possible scenes, using access to the Leonardo supercomputer infrastructure. Varvara & Mar’s Everything Is In Your Hands turns webcam gestures into glitch-driven interactions. In this piece, human expression becomes both readable and misinterpreted by algorithms.
AI, Memory, and Identity
Several works 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 turned into machine-readable patterns, and identity becomes abstract data. Kat Zhang the Poet Engineer’s Hypomnemata: Memory is a Flock of Birds looks at memory as erosion and imperfect reconstruction using associative AI systems. Alida Sun’s The world isn’t ending / Their world is ending expands toward social and planetary instability.
The exhibition space itself reflects these ideas. There is no homepage or fixed navigation. Visitors drift through interconnected digital zones designed around fragmentation and instability.
NFTs on Tezos
Alongside the exhibition, each artist will release NFTs on the Tezos ecosystem through objkt.com. For HEK and the artists, 404_LAND sees the internet’s broken spaces not as absence, but as territory. In these spaces, identity fragments, systems fail, and new digital realities begin to emerge.