Featuring humanoid robots, historic drawing machines, autonomous AI agents, early computer art from the 1960s, and a pioneering digital painting tool that revolutionized broadcasting and the MTV era – The Digital Art Mile is a landmark event set to transform Basel’s historic Rebgasse during Art Basel from June 16–22, 2025. The event is organised by ArtMeta, created by Georg Bak and Roger Haas, and will include an art fair, a curated exhibition, and a week-long conference program.
As part of the Paintboxed - Tezos World Tour, a series of events that traveled across Miami, Paris, and New York, ArtMeta, Objkt, the Tezos Foundation, and the Adrian Wilson Archive are proud to bring the groundbreaking exhibition “Paintboxed” to Basel. This exhibition showcases leading digital artists and the rich history of one of the first digital painting devices in the history of digital art. The Quantel Paintbox defined the visual landscape of the 1980s and influenced film, television, and pop culture. Its work includes iconic variations of the MTV logo and music videos such as “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits, released in June 1985. In 1986, Quantel launched a photo-quality version of the Paintbox, establishing it as the gold standard in digital art creation for years. Without the Paintbox, dozens of iconic album covers, such as Nirvana’s Nevermind, and movie posters for Silence of the Lambs, Pulp Fiction, and JFK would not exist. Before Adobe’s Photoshop became popularised in the mid-1990s, the verb for digital picture manipulation was “Paintboxed.”
The Paintbox’s cultural significance reached new heights in 1987 when the BBC’s series Painting with Light showcased six diverse international artists, including David Hockney, Jennifer Bartlett, and Sidney Nolan, creating their first digital artworks. Hockney’s initial use of a digital painting tool was the Paintbox, predating his coveted iPhone and iPad drawings by more than two decades.
The Paintboxed exhibition will feature contemporary artists such as Grant Yun, Bryan Brinkman, Justin Aversano, and Ivona Tau, who have created new works on an original Quantel Paintbox lent by Paintboxed co-curator and Quantel historian Adrian Wilson. These works will be presented as physical lightboxes for sale, paired with NFTs minted on the Tezos blockchain, and available on Objkt.
Read our full feature piece on the ambitious revival of Paintboxed here.
This year’s art fair will welcome new exhibitors, including Kate Vass Galerie from Zurich, which will present Iconoclast, a solo program by Nigerian digital artist Osinachi. The selection spans early to recent digital paintings (2019–2025) and includes a special project, Forgotten Relics, a series created during the artist’s residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy in 2025.
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LaCollection, renowned for collaborations with institutions such as the British Museum and Monnaie de Paris, will present a solo exhibition featuring a new series by generative artist Tyler Hobbs, well-known for Fidenza.
Mayor Gallery will pay tribute to the 100th anniversary of Waldemar Cordeiro, widely regarded as the father of digital art in South America. Cordeiro, founder of Brazil’s Ruptura art movement and a frequent participant in Zagreb’s New Tendencies, collaborated with Jorge Moscati to create iconic artworks in the late 1960s using an IBM 360/44 computer at the University of São Paulo.
Bright Moments from San Francisco will present a group exhibition, Automata, focusing on the evolution of robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous AI agents.
The Zurich-based digital art platform Objkt will showcase the group exhibition We Emotional Cyborgs: On Avatars and AI Agents, curated by Anika Meier (The Second-Guess), which explores how virtual entities reflect our desires and challenge notions of identity amidst the collapse of trust and truth.
The digital art fair will be accompanied by a series of conferences held at Kult.Kino Cinema at Rebgasse 1 throughout the week, covering topics such as “The Digital Art Market,” “Corporate Collections in the Digital Age,” “Generative Art and AI,” and “Museums and Digital Art.” The A-list lineup of speakers includes: Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Ian Charles Stewart, Director of Toledo Museum of Art Laboratories; Sebastien Borget, COO and Co-Founder of The Sandbox; Prof. Dr. Thomas Girst, Global Head of Cultural Engagement at BMW; Aleksandra Artamonovskaja, Head of Arts at TriliTech; Alex Estorick, Editor-in-Chief of Right Click Save; and Sofia Lekka Angelopoulou, Editor-in-Chief of Designboom.
Register to secure your spot for each conference:
17 June | Digital Art Market Day
18 June | Museums & Digital Art Day
19 June | Corporate Collections Day
