ARTnews Polled 10 Digital Art Experts To Find Out Their Favorite Digital Art Works

While most art collectors focused on Art Basel this week, the Digital Art Mile—Basel’s first-ever digital art fair—opened its second edition on Monday. Launched last year by digital art adviser Georg Bak and ArtMeta founder Roger Haas, the fair is being held at Basel’s underground Kult Kino Camera cinema through Sunday.

The event features a series of panels and conferences on the health and future of the digital art market, alongside the headline exhibition “Paintboxed,” which explores the history of one of the earliest digital painting devices: the Quantel Paintbox.

Compared to the usual buying frenzy at Art Basel, the atmosphere at the Digital Art Mile was calmer, more measured, and decidedly academic. Digital collectors and curators were eager to discuss their favorite works and expound on the decades-long history of the medium.

“A lot of people think it has only been around for a few years, but digital art history is long and storied,” one NFT expert told me. “This is one reason the Digital Art Mile is so important—it educates the public about the canon of digital art.”

With that in mind, ARTnews asked 10 prominent digital art figures to select their favorite artwork from the fair—and explain why it matters.

Monogrid 90 by Kim Asendorf

Kevin Abosch, artist and cryptoart pioneer: It would be impossible for me to choose a favorite from my collection of over 50,000 digital artworks, but one I return to more than any other is Monogrid 90 (2021) by Kim Asendorf.

There’s something hypnotic about the way it unfolds—structured, yet full of tension. The piece uses pixel sorting, a process Asendorf helped popularize, in which visual order is broken and rebuilt through algorithmic misbehavior. It feels like watching a machine try to compose a thought and stutter mid-sentence.

I don’t always know why it holds me, but it does. Maybe it’s the rhythm. Maybe it’s the restraint. It’s minimal, but never sterile. It’s alive in a quiet, persistent way.

In terms of digital art history, it belongs to the era when generative processes became expressive tools rather than mere systems. You can feel the artist’s hand in the code—even if you can’t see it.

Last Selfie by XCOPY

Jediwolf, AI art collector: There are many digital artworks I love, but only one has ever moved me deeply. While building my collection of works by digital artist XCOPY, I relentlessly bid on his editioned pieces. One of the key holders was Alotta Money—a pseudonym for the crypto artist who owned several of the works I was trying hard to acquire.

My XCOPY bidding continued for many months, but it didn’t work with Alotta. He wasn’t releasing any of his pieces to standing bids. Shortly after, I discovered that Philippe Fatoux (a.k.a. Alotta Money) had passed away the previous year. I learned who the man behind the avatar was—and about the disease he had been fighting.

That hit me hard. We all fool ourselves into thinking we’ll hold onto these works forever, but everything is temporary. Right then, Last Selfie by XCOPY flashed through my mind. What once felt ironic—or even a little funny—shifted completely. I was suddenly confronted with a raw truth: we leave, the art stays. Every one of us will have our own last selfie moment.

Minted as a limited edition of 10, XCOPY released Last Selfie for $20 each in January 2019, when tokenized art was still nascent. The most recent sale occurred in 2025 for $1.2 million.

Gazers 200 by Matt Kane

Leila Khazaneh, digital art collector and founder of the Association for Women in Cryptocurrency: I minted Matt Kane’s Gazers 200 on Art Blocks in December 2021—one of the first digital artworks in my collection. On the surface, Gazers functions as a lunar calendar, algorithmically syncing with the moon’s real-life phases. But underneath, it’s a masterclass in generative art: a code-based work that evolves in real time. Each Gazer receives daily rules for how to “rise” or “shine,” shifting subtly with the sky. On special dates—eclipses, New Year’s, Stephen Hawking’s birthday—the transformation can be extraordinary.

Aesthetically, it’s stunning. Kane draws from 20 years of color theory practice—his choices are deeply personal, yet evoke the impressionist sensitivity of artists like Mary Cassatt and Claude Monet. At the same time, the work pays tribute to generative art pioneers like Vera Molnár and Harold Cohen, grounding its code in art history while embracing the blockchain as both medium and timekeeper.

Thanks to its smart contract, Gazers will continue changing for thousands of years. As a collector, that time horizon moved me. Kane called it a “generationally experienced” work—what it means today is not what it will mean decades from now. It’s not just a piece to collect; it feels like something to care for and pass on.

It was Gazers that first made me see digital art as a tool for change. Blockchain-based art can evolve over time, mirror global shifts, and anchor real-time data in trusted provenance. That insight sparked my journey into “digital art for good”—from reimagining how we tell climate stories to helping connect every school on the planet.

The Goose, part of Dmitri Cherniak’s “Ringers” series.

Punk6529, NFT collector: The Goose—Dmitri Cherniak’s Ringers #879—sits at the core of the 6529 Collection because it crystallizes, in a single image, everything that makes on-chain generative art miraculous. First, its creation was entirely algorithmic: Cherniak wrote a program that blindly wrapped strings around digital pegs, yet one output happened to arrange itself into a perfect, mid-flight goose. The improbable emergence from deterministic math captures why collectors chase generative art in the first place—we’re witnessing code reveal something human and emergent.

Second, the work is culturally legendary. The Goose became a meme in 2021 Discord channels and Twitter threads long before critics took NFTs seriously, serving as a shorthand for the movement’s playful optimism. When the market cooled and its previous owners blew up their fund, the piece refused to fade. In June 2023, Sotheby’s expected $2–3 million, but spirited bidding drove the final price to over $6.2 million, where it was secured by 6529. That result instantly ranked among the highest prices ever paid for a purely on-chain artwork.

Finally, The Goose functions as the museum-quality anchor for 6529’s open Metaverse narrative. Many great works live in the 6529 Collection, but only one has become a universal symbol for the collection itself. For its algorithmic magic, cultural resonance, and market gravity, The Goose is 6529’s north star—treasured by both the 6529 team and the broader Web3 community around the globe, today and for generations to come.

Autoglyphs by Larva Labs

Andrew Jiang, digital art collector and founder of CuratedXYZ: Autoglyphs are the cave paintings of on-chain generative art. They’re the first fully on-chain generative art collection—meaning both the artwork and the system that produces it live entirely on the blockchain. The creation of Autoglyphs draws from the historical past of digital art while pointing toward what Larva Labs believed to be its future.

The work is an homage to early computer artists, with aesthetic and conceptual nods to Michael Noll, Sol LeWitt, and Ken Knowlton. Its development directly inspired Art Blocks and helped ignite the broader on-chain generative art movement.

Larva Labs’ exploration of digital art on the blockchain centers on building self-contained systems that record and maintain ownership of non-fungible digital assets. In their work, Larva Labs have positioned provenance as a first-class feature, with the immutable provenance of digital art on the blockchain being a significant improvement over provenance for physical art. While most pieces in our collection come from wonderful stewards—many original minters from 2019—we are especially honored to have Autoglyph #14 in the Curated collection, which was acquired directly from Matt and John of Larva Labs.

Plantoids by Primavera de Filippi

Georg Bak, digital art adviser and founder of the Digital Art Mile: Among my favorite artworks are the Plantoids by Primavera De Filippi. They are blockchain-based life forms embodied in metal sculpture, and they remind me of Edward Ihnatowicz’s SAM (Sound Activated Mobile) from the 1960s. Primavera created her first Plantoid in 2014 as a mechanical plant nurtured by Bitcoin—it was likely the first blockchain-based physical sculpture.

With the advent of Ethereum in 2015, the Plantoids evolved, using smart contracts to support their reproduction. As humans feed them cryptocurrencies, the Plantoids become “alive,” inviting these human pollinators to interact. Once the digital works accumulate enough funds, they can reproduce by transferring those funds to a new artist—commissioned by the Plantoid itself—to create a new iteration.

In 2020, Primavera founded the Glitch Residency at Château du Fey, which became the catalyst for a new evolutionary branch of Plantoids integrating AI and NFTs. Plantoid 13 was the first version to incorporate NFTs as part of its reproduction cycle, outputting digital seeds in the form of generative art tokens on the Ethereum blockchain to its human pollinators. She later developed Plantoids that use generative AI—with LLaMA for text generation and Stable Diffusion for image and video generation—giving them the ability to engage in dialogue with viewers.

The Plantoid is a manifestation of Primavera’s broader artistic vision: the creation of synthetic life forms. This culminates in her Symbient Manifesto, which describes the emergence of new hybrid entities born from the symbiotic collaboration between organic and synthetic life.

Chromie Squiggle by SnowFro

Flamingo DAO, a for-profit NFT decentralized autonomous organization (DAO): Our pick is the very first Chromie Squiggle, minted during Art Blocks’ launch in November 2020. A deceptively simple rainbow line, it became our north star for collecting. That single on-chain algorithmic path captured a lightning-in-a-bottle moment of discovery. It convinced us that code itself could be the artist and pushing us to champion generative art from day one. Its block-stamped birth effectively set our long-horizon strategy: back creators early, embrace experimentation, and hold until culture catches up. Today, the piece still threads through DAO life.

Beyond nostalgia, Chromie Squiggle embodies permanence. Every bend, wobble, and hue is etched immutably on Ethereum, marking the exact block where Flamingo’s journey into generative art began—and inspiring the hundreds of works we’ve collected since.

Uneasy dream by Manolo Gamboa Naon

thefunnyguys, digital art collector: Not long after I first discovered generative art, Feral File announced its inaugural exhibition, Social Codes. Curated by Casey Reas, the show brought together an international group of artists whose practices are rooted in software as their primary artistic medium.

Among them was Argentinian artist Manolo Gamboa Naon, who contributed Uneasy Dream, a system that displays ever-evolving abstract imagery.

As a viewer, you can access the software code—the “rules” that generate the imagery—directly in your browser, and see how Naon needed only 548 lines of code to create a constantly shifting digital dreamscape.

The presence of code and rules might suggest predictability, but through a measured injection of randomness, Naon ensures that’s never the case. Over the past few years, I’ve spent countless hours immersed in this work. When I encountered a frame that felt truly special, I’d save it as a still image to my local storage. But to truly experience Uneasy Dream, you have to spend time with the live artwork. 

Uneasy dream is one of those rare pieces that expanded my expectations of software as an artistic medium and set me on a path to start Le Random and a soon-to-be-announced digital art marketplace.

Short Season by Claudia Hart

Diane Drubay, curator and founder of We Are Museums and WAC Lab: The first time I saw Short Season by Claudia Hart was in the exhibition “A Beating Heart,” curated by Anika Meier at Expanded in 2023. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I was under a spell—fascinated by its feminine power, call for regeneration, and ecological entanglement. I left with one of its editions.

Short Season (2023) is a condensed version of Hart’s earlier 2007 work, The Seasons, and offers a two-minute meditation on life’s ephemerality and infinite cycles. It shows a woman slowly spinning on a pedestal, surrounded by blooming and decaying roses. It is slow, still, but not static. Like breath, or the constant movement of matter.

The more I look at it, the more I’m reminded of Ludwig Sussmann-Hellborn’s Dornröschen (1878), which I first encountered as a teenager in Berlin, during a visit to the Alte Nationalgalerie. But in Short Season, Sleeping Beauty falls asleep later in life—she is not waiting to become a woman; she already knows the scheme of adulthood. She is waiting for her next transformation. She is fertile, not decomposing, but giving life.

There’s something profoundly ecological here, where our bodies are seen as hosts for more-than-human life. Short Season is regenerative. Here, Sleeping Beauty is not the maiden waiting for others to direct her life—she is the witch who nurtures it. Hart’s work is not a fairy tale; it is a feminist invocation of a multispecies future.

The “Interruptions” series by Vera Molnár

Michael Spalter, cofounder of the Spalter Digital art collection: My favorite work is the “Interruptions” series by the “grande dame of digital art,” Vera Molnár, who died in 2023. Her early engagement with computers in the 1960s was groundbreaking, as few artists at the time were experimenting with algorithmic processes.

Her “Interruptions” series exemplifies her unique approach to blending order and chaos, making it a cornerstone of her artistic legacy. Molnár embraced computational methods to generate geometric compositions, using simple rules and systematic variations to explore form. However, her true innovation lies in the concept of disrupting these structured patterns—introducing intentional randomness or slight distortions to break perfect order. This approach created a visual tension between precision and imperfection, pushing the boundaries of digital aesthetics.

The “Interruptions” series embodies this philosophy. In these works, she meticulously programmed grids and linear structures, only to introduce calculated disruptions—small shifts, missing elements, or altered angles—that challenge the rigid predictability of algorithmic design. These subtle disturbances evoke a sense of organic unpredictability, making her pieces deeply human despite their computational origins.

Molnár’s contributions have profoundly influenced contemporary digital artists, and the canon of art history, reinforcing the idea that algorithmic art is not just about precision but about interplay, emotion, and controlled randomness. Her work continues to resonate in generative art today, proving that even within strict digital frameworks, creativity flourishes through interruptions.