Issuu

KURT HENTSCHLÄGER

MARIKO MORI

ALVA NOTO

MÁRI MÁKÓ

GÁBOR + ANDRÁS + ROZI KITZINGER LÁSZLÓ NAGY MÁKÓ GROTESQUE GYMNASTICS

FRANCK AREAL & TRAFOHALLE 15 – 20 JUNE 2026

DORK

FOREWORD

HEXA ISSUE 01 · COSMIC KNOTS · BASEL · JUNE 2026 HEXA is the magazine of 0xCollection, a Basel-based collection of digital and time-based art founded in 2023 by the entrepreneur and philanthropist Karel Komárek. The collection operates as a multidisciplinary platform that supports exhibition, research, and education. It is artist-driven, and it works through long collaborations — with the artists in the collection, with institutions across academia, technology, and cultural heritage, and with the technologists who conserve and preserve digital work built on infrastructure that continues to age. A networked approach guides the collection. Each year, a curatorial framework reframes the field through a thematic exhibition: Synesthetic Immersion in Prague in 2023, Dvořák Dreams at the Kennedy Center in 2024, Frames of Reference in Basel in 2025, and now Cosmic Knots in 2026. In launching the publication HEXA, an additional working space beyond this programme opens a place for critical writing, artist voices, and curatorial argument. This enhances the commitment to the artworks, exhibitions, conservation projects, and relationships that enable their success. The issue you have in your hands develops from the ideas around Cosmic Knots — three installations at the Franck Areal silos and a performance evening at the Trafohalle in Bottmingen, across Art Basel week, 15–20 June 2026. You will find Mariko Mori’s Tom Na H-iu (2006) returning to view after eighteen years of dormancy, the inflection point of our developing practice in digital archivism and reconstruction. You will find Kurt Hentschläger’s SUB (2019), and Gábor Kitzinger, András László Nagy, and Rozi Mákó’s X: Kinetic Techno Sculpture (2025). The magazine highlights the ephemeral practices of these artists and those who carry the opening evening at the Trafohalle — Carsten Nicolai, Grotesque Gymnastics, Mári Mákó, and the surprise guest of the night. The curatorial essay guides the connections among this diverse group by proposing topology before form as a working position on art. For the inaugural issue, the artists of the collection are also highlighted. What we are building, beyond exhibitions, activations, and collaborations, is the slow infrastructure of a sustainable institution: ongoing support for critical voices in the arts and emerging technologies, the conservation of work that depends on complex infrastructures, new commissions, and current debates and dialogues. My thanks, in this first issue, to Karel Komárek, whose conviction made the collection possible; to the artists of the collection, who carry the practice; to Allwyn, our partner in the Cosmic Knots programme; to our collaborating institutions, and to Art Basel for the week that brings us all to the same city in June. Particular thanks to Charlotte Kent, guest editor of this issue, whose voice is woven through what follows. And to the 0xCollection team — the people who turn the idea into the room. —

VIOLA LUKÁCS

Director of Curatorial Affairs, 0xCollection

CONTENTS WORKS Mariko Mori — Tom Na H-iu Q1 — ON THE MUSEUM’S NEAR FUTURE Kurt Hentschläger — FEED · ZEE · SUB · FLUX Q3 — Technology: medium / subject / condition Kitzinger · Nagy · Mákó — X Charlotte Kent — THE POSSIBILITY OF PRESENCE

05 11 13 20 21 26

PERFORMERS Carsten Nicolai / Alva Noto — HYBR:ID PARA PARA Grotesque Gymnastics — Vertical Dance Mári Mákó — Anneal Dork — Frankhegy / Tresor / Detroit

31 33 35 37

CURATORIAL ESSAY — A TOPOLOGY OF TENSION 40 The History of 0xCollection 44 Artists of the Collection 48 TIME LOOPS Past Events References Colophon

56 58 60

WORKS

THREE INSTALLATIONS. THE REFUSAL OF QUANTIFICATION.

MARIKO MORI TOM NA H-IU In April 2006, at SCAI The Bathhouse in Tokyo, Mariko Mori installed a glass monolith. The interior was lit by LEDs governed, in real time, by a data stream from the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory at the Kamioka Mine in Gifu — fifty thousand tons of ultrapure water and eleven thousand photomultiplier tubes, buried a kilometer underground. The live installation was facilitated by Nobel laureate Masatoshi Koshiba, whose 2002 prize had been awarded for the detection of cosmic neutrinos and who, at Mori’s request, opened the observatory’s signal stream for the work. Tom Na H-iu is among the earliest sculptures in the history of the medium to be permanently coupled to a live scientific data feed — to take, as its operating principle, the translation of an instrument’s measurements into a visible body. It does what data-driven art now does as a matter of course, produced before the category existed in the popular imagination. Innovative then, the work now showcases how science and technology need not be opaque. The artist’s ambition is to work with a piece of physics that makes the invisible visible.

← MARIKO MORI, TOM NA H-IU II, 4.5 M GLASS MONOLITH, LONG EXPOSURE. CONSERVATION DOCUMENTATION IMAGE DURING LED PANEL TESTING. COURTESY OF GÁBOR KITZINGER, JAKUB PISEK, AND 0XCOLLECTION, 2026, BASEL.

ONE OF THE FIRST DATA SCULPTURES TO TAKE A LIVE FEED FROM THE UNIVERSE, 2006

The name Tom Na H-iu is Celtic, referring to a place on the ridge between worlds where souls in transmigration pause. Mori takes this older topology of the soul and routes it through a contemporary instrument of particle physics — and the two registers do not, in her work, sit at a distance from each other. They are the same gesture under different conditions. The Celtic standing stone and the Super-Kamiokande detector are both built around the same intuition: that there are events whose rhythm is not ours, and that a place can be marked, with great labor, to receive them.

← MARIKO MORI, RING: ONE WITH NATURE, 2016, COURTESY OF FAOU FOUNDATION, NEW YORK, PHOTO: STEPHANIE LEAL

This is why Mori’s work matters even more twenty years on. Her relation to technology has always been cosmological rather than instrumental. “My driving force,” she has said, “is a never-ending question about the mystery of life, death, and rebirth.” The data link is not, in this sentence, a tool. It is part of the question. Before the contemporary discourse around data-driven, generative, and machinelearned work could debate its preferred vocabulary and symbolism, Mori had already proposed the operative figure: a sculpture whose body is co-extensive with an instrument, and whose instrument carries a cosmology. Martin Kemp, writing in Nature in 2006, called this “an echo of the spiritual or astronomical thinking that may have driven Neolithic humans to erect their stone monoliths.” That figure is exactly the one Cosmic Knots is built around. The exhibition borrows, from Tom Kibble’s 1976 theory of cosmic strings, the language of a defect under tension — a line held taut between two scales, the very small and the very large. Tom Na H-iu serves at this register to hold the notional dynamics guiding the show. The artwork binds a neutrino, the slightest measurable thing in the universe, to a four-and-a-half-meter standing body inside a former coffee-substitute silo in Kleinbasel. Tracking this line between the two is the work Cosmic Knots invites.

“the sculpture glows with colour-coded traces of ancient violence from remote regions of the cosmos”

— MARTIN KEMP, NATURE, OCTOBER 2006

The version presented at the Franck Areal Silo this June is Tom Na H-iu — the four-and-a-half-meter edition first shown at Deitch Projects in New York in 2007 and last lit at the closing of its London exhibition on the twenty-fourth of June, 2008. For eighteen years the work has been dormant. In June 2026, it will shine again. It does so because an institution decided that some works are not preserved by being stored. They are preserved through activation. This decision is the curatorial argument the rest of this magazine sits inside. The collection’s ambition, declared by acquiring Tom Na H-iu and confirmed by the technical labor to make it operable take seriously the conservation of art that depends, structurally, on infrastructure that will not outlive the work. The metaphor for this work is not the vault and not the archive. It is the living studio. 0xCollection has been building, alongside its exhibition program, an internal practice of digital archivism and reconstruction — one that treats software, hardware, signal protocols, and data links as constituents of the work, not as supports to be replaced when convenient. The position is straightforward, and it is unfashionable. A work like Tom Na H-iu cannot be conserved at a distance from itself. Throughout the Cosmic Knots reconstruction, the collection has worked in dialogue with the Mariko Mori Studio. The studio’s involvement is not protocol. It is the condition under which a work of this kind can be returned to broad engagement and carried forward. The reconstruction was the collection’s responsibility; the studio’s presence makes that reconstruction part of the work’s continuing life, rather than merely an episode in its archive. Two months of restoration at the Franck Areal silos bring the work to light this June. Led by the artist and digital archivist Gábor Kitzinger with a small team of systems specialists, the technical workshop recovered the original control code, reassembled the operating environment, and re-established the live link from Super-Kamiokande by way of the relay in Tokyo. Eighteen years after its last exhibition, the work is again receiving the events for which it was built. The studio will be present for the final approval in early June. What is at stake in this kind of work is not, however, solely technical. It becomes a question of relations, about how a collection means to live with what it holds. Tom Na H-iu was made as a generation of artists produced works that required institutions to learn a new kind of patience. To take such a work seriously after two decades must refuse the easy options: to refuse to mothball it, to refuse to migrate it onto a screen, to refuse to declare it a document of itself. It is to maintain the body, and the body’s relation to the instrument, in the only framework the work admits: the present tense. Onview at the Franck Areal on the fifteenth of June, the line under tension isn’t merely conceptual or archival, but the material data link from a Japanese mountain to a converted industrial silo in Kleinbasel. The work is what the line, held under tension, generates.

↑ MARIKO MORI, RING: ONE WITH NATURE, 2016, COURTESY OF FAOU FOUNDATION, NEW YORK, PHOTO: STEPHANIE LEAL

IN DIALOGUE · Q1 To open HEXA, we reached into our professional network and asked colleagues across the field to think with us on the questions that are urgent now and that will define what 0xCollection becomes as an institution.

↑ MARKO MORI, PRIMAL RHYTHM: SUN PILLAR, 2011,COURTESY OF FAOU FOUNDATION, NEW YORK, INSTALLATION VIEW: STYEN LIGHT BAY, MIYAKO ISLAND, JAPAN, PHOTO: RICHARD LEARBYD

1. ON THE MUSEUM’S NEAR FUTURE. The institutions doing the most interesting work with digital, timebased, and immersive media are effectively reinventing what a museum is as they go: the building, the visit, the collection, the timeframe. Looking five to ten years out, what do you think the museum will need to have let go of, and what will it need to have learned, to remain a serious site for this kind of work?

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“What needs to go, first and most urgently, is the fantasy of completeness: the idea that a work can be collected in a final, authoritative form. Institutions that try to force these works into that mould end up preserving not the work but a ‘taxidermied’ version of it.” “The museum will need to learn how to be a living infrastructure and not, as in the past, a monument for the audience.” “The institutions getting this right are those where the director has internalized that the building is the least interesting thing they manage.”

AURONDA SCALERA & DR. ALFREDO CRAMEROTTI Artistic Director & Curator; Lecturer, Kingston University London & IESA Paris; Collaborator, Alan Turing Art & AI Group; Oxford University AI & Education / Director, mm:museum, Northwestern University Qatar; President, IKT — International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art ““History is most alive when it is staged, when you can walk through it rather than file past it.” “Commercial immersive shows are seductive but have a bad reputation, not without reason. But they work—they’re like a tickle, a magic trick, working on the body even when the mind objects.” “Scholarship and spectacle are not opposites. They just require different choreography.”

CLAUDIA HART

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Professor Emerita, School of the Art Institute of Chicago “Museums need to unlearn the orthodoxies of the Western intellectual tradition, to open up gradually, and start to listen more, so they can be more artist-led and audience-focused.”

ANDRÁS SZÁNTÓ Author and Cultural Strategist; Imagining the Future Museum interview series

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“Just as restoring multiple centuries-old paintings requires specialist knowledge of the techniques dating back to the area where the work was created, preserving and restoring digital and biological art requires specialist knowledge of the digital and biological techniques of the work’s origin.” “even few decades old digital works require equipment and techniques no longer generally available.” “If we were to recreate the experience Gibson described in 1984 as an art installation today, which of these experiences would we show the modern audience?”

ÁKOS MARÓY media-artist, doubleNegatives Architecture; bio-aritst; Jury member, Biodesign Challenge; Council member, iGEM Arts & Design Village; Jury member, European Innovation Council; Jury member, Research & Innovation Foundation Cyprus; CEO, Perem Research “Nxt was built more like a startup: agile, entrepreneurial, supported by investors and multiple revenue streams rather than relying on government funding and/or philanthropy. Not purely private, not purely public.” “Without a permanent collection, we could focus our resources on programming, experimentation, and audience development rather than the costs of storing, conserving, and managing objects.” “we operate through a dual model in which a non-profit and a for-profit entity complement one another.” “museums will need to let go of outdated assumptions about how cultural institutions should be funded and governed.” “resilience will come from building diverse ecosystems of support, creating genuine partnerships, and remaining flexible enough to evolve alongside the work and audiences they serve.”

MEREL VAN HELSDINGEN Founder & Director, Nxt Museum, Amsterdam

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KURT HENTSCHLÄGER FEED · ZEE·SOL· SUB · FLUX In 2005, at the Venice Theatre Biennale under Romeo Castellucci’s direction, Kurt Hentschläger premiered FEED. The first half is almost tender: larger-than-life, gravityless figures drifting and convulsing across a screen, beautiful and a little unbearable to watch. Then the second half takes the screen away from you. Dense artificial fog floods the room, stroboscopic light cuts into it, a sub-bass pulse settles into your chest — and the stage you had been watching becomes a condition you are inside of. Your eyes stop being able to do the quiet, unnoticed work they normally do with a room. And out of that failure the real image of the piece arrives, not on any surface in front of you, but somewhere behind your own eyes. This is the principle Hentschläger has been turning over, patiently, for twenty years. Described at its most literal, the medium is fog and pulsed light — sometimes inverted into near-total darkness broken by bursts lasting fractions of a second — with a low ambient sound sealing the enclosure. But the room doesn’t operate as a container for the work. The room is the work, and the work happens to you, as a physiological event. Hentschläger doesn’t stage something inside the space for you to look at. The event is your body discovering that its everyday cooperation with its own eyes was only ever provisional. The lineage runs back to Granular-Synthesis, the duo he formed with Ulf Langheinrich in Vienna in 1991 and sustained until 2003. The group’s name came from the audio technique of shredding sound into micro-grains and reassembling them into machinic loops. The two artists applied that logic to video: the face and voice of a single performer — most famously the dancer Akemi Takeya in Modell 5 (1994) — broken across multi-screen, multi-channel arrays into pulses too fast and too loud to resolve back into a person.

← KURT HENTSCHLÄGER, SUB (2019), ONE-THIRD-SECOND LIGHT BURST ARRESTED MID-PULSE. PER THE ARTIST, THE PERCEPT THAT FOLLOWS CANNOT BE PHOTOGRAPHED ]

THE ROOM AS THE WORK, THE BODY AS THE ONLY ARCHIVE

And then, in 2001, came the work that marked an undeniable threshold. Granular-Synthesis represented Austria at the 49th Venice Art Biennale with RESET — two channels of video and four of audio, with granulated and pulsing color locked to synchronized electronic noise. What makes RESET matter is not its intensity, though it had that in abundance. Rather, RESET made the room itself, rather than the screen hanging inside it, the object of art. The screen stopped being a window and became a wall of the enclosure; the viewer stopped being an observer and became an occupant. That inversion is quiet to describe and enormous in consequence. Almost everything we now file under “immersive”—the audiovisual environments, the architecture-scaled light and sound pieces, an entire generation of artists who assume as a starting point that the space and the body are the material—descends from the moment that the wall or the screen was no longer the point. The duo stopped working together in 2003, but that vision didn’t vanish when Hentschläger went solo. It became spatial. What the two of them had once done to a face on a screen, he now does to the room around a single visitor. What keeps Hentschläger’s work serious, rather than merely spectacular, is his clarity about what the work he produces is doing to you. He insists — and this is important — that these are not sensory deprivation environments. They are environments of sensory abundance. You are given far too much, never too little, and the vertigo that follows is simply a perceptual system that has been handed more than it can lock onto. Robert Irwin and James Turrell built rooms in which you could discover you were already seeing more than you’d realized. Hentschläger builds rooms in which you discover that what you had been calling seeing was a kind of settlement all along. A negotiation between the eye and the world depends on a kind of architecture, one no longer anchored by the notion of the room. The kinship with Light and Space is real, and so is the departure. Where Turrell and Irwin work in slow, daylight-adjacent registers that let awe soften into self-awareness, Hentschläger works right at the edge of what the body will tolerate — and that is exactly the point. Standardized warnings, signed waivers in some venues, trained staff on hand: these aren’t disclaimers around the work, they’re part of how it’s made. The body isn’t a metaphor here. It’s the site. “I look at the phenomenon of afterimages as a metaphor for memory — or rather, for the fluidity and malleability of human memory. When we experience something of enough significance, we file it as a long-term memory. But from the moment of saving, a process of slow decay and transformation begins. Each time we recall a memory to refresh it, we subtly alter it. Details get lost. Some parts become more or less prominent. Emotional states get enhanced or suppressed — as is particularly visible with trauma. The longer an experience lies in the past, the more dramatic these changes become. What was once crystal clear turns into a ghostly, ambiguous remnant of something that happened. Retinal afterimages are a sped-up, purely visual representation of exactly that process. They are quite magical, yet fleeting and irrecoverable.

Human memory is unstable, non-linear, and nothing like digital storage — which, however imperfect, will read identically every time it’s accessed.” — KURT HENTSCHLÄGER, 2026

SUB, the piece installed in the Franck Areal silo for Cosmic Knots, is the second of Hentschläger’s compositions for absolute darkness — the works with fog turned inside out; the fog replaced by total black. It premiered at Mana Contemporary, New Jersey, in 2019, built on a long, sustained audio field of sub-bass broken at intervals, but only for fractions of a second, by flashes of animated abstract form. You stand in the dark. The light erupts. It ends. What stays in the room with you is a retinal afterimage, fading slowly, until the next eruption. Devices and anything light-emitting are surrendered at the door. There’s no emergency lighting in the room itself, and there is no photograph of the work that doesn’t, in some way, lie about it. A photograph can show you the stimulus. It cannot show you the work, because the work is what the stimulus makes happen inside you — and that is precisely what the camera can’t reach. The silo is well chosen for this. The former chicory-storage container at the old Thomi + Franck site in Kleinbasel is a concrete bin sealed against light, every screw hammer-drilled into a slab far thicker than the architecture strictly needed. It was a blackout space before any of us arrived — light-tight, long in its reverberation, its original purpose (holding roasted chicory in volumes too vast to really track) and its acoustic signature (the long, late tail of an empty grain bin) sitting remarkably close to what SUB asks for. The work and the building turn out to share a logic. The most recent piece in the lineage, FLUX, premiered in November 2025 at Noor Riyadh—the festival’s fifth edition, curated by Mami Kataoka, Li Zhenhua, and Sara Almutlaq under the title In the Blink of an Eye, installed at the new STC Metro Station. FLUX is the most pared-down of the dark-room works: an LED wall and surround sound suspended in a pitch-black void, micro-moments of light arriving at intervals to paint afterimages onto the retina. The artist calls it “a lucid dream of photons and air, where edges blur and time feels elastic.” What distinguishes FLUX is that it’s designed for larger spaces, with more surround void if you will, and a much larger than life display, extending the lineage of dark works — SOL in 2017, SUB and EKO in 2019 — that has made less and less while asking the body to make more.

← KURT HENTSCHLÄGER, SUB, 2019, COURTESY OF KURT HENTSCHLÄGER, PHOTO: BRUNO KLOMFAR

Bernard Stiegler, across three volumes of Technics and Time (1994, 1996, 2001, argued that consciousness itself depends on the externalization of memory into technical objects — into writing, photographs, recordings, and so would include today’s digital systems. He called these tertiary retentions. His argument was that what we are… is what we have managed to put outside ourselves. Hentschläger’s room is a counter-argument. The work returns the visitor to a body that cannot offset its experience. The work refuses the intellectual archive . The body that experienced it is the only archive that will ever hold it.

This is also why the work belongs in Cosmic Knots. Shifting from Tom Kibble’s 1976 theory of cosmic strings described in the discussion of Mariko Mori’s work, Hentschläger’s work invites another visionary theorist into the discussion. Karen Barad’s intra-action, her name for the principle that things do not pre-exist their relating, lands here without translation. SUB does not exist before the viewer walks into the silo. It comes into being in the entanglement of strobe and retina, of pulse and chest, of the room and the body the room contains. The line under tension is the line of light that arrives, for one third of a second, and then is gone. The work is the afterimage that the body holds in the dark, alone, until it fades.

↓K URT HENTSCHLÄGER, ZEE, 2023, COURTESY OF KURT HENTSCHLÄGER, PHOTO: BRUNO KLOMFAR

This is why Hentschläger’s work has not been well served by the prevailing discourse on immersive art. The word immersive has been hollowed by a decade of light-and-projection entertainment whose business model is interchangeable rooms and Instagrammable backdrops. What Hentschläger does is the opposite of that economy. He is not making a backdrop. He is making a room you cannot photograph. The work, in the strict sense, is what your camera fails to record. The standardized line on every page of his recent catalog is the same: due to the phenomenological nature of the work, video documentation is not available. The image you would expect to find is structurally absent.

↑ KURT HENTSCHLÄGER, SUB, 2019, COURTESY OF KURT HENTSCHLÄGER, PHOTO: QUENTIN CHEVRIER

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IN DIALOGUE · Q3 ON THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY. There is a persistent question in the field about whether technology in art is medium, subject, condition, or all three — and the answer shapes everything from how works are conserved to how they are written about. Where do you currently stand, and has a particular work or exhibition shifted your thinking recently? “Technology is condition before it is medium or subject: the substrate, the thing that changes what is possible and therefore what gets made and what is knowable, without necessarily declaring itself as content.” “When a work treats technology only as medium, you usually get spectacle; when it treats technology only as subject, you often get illustration; the work that stays with us holds all three at once and refuses to resolve the tension.”

AURONDA SCALERA & DR. ALFREDO CRAMEROTTI Artistic Director & Curator; Lecturer, Kingston University London & IESA Paris; Collaborator, Alan Turing Art & AI Group; Oxford University AI & Education / Director, mm:museum, Northwestern University Qatar; President, IKT — International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art “The museum that survives the next decade will be the one that learns to tell those stories with the full force of what technology now offers, without mistaking spectacle for substance.”

CLAUDIA HART Claudia Hart Professor Emerita, School of the Art Institute of Chicago “For me, technology in art is a condition - it gives rise to worlds we can enter, explore, and contemplate.” “The works I love most are worlds unto themselves; I get the privilege of marvelling at their structure and the nature of their being. They stand on their own and have no need of my attention.” “These worlds can exist without being observed, but observers cannot exist without these worlds. By letting me become a beholder - a self only possible through their existence - they give me something I could never give myself, and for that I am grateful.”

ÁKOS MARÓY Artist & Technologist

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GÁBOR KITZINGER ANDRÁS LÁSZLÓ NAGY ROZI MÁKÓ X KINETIC TECHNO SCULPTURE X: KInetic Techno Sculpture is a kinetic, modular sculptural proposition. It is not an installation in the inherited sense, not an object placed in a room for the viewer to encounter at a fixed distance. It is a multisensory environment whose body is a mirrored floor, a transparent 3×8-meter LED grid suspended above it, and a quadrophonic surround system into which robotic lights, smoke, and stroboscopes are choreographed in real time. The work takes its name from what the room produces: the grid above and its reflection below meet in space to form an X, the sculpture’s signature figure and the geometry the body inside it enters. At the center of the floor, a custom mattress fitted with biometric sensors reads the heart rate and abdominal breathing of whoever lies on it. The signals are routed back into the visual and acoustic field. The room breathes when the body inside it breathes. The work is what that loop produces. Made for Budapest’s expanded media art biennial BINÁLÉ in 2025 by Gábor Kitzinger, András László Nagy, and Rozi Mákó, X has the formal vocabulary of a rave (fog, strobe, sub-bass, mirror, low light) and the operating principle of a meditation chamber. It is rooted in techno culture, and it is honest about it. The communal energy and sensory intensity of the rave are not borrowed here as style. They are the work’s underlying social form. What X proposes is that the rave, the dark, leveling, sweat-saturated encounter of bodies under a single beat, is a legitimate sculptural register.

← G ÁBOR KITZINGER, ANDRÁS LÁSZLÓ NAGY, ROZI MÁKÓ, X, 2025, COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS, PHOTO: TAMÁS RÉTHEY-PRIKKEL

A RADICAL, EPHEMERAL PLATFORM FOR COLLECTIVE CREATION

Gábor Kitzinger, András László Nagy, and Rozi Mákó collaborate in their work inside a Hungarian tradition of light art that runs from László Moholy-Nagy and the kinetic experiments of the historical avant-garde through to György Kepes’s later inquiries into light as a structuring principle. Their generation has carried that inheritance into the territory of programmable systems, sensors, and real-time computation. Kitzinger is the project’s lead and technical author. His practice moves from large-scale architectural projection toward interactive, pseudo-holographic constructions and sculptures driven by data and autonomous systems, and what unifies the work is an instinct for treating the apparatus itself as the artwork. The biometric mattress, the suspended grid, the routing of breath back into light and sound are not effects laid over a sculpture; they are the sculpture, and they are Kitzinger’s domain. The first lineage for X comes through Joseph Beuys’s Soziale Plastik, or social sculpture. Beuys proposed that any structured human activity capable of changing its participants is itself a sculptural medium, wherethe artist designs the conditions, not the object. X takes this proposition literally and updates it for the present. The sculpture must not be conflated withthe LED grid. The sculpture is the situation that the grid produces: a temporary community of bodies whose physiological data, attention, and proximity to one another are the actual material being shaped. The artists’ own working title for one of the project’s framings names this directly: X Social Sculpture. The second lineage comes from the hypothesis of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, Orchestrated Objective Reduction: the speculation that consciousness does not arise from classical computation but from quantum-scale processes inside the brain’s microtubules. The hypothesis is contested, and it is meant to be. What X borrows from it is not a theory of mind but a working figure: consciousness as something that emerges from a loop between physical matter and an indeterminate field, the result inseparable from the conditions of its measurement.

“Techno, first and always a Black music, invites fresh sonic and temporal possibilities for this era of diminishing futures.” — MCKENZIE WARK, RAVING (DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2023) The third lineage for X is the one the academy has been slowest to take seriously. McKenzie Wark, in Raving (Duke University Press, 2023), argues that the rave (the underground techno party, conducted in junkspace, at night, under sound systems built to bypass the language faculty) is a coherent and contemporary form of resistance. As a practice, it produces what Wark calls a “haven for fugitives from consensus banality,” a temporary kinship structure that briefly recombines the selves that the working day has atomized. Wark insists, after the writers and DJs she draws on, that technopeople whose authorship the mainstream has chronically erased. To stage a kinetic sculpture rooted in techno culture inside an institutional frame, in 2026, is to acknowledge that legacy and its ongoing relevance. If the apparatus is Kitzinger’s, the choreography of light depends upon András László Nagy. He works with light in its many forms (light installations, real-time animation, kinetic sculpture), and his sensibility is recognizably abstract and minimalist. What interests him is the seam between image and sound, the moment one becomes the trigger or the score for the other, and the tools that let that exchange happen in real time: electronics, 3D printing, generative software, code written close to the hardware. In X, he is responsible for the robotic light design — the moving heads, strobes, and beams that turn the quadrophonic field into a spatial event. His work treats programmable light not as illumination but as a sculptural material with its own time signature. The sonic body of the original work belongs to Rozi Mákó. A composer working out of sonology and electroacoustic practice, and co-author with her sister Mári Mákó of the score for Flóra Anna Buda’s 27 (winner of the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at Cannes in 2023), Mákó wrote X’s underlying soundscape as a minimalist drone suite balancing sensitivity and density. The score is the still floor of the room. Above it, at BINÁLÉ in Budapest, a rotating cast of electronic musicians and VJs activated the sculpture across the duration of the biennial. The work was never the same on two consecutive nights. It was not meant to be. No single discipline holds the center, fitting for a work whose whole argument is that authorship dissolves into the situation it produces.

Among 0xCollection’s propositions, X is a direct knot to OMG! Franck festival: Radio X’s six-evening program at the Franck Areal. The sonic contributors across the run are Mári Mákó, Simon Krebs, and Robin Michel.

Cosmic Knots is built around works that come into being only in the presence of a body that has agreed to receive them. Mori’s monolith is one such body. Hentschläger’s silo is another. X is the third: the most explicitly collective, the most unrecorded, and the most insistent that the work and the situation are the same thing.

↓ G ÁBOR KITZINGER, ANDRÁS LÁSZLÓ NAGY, ROZI MÁKÓ, X, 2025, COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS, PHOTO: TAMÁS RÉTHEY-PRIKKEL

These material and conceptual entanglements dissolve the ability to determine the work . X is honest about its ephemerality. There is no fixed object to conserve. There is a sculptural apparatus and a protocol for its activation. The work exists only while it is running, and it ends when the last set ends. What it produces (the collective experience of a room shaped by the breathing of the bodies inside it) is real, and it is unrecorded, and it cannot be commodified. Authorship, in any traditional sense, perishes in a work of this kind. What survives is the situation and the people who were in it.

CHARLOTTE KENT THE POSSIBILITY OF PRESENCE Experiencing art in any of its myriad forms, rather than focusing on its visuality to document it, post it, circulate it, shifts us into an embodied sensibility. This does not simply slow us down, but reopens the possibility that not everything needs to become information in order to matter. What needs to be expressed, then, is not another layer of interpretation or data about the world, but a renewed language for attention itself: one that acknowledges ambiguity as a condition of presence, and experience as something that cannot be compressed without being fundamentally changed. Among the persistent challenges of contemporary art is the question of what, exactly, is being preserved. For centuries, the answer seemed relatively straightforward. Paintings, sculptures, and objects occupied space and endured through time. Conservation sought to stabilize material forms against decay. Preservation meant ensuring that an object survived. But many contemporary artworks resist this logic. Light installations, sound environments, interactive systems, and technologically mediated experiences often exist less as objects than as events. Their significance lies not in a stable material form but in an encounter: a body moving through darkness, a field of sound reverberating through space, a moment of sensory disorientation, wonder, or reflection. These works unfold in time. They are experienced rather than merely observed. What, then, does it mean to preserve them? The challenge emerges from a simple contradiction. Experience is inherently ephemeral. It exists in being lived. The sensation of standing within a room flooded with shifting light, the vibration of low frequencies felt in the chest, the awareness of one’s own movement through an environment…these cannot be separated from the moment in which they occur. Once the experience ends, the work vanishes. Yet institutions, collectors, and conservators are often tasked with ensuring that artworks endure. The impulse to preserve arises from a desire to protect cultural memory, to ensure future audiences can encounter significant works. Preservation is an act of care. It attempts to safeguard access to experiences that might otherwise disappear. But preserving an experience is not the same as preserving an object. The answer may be less than we hope, but more than we imagine.

While sensations themselves cannot be archived, traces can be. For many technological and experiential artworks, preservation increasingly resembles transmission rather than fixation. The goal is not to freeze a singular moment in time, but to maintain an understanding of the conditions through which future experiences can occur. Instructions, technical specifications, software migrations, replacement components, and artist interviews become tools for carrying a work forward. What is preserved is not necessarily the original event itself, but the possibility of its reactivation. Perhaps this is why experiential artworks are so compelling in the context of preservation. They make visible a truth that applies to all cultural memory. Nothing is preserved perfectly. Every transmission across time involves change. The difference is that ephemeral works make this condition impossible to ignore. Each activation is both the same work and a different one, shaped by the irreproducible context of its reception. The gift of the artwork reveals itself to be a system designed to make experience possible again and again under changing conditions. Kurt Hentschläger’s practice emphasizes this destabilization, explicitly in SUB (2019), which the artist states “has no beginning or end.” This ultimately highlights a central paradox of experiential art: the most significant aspects of the work may be precisely those that cannot be stored, collected, or archived, but only repeatedly met and enacted anew. What lingers after the encounter is no stable image or discrete artifact, but the memory of a bodily and perceptual state. The art trio producing X: Kinetic Techno Sculpture (2025) operate in precisely the space where experience, technology, and identity begin to dissolve into one another – where the artwork is less something one looks at than an occasion for the self to resound in itself by stepping into the moment. One enters, undergoes, and is altered by the work. The knowledge that the encounter cannot be fully retained or replayed becomes part of the artwork’s meaning – an insistence that consciousness, like light and sound in the installation, is always already in motion, always becoming something that cannot be held still. Mariko Mori’s Tom Na H-iu (2006) can be read as a meditation on experience itself as something that is at once technologically produced, cosmically scaled, and ultimately ungraspable in any stable form. What the viewer experiences is not a fixed composition but a continuously updating translation of cosmic activity into embodied perception, a choreography of light that is always slightly elsewhere, always contingent on forces beyond the gallery space. The encounter becomes inseparable from an awareness of mediation: we are not witnessing the universe directly, but through layers of scientific instrumentation, computation, and aesthetic transformation. Attempts to fully capture such works risk not only misunderstanding them but missing what they offer. The artwork continues not because the experience has been preserved, but because the conditions for experience have been preserved. What endures is not the moment itself, but its capacity to happen again, even though it won’t be the same.

Certain experiences derive their meaning precisely from their transience. A fleeting projection, a temporary sound environment, or a momentary interaction may gain significance because it cannot be repeated exactly. Its disappearance is not an accident but an essential part of its existence. This suggests that loss is not merely a problem for preservation but one of its defining conditions. Preservation does not eliminate loss; it manages it. It acknowledges it. To preserve every detail would be to transform the artwork into something else: a record rather than an event, evidence rather than experience. Every archive contains absences. Every conservation strategy determines what can be carried forward and what must remain behind. Preservation does not secure experience against time so much as it ensures the possibility of renewed disappearance. What survives, then, is neither the original experience nor a perfect replica of it. What remains is not the event itself, but the structure that allows it to flicker into being – briefly, repeatedly, and always in excess of what can be held. What survives is a possibility: the possibility that another body, at another moment, might encounter light, sound, space, and time in ways that resonate with an experience long past. Embodiment becomes important precisely because contemporary technological life so often dislodges us from it. In a landscape of accelerated feeds, continuous notification, and abstracted “content consumption,” attention is frequently split, externalized, and pulled into asynchronous streams of information. The body is still there, of course, but it is rarely the primary site of meaning-making. Instead, cognition is distributed across screens, platforms, and interfaces that privilege speed, comparison, and endless adjacency. What gets lost in these contexts is not just attention, but duration: the capacity to remain with something long enough for it to register as lived experience rather than passing input. Experiential artworks that use technology – light installations, responsive environments, sound fields, data-driven sculptural systems – seem, at first glance, to risk reproducing this same condition. They are often immersive, sensorially saturated, and technologically complex. But many of them do something subtly different: instead of accelerating perception, they recalibrate it. Rather than offering more information, they often reduce legibility. Rather than guiding interpretation, they disorient or slow it. Instead of optimizing attention, they make attention itself the subject of the work. These works do not ask to be “understood” quickly; they ask to be endured, negotiated, and felt over time. In doing so, they reintroduce a kind of friction that contemporary interfaces often erase. Fog obscures. Sound saturates. Light destabilizes depth. Data becomes perceptual atmosphere rather than informational clarity. The result is not more information, but less certainty about how to process what is present.

This is where embodiment becomes crucial. To be embodied in these works is to recognize perception as something that unfolds in time and is inseparable from the body’s own limits: fatigue, orientation, breath, discomfort, rhythm. Unlike the disembodied glide through digital information streams, these installations insist on gravity, duration, and situatedness. One cannot skim them. One must remain inside them long enough to be changed by them, even slightly. To become conscious of oneself as a body is to recognize that perception is never neutral, universal, or disembodied. It is always situated. By drawing attention back to the body, experiential art can interrupt the illusion that we stand outside the world as detached observers. We experience the world through particular senses, capacities, limitations, histories, and vulnerabilities. Once we recognize our own perception as contingent and fluctuating, we become more capable of imagining that same complexity for others. Bodies perceive differently. The artwork becomes not only a site of self-awareness but also a reminder of difference. At the same time, awareness of being embodied reveals dependence rather than autonomy; we are constantly shaped by environments, technologies, and relationships beyond our control. We encounter ourselves as participants among other participants, each navigating uncertainty from a different vantage point. Such an awareness of oneself or others rarely emerges under conditions of acceleration. When attention is fragmented and perception is rushed, people often move through the world reactively, treating both experiences and other individuals as information to be processed rather than presences to be encountered. By encouraging sustained attention to one’s own body, breath, movement, and sensory experience, experiential artworks create the possibility for noticing nuance, vulnerability, and interdependence. In this sense, these works offer an alternative model of attention. They suggest that presence is not the absence of technology, but a different relationship to it – one in which technology is not a channel for more input, but a structure that reveals the conditions of perception itself. Instead of extending reach outward indefinitely, they fold perception back into the body, making the viewer aware of their own sensing as part of the artwork. This points toward a set of ideas that feel increasingly urgent. First, that slowness is not a nostalgic retreat but a perceptual necessity: without duration, experience collapses into data. Second, that attention is not infinite and should not be treated as such; it is a finite, embodied resource that can be shaped, depleted, or renewed. Third, that technological systems do not have to mirror the logic of platforms built for extraction and speed; they can instead be designed as environments for uncertainty, reflection, and partial understanding. Perhaps most importantly, these works suggest that meaning in contemporary culture may no longer reside primarily in what is seen or known, but in how it is felt while not fully understood. In a world saturated with explanation, immediacy, and constant legibility, the refusal to fully resolve becomes a gesture of great generosity. If these artworks create spaces for reflection, presence, and shared human experience, then preservation becomes more than the protection of cultural artifacts – it becomes the preservation of conditions for meaningful encounter.

PERFORMERS

IN A HIDDEN INDUSTRIAL GEM. TRAFOHALLE, BOTTMINGEN.

CARSTEN NICOLAI ALVA NOTO HYBR:ID PARA PARA OPENING NIGHT, TRAFOHALLE BOTTMINGEN

Last June, during the collection’s Art Basel program Frames of Reference, Nicolai’s transmitter / receiver — the machine and the gardener was installed as the central element of the show. Developed in 2022 for Andrea Lissoni at Haus der Kunst, the work is an audiovisual environment built around vintage Soviet-era Geiger counters that detect cosmic radiation in real time and route those readings into light and sound. The decision to anchor an Art Basel exhibition on a work whose operating principle depends on a live, planetary-scale signal was a deliberate signal of the collection’s commitment to long-term collaboration with the artists of the collection.

← ALVA NOTO, LIVE AT MUTEK JAPAN, 2025, COURTESY OF MUTEK JAPAN, PHOTO: SHIGEO GOMI

Carsten Nicolai is one of the small number of artists who, over thirty years, have made it possible to take the seam between sound, light, and architecture seriously as a single medium. His practice begins in Chemnitz in 1992 with VOXXX — the gallery-cinema-bar-studio biotope he co-founded in the former Sozietätsbrauerei — and runs through the founding of the NOTON label in 1994, through Catherine David’s Documenta X in 1997, through Harald Szeemann’s Plateau of Humankind at the 2001 Venice Biennale, through the syn chron polyhedron at the Neue Nationalgalerie in 2005, and recently into the HYBR:ID environments of the last five years. What unifies the work is the refusal to choose between disciplines concretized by institutions He kept both sound and form,building an architecture in which they could meet.

“You’re not building eternity. You’re building a moment in which something becomes possible, and you protect it for as long as you can.” — CARSTEN NICOLAI, IN CONVERSATION WITH THE EDITOR, BERLIN, MARCH 2026

← ALVA NOTO, LIVE AT MUTEK JAPAN, 2025, COURTESY OF MUTEK JAPAN, PHOTO: SHIGEO GOMI GYMNASTICS, PHOTO: IRINGÓ SIMON

On the opening evening of Cosmic Knots, Nicolai activates the Trafohalle in Bottmingen with HYBR:ID PARA PARA — a work that exists only for the duration of its performance. The title carries two registers at once. Para Para is the synchronized group dance that emerged in Tokyo’s eurobeat clubs in the late 1980s — bodies in rows performing identical upper-body movements to fast electronic rhythm, a grid of human signals. The Greek prefix para doubles into a second reading, alongside and beyond, a hybrid sitting next to a hybrid, in keeping with the logic of the HYBR:ID cycle.

Sound, light, and architecture arrive in the hall as a single body. The industrial volume becomes the instrument. Low-frequency pulses, stroboscopic structures, and rhythmic codes resolve, briefly, into a coherent space, then dissolve. Nothing remains afterwards but the room. Those who follow electronic music will recognise Nicolai under his other name, Alva Noto — the alias under which he has released the five-album V.I.R.U.S. cycle with Ryuichi Sakamoto and scored Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant with Sakamoto and Bryce Dessner. The HYBR:ID work belongs to both lives at once. The lineage runs back through syn chron (2005) and, beyond that, through Iannis Xenakis’s Philips Pavilion of 1958 — the first serious attempt to build architecture, light, and sound as a single work.

GROTESQUE GYMNASTICS VERTICAL DANCE AT THE TRAFOHALLE OPENING THE COSMIC KNOTS PERFORMANCE EVENING, 15 JUNE Grotesque Gymnastics is a Hungarian new-circus company founded in Budapest in 2013 by Gáspár Téri and Ilka Bardóczy. Their work sits between contemporary dance and aerial acrobatics — primarily pole and rope — and refuses both. The dance world finds them too acrobatic. The circus world finds them too internal. They have settled into the space the two refusals open. Across the decade since, in pieces like Anatomy of Failure (Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest, 2020), they’ve developed a language for the loaded body—one that articulates muscular action, contests the discipline shaping it, and ages within a form designed for youth’s narrow window. The bodies in the room have rehearsed the failures the work describes.

↑ G ROTESQUE GYMNASTICS, 2026, COURTESY OF GROTESQUE GYMNASTICS, PHOTO: IRINGÓ SIMON

For Cosmic Knots, the company opens the performance evening of 15 June at the Trafohalle in Bottmingen. The piece is not the staged version of itself. It is a vertical dance — an embodied activation of the hall — performed by Gáspár Téri, Ilka Bardóczy, Eszter Kudlák, and Marcell Hajdu against and with the raw concrete of the building. Gravity becomes material. Architecture becomes a partner. The fourth wall dissolves into the surface the dancers are working against.

The vertical dance mobilizes the argument of Cosmic Knots and shows what it looks like when made of flesh, rope, concrete, and gravity. The dancer’s body and the wall do not exist as separate entities, as if they were closed systems holding still while the choreography happens between them. What this kind of choreography refuses, by its own terms, is forms of representation. As has been widely theorized about performance and dance, so no still image contains the dance. The image will only ever show the body and the wall. It cannot hold the forces between them — the muscular tension, the breath, the millisecond negotiation between human fragility and architectural mass. The work exists only in the room, only for the duration of the encounter, only between the bodies that have agreed to receive it and the bodies that are producing it. The Trafohalle, on the evening of 15 June, opens with a piece that cannot afterwards be shown to anyone who was not there.

MÁRI MÁKÓ ANNEAL

A question runs through Mári Mákó’s practice about sculptures that sound, and about the sounds that sculptures make. It is the title of her doctoral research at MOME Budapest, Art of Listening: Designing Sonic Artefacts for Embodied Listening Experience in Fragmented Times, and it is the seam along which her work as composer, researcher, instrument-builder, and performer holds together as a single argument. And yet, her practice resists the urge to answer the question and resolve the tension that enables her work. Working between Rotterdam and Berlin, Mákó treats instment-making as a compositional act in itself, a negotiation of agency with materials that refuse to do exactly what the composer asks. She collaborates with choreographers, with sculptors, and with her sister Rozi Mákó, with whom she wrote the score for Flóra Anna Buda’s 27 (Palme d’Or, Cannes 2023) and whose drone composition is the still floor of Gábor Kitzinger’s X. The question is theoretical, but Mákó works it out in rooms. In 2024 at Sotheby’s New York, Bernar Venet released his first long-form generative work, EVENT, and Mákó composed the piece’s acoustic body inviting audiences to consider:How does a generative sculpture have a voice.

← MÁRI MÁKÓ PERFORMING ON THE SELF-DESIGNED METAL-BODIED INSTRUMENT; OR STUDIO SHOT OF THE INSTRUMENT ITSELF, SCULPTURAL BODY VISIBLE

ON A SELF-BUILT INSTRUMENT, BETWEEN HARP AND LYRE, AT THE TRAFOHALLE

“By turning the pole into a ‘living’ entity with sounds, we can break down and develop another sense of ritual.” — MÁRI MÁKÓ, ON HER PERFORMANCE WORK WITH CHOREOGRAPHER SOFIE KRAMER The work she performs at the Trafohalle, Anneal, is the most concentrated version of this question. It is played on an instrument she designed at the intersection of harp and lyre, ancient forms remade in metal. The body under such conditions becomes sculptural in its own right. The voice beckons, part of the instrument too. Anneal is both a metallurgical and a molecular term: the heat that lets hard metal bend, and the binding of two strands into a single structure. Mákó’s voice does both. It threads through the metal of her instrument and softens it. It binds with the steel and the strings until the three are one body. And then, that body works on the room. By the close of the piece, the hall has annealed: the Trafohalle is bent, bound, and not what it was when the visitor walked in.

DORK FRANKHEGY· TRESOR · DETROIT THE PARTY AS A SITE OF CONTEMPLATIVE ATTENTION, SINCE 1996

Her sonic approach runs through Pan Sonic — the Finnish duo of Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen whose Vakio (1995) and Kulma (1997) reduced techno to sine waves, sub-bass, and the body’s own pulse — but also appears in the work of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS records, Thomas Köner’s frozen ambient, and Donato Dozzy’s ← long arcs of deep techno. For these artists,bass is not a delivery mechanism for euphoria, but a vehicle for attention. The Buddhist orientation Dork has identified in her own practice is consistent with this register: a refusal of the gaming-structure in the contemporary club — action, reward, next level — in favor of long-form attention to the room and the bodies in it. When McKenzie Wark calls the rave “a haven for fugitives from consensus banality,” Frankhegy reveals itself as one of the longest-running examples in Eastern Europe of that argument practiced as a method.

← DJ DORK, PERFORMING AT BINÁLÉ, 2025, PHOTO: CSILLA FODOR

Dork is one of the founding figures of Hungarian underground techno, and a long-running counter-argument to the gallery world’s assumption that the rave is an art form of escape. Since 1996, the year she co-founded the outdoor parties at Frankhegy in Buda with Péter Kozma and first played Berlin’s Tresor, Dork’s practice has held to a single thesis: the rave is a site of attention, not of release, and a sound system held under the right kind of pressure can do what older institutions of contemplation no longer reliably provide. The duo she formed with Kozma — Dorkandkozma — named their direction intellectual techno. With DJ Isu, she runs Technokunst, the long-form party series and record label that has carried the practice into the present.

“Minimal, deep and meditative electronic music, with a heartbeat foundation.” — DORK, ON THE SOUND SHE HAS BUILT HER PRACTICE AROUND

At Cosmic Knots, Dork headlines the performance evening at the Trafohalle in Bottmingen. The line under tension in her work is the bass line itself. What it holds, briefly, between the speakers and the bodies in the hall, is the community her practice has been building for thirty years.

↓ FRANKHEGY, 1998, PHOTO: ZSOLT FEKETE

For nearly two decadees, Dork’shas extended her practice to include the visual register, which she identifies under the name Raypainting: hand-painted glass slides projected at architectural scale onto the facades of buildings, the hillside at Frankhegy, the bridges of Budapest. This type of work recalls the Joshua Light Show of the late 1960s as well as Krzysztof Wodiczko’s projections on public architecture. For Dork, it becomes a working practice that joins sound and image as a single field of attention. These architectural canvases have carried, in recent years, an explicit ecological and animal-welfare register. Her November 2025 contribution to the BINÁLÉ media art biennial was a poster-sized two-sided lightbox suspended at the entrance of the Merlin Theatre in Budapest, on which a single pair of frightened animal eyes looked down at the crowd. The press for that work named her “the frail-bodied foremother of Hungarian underground techno culture.”

VIOLA LUKÁCS A TOPOLOGY OF TENSION CURATORIAL ESSAY

ON ART YOU FEEL BEFORE YOU KNOW

In December 2025, physicists at Hiroshima University proposed in Physical Review D that the first stable structures in the universe were not particles but knots. Two species of cosmic string, magnetic flux tubes from a broken gauge symmetry and superfluid vortices from a Peccei-Quinn field, wound around one another in the cooling instant after the Big Bang and locked. The configurations they formed were topologically stable, irreducible, non-trivial. For a fraction of a second, these knots dominated the energy of the universe. When they decayed, they left behind the asymmetry from which all baryonic matter emerged. Atoms came later. Forces came later. What came first was relation. In this vein, the physicist and philosopher Karen Barad has argued that entanglement, at the quantum scale, is not a relation between entities that already exist but the condition out of which entities arise at all. That cosmological echo resonates across this exhibition. Identity is the afterthought. The binding is the origin. The knot comes first. This is the wager of the exhibition, and it is a double one. On one side, physics is dragged out of the equation and into the nervous system. The cosmological finding is not illustrated on a wall label. It is delivered to the body as a sensation, as pulse, after-image, and breath. On the other side, that delivery is only possible because the works refuse to be quantified. They will not resolve into the photograph, the metric, the shareable surface, an easy data point to index. The refusal of the dashboard is precisely what allows the physics to move through the flesh.In that refusal, repeated across four very different rooms, the exhibition becomes a single argument. The knot binds the invisible to the visceral. So does every work. The many movements turn out to be one.

I encounter the present moment, in my own field, as a condition of organised disembodiment. Experience arrives through screen interfaces coded for attention and indifferent to presence. You are positioned as a mechanism for circulation rather than a complex body in a shifting space. Art that accepts this arrangement, built first for the screen and only afterward for the encounter, has quietly signed a contract about what art is for. Cosmic Knots resists that contract Step into Kurt Hentschläger’s SUB and the dark takes your phone at the door, then your bearings. The strobes begin. Within seconds your own eyes start manufacturing a light the room never emits, green and violet ghosts blooming and folding on the inside of your skull, after-images stacking faster than they can fade. The pattern you leave with exists nowhere in the building. It was made through you. There is almost no photograph of SUB because the work has no photographable surface. The retina is the medium and the encounter is the artwork. To capture it is to lose it. Here the physics of light becomes, without translation, an event in your own optic nerve. In Mariko Mori’s Tom Na H-iu, a glass monolith stands and breathes light, and the light is not designed. It is written, second by second, by neutrino events registered at the Super-Kamiokande detector a kilometre beneath Mount Ikenoyama. The form holds still while its content is authored, in real time, by cosmic events the sculpture neither controls nor predicts. Each viewing is a different work. The glow a visitor might try to take home is a snapshot of a process whose author, at the instant of looking, may be a dying star a thousand light-years away. To see Tom Na H-iu alive and connected, actually running is all too rare. The work had never previously been installed. It arrived to us without documentation, a monument with no instructions. Bringing it back to life opened a genuine conservation inquiry, which we have taken up in collaboration with the Mori studio. How do you preserve a sculpture whose very being is a live data stream, a connection to a scientific instrument that will one day be decommissioned? What is the authentic state of a work that is, by design, never the same twice? These are not housekeeping questions. They are ethical ones, questions of authorship and of obligation to another entity, in this case awork whose lifeblood is borrowed from a star and a laboratory. The protocols emerging from the work are, as far as we can establish, the first of their kind for an artwork of this nature. In our efforts, we have aimed to set a standard the field will come to need. In X, the kinetic sculpture by Gábor Kitzinger, András László Nagy and Rozi Mákó, the work is generated by the breath of the body. A mirrored floor and a transparent LED grid form an architecture that answers to heart rate and the rise of an abdomen. Lie on the mattress at its centre and the room reshapes itself around your physiology in real time. No two activations are alike, because no two bodies arrive in the same state. X is not an image of entanglement. It is an instance of it, your nervous system and the apparatus knotted into one circuit you cannot step outside of to observe.

The opening evening at Trafohalle carries the argument into sound and the moving body. Alva Noto’s HYBR:ID PARA PARA strips signal back to its structural primitives, sine and noise and frequency and waveform, and stages the body’s resonance against the concrete of a brutalist hall as the work itself. Mári Mákó plays instruments she has built with her own hands, treating the apparatus as composition and the room’s acoustic field as a member of the ensemble. Grotesque Gymnastics works the building’s vertical surfaces. None of the evening will be livestreamed. The decision not to circulate it as content is not a logistics footnote but a curatorial position. What is at stake here is more than a policy on cameras. It is a question about what kind of cultural memory a collection of digital and time-based art can hope to build, when its own medium is so fluent in reproduction. And it is a question, sharpened to a point by the Mori conservation work, about what art does, and what it asks of those who keep it, once it stops trying to be content. The knot is not an image of a relation. The knot is the relation. It binds the invisible to the visceral in a single structure you cannot photograph because you cannot stand outside it. The body knows it before the mind can name it. The room knows it. You feel it before you know it. Before atoms, before forces, before form: topology. This is the cosmological finding. It is also a position on art, and, we have come to believe, a duty of care.

↓ G ÁBOR KITZINGER, ANDRÁS LÁSZLÓ NAGY, ROZI MÁKÓ, X, 2025, COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS, PHOTO: TAMÁS RÉTHEY-PRIKKEL

None of this is a refusal of the world. It is a refusal of one mechanism by which the world has come to mean the dashboard. Hito Steyerl, Erika Balsom, and most recently Claire Bishop have named the same condition from different angles: an art system whose works are increasingly built for the terms of their circulation rather than the terms of their encounter. Cosmic Knots does not pretend to stand outside that system. It opens inside art-fair week, in a city the global market relocates to each June. The question was never whether art can escape circulation. The question is whether it can be built, first, for something else, and whether you can be made to feel that difference before anyone explains it to you.

THE HISTORY OF

PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE ↑ REFIK ANADOL, DVOŘÁK DREAMS, 2023, IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST’S STUDIO AND 0XCOLLECTION.

2023 — A Commission, Not an Acquisition 0xCollection was founded in Basel in 2023 by Karel Komárek as a permanent, public-facing institution dedicated to new media and time-based art from 1960 to the present. The name — pronounced “hex collection” — references the hexadecimal code that defines colour in digital files. From the start, the collection was structured against the logic of the private holding. Curators rotate with vision that call upon different disciplinary contexts and concerns. Similarly the programme grows around artists and movements, not a single sensibility. The point was to build an art-historical narrative, not a portfolio — and to do it inside, rather than alongside, the wider creative and technological ecosystem of KKCG. The board reflects that: curatorial, technological, and institutional expertise in close working proximity. The first work was a commission. Over two years, Refik Anadol developed Dvořák Dreams (2023), training AI models on the life and music of Antonín Dvořák — an extension of Komárek’s long-standing patronage of the composer through the Dvořák Prague International Music Festival. The piece premiered in September 2023 in Jan Palach Square, where Dvořák had conducted the first Czech Philharmonic concert in 1896. It opened alongside Synesthetic Immersion at the Bořislavka Center where eight artists — Carsten Nicolai, Daito Manabe, Libby Heaney, Lu Yang, Nancy Baker Cahill, Quayola, Ryoji Ikeda, Sougwen Chung — presented work across the borders of sense.

2024–2025 — Becoming an Institution The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. opened its programme to digital art for the first time in 2024, with 0xCollection as its partner in bringing Refik Anadol’s Dvořák Dreams to the nation’s capital. It was the moment the project shifted register: from private commitment to public engagement. In June 2025, the collection mounted an exhibition during Art Basel about time — perception, technology, materiality, and the ways each disrupts the others. Works from the collection sat alongside loans by Douglas Gordon, Nam June Paik, Carsten Nicolai, Miles Greenberg, Tatsuo Miyajima, Mariko Mori, Agnes Denes, Julian Charrière, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Conrad Shawcross. Nicolai closed the show with a site-specific installation that dissolved linearity entirely. Across these names, a throughline for the collection came into focus: from the pioneers of media art to the artists now reshaping what a signal, an image, or a living work can be. That September, 0x served as lead institutional partner for BINÁLÉ — We Are Not Alone at the Merlin Theatre in Budapest. Twenty-six artists, organised around alienation, otherness, and communion in the digital age. BINÁLÉ is also one of the clearest examples of how the collection works in practice: through relationships built over years, not assembled for a single occasion. The biennial was anchored by Nam June Paik’s Brain of a Robot (1965) — the prophetic origin of the electronic nervous system — staging a geneology for Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst on AI as creative collaborator and ethical problem, Sarah Friend on the political weight of the internet’s material infrastructure, and Trevor Paglen on surveillance and engineered myth. That this happened in Budapest, in the current political climate, was not incidental. Standing behind a democratic, independent, rhizomatically organised biennial — a space for plural and critical voices rather than a curated consensus — was the institutional point.

The institutional horizon extends beyond Basel. In September 2026, 0x joins the Southbank Centre in London as a partner for Creative Intelligence (11–13 September, 2026) — the centrepiece of the Centre’s 75th anniversary, programmed in the spirit of the 1951 Festival of Britain. Across installations, prototypes, live discussion, and performance, the festival asks how AI and digital innovation are reshaping the way we live, imagine, and create. The premise is transdisciplinary in the older sense of the word: art, technology, science, and society held in a single conversation rather than separated into tracks. For 0x, the partnership follows the same working pattern as Budapest — sustained engagement with institutions doing related work, rather than one-off appearances. Beyond the exhibitions, the collection is convening a professional cohort to research what a museum of digital and time-based art could actually be — how such an institution is structured, what it conserves, how it serves the work and the public. The first issue of HEXA takes that conversation outward, inviting leading voices across curatorial practice, technology, conservation, and law to contribute a thought. Less a set of answers than an opening — the unsolved questions of ownership, authenticity, presentation, and conservation put to the field, rather than resolved from inside a single institution.

← KURT HENTSCHLÄGER, SUB, 2019, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND BINÁLÉ, PHOTO: TAMÁS RÉTHEY-PRIKKEL

2026 — Cosmic Knots and a New Kind of Museum The most recent exhibition is Cosmic Knots, opening 15 June at Franck Areal (the Silos) in Basel and running through 20 June, concurrent with Art Basel. On view are three immersive installations: Kurt Hentschläger’s SUB, Mariko Mori’s Tom Na H-iu, and X by the Kitzinger·Nagy·Mákó collective. The opening evening is at Trafohalle, Bottmingen. The exhibition coincides with the launch of HEXA, 0xCollection’s periodical.

ARTISTS OF THE COLLECTION THE SYSTEMATIC APPROACH

“Cosmic Knots is the latest step in an ongoing curatorial project that has moved from Synesthetic Immersion to Frames of Reference and turns now to the structural: to the invisible forces through which worlds are knotted into being. We are interested in what remains when art refuses the apparatus of documentation, quantification, and circulation. The works here do not permit easy photography, stable measurement, or reproducible representation. They exit commodification by refusing the image.” What follows on these pages is an overview of the artists currently represented in the collection’s digital and timebased holdings, organized as a partial reading of how each contributes to the programme.

CORNERSTONES

JAMES TURRELL

B. 1943, LOS ANGELES · LIGHT AND SPACE A founding figure of the Light and Space movement and one of the living artists most central to the question of what light can be made to do as a medium in itself. The collection’s Turrell holdings span six decades of the practice, from his earliest projected-light works of the late 1960s through pieces from the recent past, taken in close dialogue with the studio. The arc traces, across one body of work, the full development of the proposition the rest of his lineage has elaborated: that a room can be made to behave as if it has no walls, and that the viewer is producing the experience, not receiving it.

↑ JAMES TURRELL, PERFECTLY CLEAR (GANZFELD), 1991, COURTESY OF JAMES TURRELL, PHOTO: FLORIAN HOLZHERR

NAM JUNE PAIK

1932–2006, SEOUL → NEW YORK · VIDEO ART / FLUXUS The historical root of the entire collection. The artist is universally regarded as the founder of video art and the figure from whom the lineage of media and time-based art descends. The collection holds Brain of a Robot (1965), one of the works that founded the field — discussed in the Curatorial Essay (pp. 35–37) for its argument that the early machine and the handwritten notebook belong to the same epistemic moment.

↑ NAM JUNE PAIK, BRAIN OF A ROBOT, 1965, COURTESY OF NAM JUNE PAIK AND 0XCOLLEXCTION, PHOTO: JANÓ FEKETE

THE DATA LINEAGE REFIK ANADOL

B. 1985, ISTANBUL → LOS ANGELES · AI / DATA ART The most globally recognised name in the data-aesthetics lineage. Co-founder of Refik Anadol Studio and of Dataland, the first museum dedicated to AI arts. The collection holds Dvořák Dreams (2023), the AI work translating the cultural and musical world of Antonín Dvořák into generative imagery — premiered at the Kennedy Center REACH Plaza in September 2024 as part of the collection’s 0xDvořák program.

↑ REFIK ANADOL, DVOŘÁK DREAMS (2023), COMMISSIONED BY THE 0XCOLLECTION, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST’S STUDIO AND 0XCOLLECTION

RYOJI IKEDA

B. 1966, GIFU → PARIS/KYOTO · DATA / SOUND ART The most rigorous data-sound artist of his generation, the foremost name in data-art’s minimalist lineage. The collection holds data. gram 14 [circuit boards] (2022), a work that renders data as precise, high-density visual pattern — the materiality of computation itself. A counterweight to the painterly AI works on the same axis. ↑ RYOJI IKEDA. DATA.GRAM 14, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 0XCOLLECTION, PHOTO: TAMÁS RÉTHEY PRIKKEL

DAITO MANABE

B. 1976, TOKYO · CODE / PERFORMANCE Founder of the studio Rhizomatiks. Works at the intersection of code, sound, the body, and live performance — known for collaborations with Björk and ELEVENPLAY and for large-scale datadriven spectacles. The collection holds Cells: A Generation (2023), a generative audiovisual system conceptually adjacent to cellular automata and models of emergence.

↑ DAITO MANABE, CELLS A GENERATION, 2023, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 0XCOLLECTION.

QUANTUM, COMPUTATION, AND THE CANON LIBBY HEANEY

B. 1980, UNITED KINGDOM · QUANTUM ART A trained quantum physicist (PhD) who uses actual quantum computing as an artistic medium rather than as a metaphor — a leading figure of the emerging field. The collection holds Ent- (Enter the Garden of Forking Paths) (2022), a quantum-computed moving-image world that maps superposition and entanglement onto a fluid dreamscape, layering Borges’s 1941 story of branching timelines with a reworking of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

↑ LIBBY HEANEY, ENT-ER THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS, 2022, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 0XCOLLECTION.

QUAYOLA

B. 1982, ROME → LONDON · COMPUTATIONAL ART Reinterprets the canon of European art history — Old Master painting, classical sculpture, the landscape — as evolving, abstracted digital forms. The collection holds Transient Suite B (2020), part of the Transient series in which the landscape and still-life traditions of the sublime and Romantic eras pass through computation and re-emerge as something else. Links the digital programme back to art history, framing the new media as a continuation of the canon rather than a break from it.

↑ QUAYOLA, TRANSIENT SUITE #B, 2020, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 0XCOLLECTION.

SOUGWEN CHUNG

B. 1985, TORONTO → LONDON · HUMAN-MACHINE COLLABORATION A pioneer of human-machine collaborative drawing and former MIT Media Lab researcher. Creator of the D.O.U.G. (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation) robotic systems trained on her own gestures. The collection holds two works from the Ligatures series — Node 1 and Node 3 (2021)— mark-making produced in live dialogue with AI-trained robotic arms, with authorship made visible as a duet.

↑ SOUGWEN CHUNG, LIGATURES (NODE 1), 2021, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 0XCOLLECTION.

EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY, THE MOVING IMAGE LU YANG

B. 1984, SHANGHAI · MULTIMEDIA / NEW MEDIA Multimedia artist working across gaming, anime, 3D animation, and neuroscience to explore identity, consciousness, and the post-human. Studied new media under Zhang Peili at the China Academy of Art; named Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year in 2022. Creator of the genderless avatar DOKU. The collection holds DOKU Hello World (2021), a work whose title joins computing’s foundational first program to the Buddhist concept of dying alone and being reborn.

↑ LU YANG, DOKU: HELLO WORLD, 2021, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 0XCOLLECTION.

NANCY BAKER CAHILL

B. 1970, UNITED STATES · AUGMENTED REALITY / DRAWING Works across augmented reality, drawing, and animation to examine the body, power, and systems of control. Founder of the public AR platform 4th Wall, which has carried civic and ecological commissions across the United States. The collection holds Enter the Garden of Forking Paths (2022), a work that evokes real-world sites rather than the virtual alone.

↑ NANCY BAKER CAHILL, THE QUIVERING AND LIVELY NERVE OF THE NOW, 2023, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 0XCOLLECTION.

DOUGLAS GORDON

B. 1966, GLASGOW → BERLIN · MOVING IMAGE / APPROPRIATION Turner Prize laureate (1996). A defining figure of 1990s appropriation art and what is now called the cinema of duration. The collection holds 24 Hour Psycho (1993, collection edition 1999), Hitchcock’s Psycho slowed to two frames per second, twenty-four hours in full — a working refusal of the cognitive economy of contemporary movingimage culture.

↑ D OUGLAS GORDON, 24 HOUR PSYCHO, 1993, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 0XCOLLECTION.

THE JAPANESE LINEAGE AND THE SOUNDAND-SCIENCEAXIS MARIKO MORI B. 1967, TOKYO · TECHNOLOGY AND SPIRITUALITY

A flagship of the collection. Founder of the Faou Foundation. The collection holds Tom Na H-iu (2006), the 4.5-meter glass monolith linked live to the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory in Gifu, and Beginning of the End, the long-form photographic series documenting global sites of transformation. Tom Na H-iu is treated at length in the magazine’s Works section (pp. 4–7).

↑ MARIKO MORI, RING: ONE WITH NATURE, 2016, COURTESY FAOU FOUNDATION, NEW YORK, PHOTO: LEO AVERSA

TATSUO MIYAJIMA B. 1957, TOKYO · CONCEPTUAL / LED

The collection holds Changing Time with Changing Self (2002), LED counters cycling from 1 to 9 — never zero, which signifies death — to evoke the continuous transformation that Miyajima’s three operating principles describe: Keep Changing. Connect with Everything. Continue Forever. A meditative, philosophical anchor among the collection’s more spectacular media works.

↑ TATSUO MIYAJIMA, WALL OF CHANGE, 2022, IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND BANGKOK ART BIENNALE.

CARSTEN NICOLAI

B. 1965, CHEMNITZ → BERLIN · SOUND / SCIENCE / ART A long-standing relationship with the collection, deepened with the acquisition of the installation of transmitter / receiver — the machine and the gardener (2022) as the central element of Frames of Reference at Art Basel. Nicolai opens the performance evening of Cosmic Knots at the Trafohalle with HYBR:ID PARA PARA — treated at length in the Performers section (pp. 26–27).

↑ CARSTEN NICOLAI, TRASMITTER / RECEIVER - THE MACHINE AND THE GARDENER, 2022, COURTESY OF CARSTEN NICOLAI STUDIO, HAUS DER KUNST MUNCHEN AND 0XCOLLECTION, PHOTO: MAX GEUTER

TIME LOOPS

THREE YEARS. THREE EXHIBITIONS. TWO ACTIVATIONS. ON THE PATH OF BECOMING.

THE PROGRAMME

THREE EXHIBITIONS AND TWO ACTIVATIONS

← REFIK ANADOL, DVOŘÁK DREAMS, 2023, IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST’S STUDIO AND 0XCOLLECTION.

2023 — SYNESTHETIC IMMERSION Prague, September 2023. The collection’s inaugural exhibition, presented during the Dvořák Prague festival at the KKCG Arts Space, Bořislavka. Eight artists — Ryoji Ikeda, Sougwen Chung, QUAYOLA, Libby Heaney, Daito Manabe, Carsten Nicolai, Nancy Baker Cahill, and Lu Yang — accompanied by Refik Anadol’s two-year public commission Dvořák Dreams, installed at Jan Palach Square outside the Rudolfinum. The curatorial frame proposed synaesthesia not as a stylistic flourish but as a structural condition of contemporary digital work: a fact about how the work asks the body to receive it.

2024 — DVOŘÁK DREAMS at the KENNEDY CENTER · ACTIVATION Washington, D.C., 4–24 September 2024. The U.S. premiere of Refik Anadol’s Dvořák Dreams, reinstalled at the Kennedy Center’s REACH Plaza — the Center’s first dedicated digital-art presentation, sponsored by Allwyn. Trained on the Dvořák archive, the work returned a Czech symphonic inheritance to the central plaza of American institutional culture: a doubled translation, from nineteenth-century notation into contemporary data, and from a Czech cultural memory into an American civic space.

2025 — BINÁLÉ: WE ARE NOT ALONE · ACTIVATION Budapest, 17 September – 26 October 2025. The second edition of the Budapest expanded media art biennial BINÁLÉ, We Are Not Alone, at the Merlin Theatre — realised through a collaboration between 0xCollection and the Örkény István Theatre, curated by Viola Lukács and Júlia Neudold, with Máté Serflek’s design, Gábor Kitzinger’s animations, and Rozi Mákó’s soundscapes. Twenty-two international artists — including Nam June Paik’s Brain of a Robot — whose immersive installations probed what it means to live among others: human, machine, and beyond. BINÁLÉ was the proving ground for three works that now anchor Cosmic Knots: Carsten Nicolai, Kurt Hentschläger’s SUB, and X by Gábor Kitzinger with András László Nagy and Rozi Mákó.

← 0XCOLLECTION, FRAMES OF REFERENCE EXHIBITION OPENING, 2025, COURTESY OF 0XCOLLECTION, PHOTO: JANO FEKETE

2025 — FRAMES OF REFERENCE Basel, June 2025, parallel to Art Basel. Ten artists — Douglas Gordon, Nam June Paik, Carsten Nicolai, Miles Greenberg, Tatsuo Miyajima, Mariko Mori, Agnes Denes, Julian Charrière, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Conrad Shawcross. The exhibition proposed that perception, technology, and materiality intersect in time-based work in ways that shape and disrupt the visitor’s experience of duration. The collection’s first Basel-based public exhibition, and the architectural and conceptual bridge to Cosmic Knots.

THE FIELD AROUND COSMIC KNOTS Literature, music, theory — laid flat. Three fields: cosmotechnics & perception, knots & topologies, sound & listening. 01 COSMOTECHNICS & PERCEPTION Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention — Verso, 2024; Merce Cunningham’s Events: Key Concepts — 2024 Yuk Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics — Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2021 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1–3 — Stanford, 1998–2011 N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought — Chicago, 2017 Erika Balsom, After Uniqueness — Columbia, 2017 Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China — Urbanomic, 2016 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble — Duke, 2016 Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology — Columbia, 2016 Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture — Duke, 2016 Mark B. N. Hansen, Feed-Forward — Chicago, 2015 Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World — Princeton, 2015 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects — Minnesota, 2013 Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect — Zer0, 2010 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway — Duke, 2007 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual — Duke, 2002 02 Knots, Topologies & Science Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit — Urbanomic, 2018 Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art — Verso, 2017 Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts — 2015 Maggie Nelson, Bluets — 2009 Tom Kibble & Mark Hindmarsh, “Cosmic strings,” Rep. Prog. Phys. 58, 1995 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious — MIT, 1993 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction — 1986; Ignota repr. 2019

Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9, 1979 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXII: R.S.I. — 1974–75 Clarice Lispector, Água Viva — 1973; trans. Tobler 2012 Stanisław Lem, His Master’s Voice — 1968 Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics — 1965; trans. Weaver 1968 Stanisław Lem, Solaris — 1961 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “The Library of Babel” — Ficciones, 1944 03 SOUND & LISTENING Kali Malone, All Life Long — 2024 Sarah Davachi, Long Gradus — 2024 Pauline Oliveros, Quantum Listening — Terra Ignota, 2022 Caterina Barbieri, Spirit Exit — 2022 Kali Malone, The Sacrificial Code — 2019 Christoph Cox, Sonic Flux — Chicago, 2018 Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence — Continuum, 2010 Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories — Continuum, 2010 Alva Noto, Xerrox Vol. 1–5 — NOTON, 2007–24; Vrioon, Insen, Summvs, Glass with Sakamoto Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening — iUniverse, 2005 Maryanne Amacher, Sound Characters: Making the Third Ear — 1999 Éliane Radigue, Trilogie de la Mort — 1998 Alvin Lucier, Music on a Long Thin Wire — 1979 Catherine Christer Hennix, The Electric Harpsichord — 1976, Die Schachtel reissue Éliane Radigue, Adnos I–III — 1974–82 Alvin Lucier, I Am Sitting in a Room — 1969 La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela, Dream House — ongoing since 1969

COLOPHON PUBLISHER 0xCollection AG, Basel EDITORIAL Editor-in-Chief: Viola Lukács (Director of Curatorial Affairs) Guest Editor: Charlotte Kent Editorial Office: St. Jakobs-Strasse 17, 4052 Basel EXHIBITION Cosmic Knots, 15–20 June 2026 Venues: Franck Areal (Horburgstrasse 105, 4057 Basel) & Trafohalle (Therwilerstrasse 56/58, 4103 Bottmingen) Curator: Viola Lukács Production: Géraldine Rusek , Liliána Simon Design: Máté Serflek TYPOGRAPHY Set in MANGO GROTESQUE and ABC Favorit. Cover composition by Máté Serflek. WITH THANKS Karel Komárek; KKCG Group, Pavel Turek and Allwyn, Jiri Radoch and Linda Sedlakova, Valea Group, the artists; Mariko Mori Studio, Carsten Nicolai Studio, Igor Rusek and ATAG Private & Corporate Services AG, Patricia Roberty, Gabrielle Perregaux, Laura Quinter, HAAS AG (Switzerland), Angelino Artworks (Italy), Masami Komija and the Super-Kamiokande team, Anja Piazza and Barbara Krause and the Undterdessen Trafohalle Bottmingen team; Géraldine Rusek, Richard Castelli, Florence Berthaud and the Epidemic team, Gábor Kitzinger, Jakub Pisek, Zita Fonyódy, Fanni Zóka-Győri and Bálint Liptay and the readers; Gabriel Eckenstein and the KULTQuartier, Wegwarte and Tanzhaus teams at Franck Areal; Danielle Bürgin at Radio X, Cédric Christmann and the Primeo Energie. © 2026 0xCollection AG. All rights reserved. Texts © the authors. Images © the artists and lenders.

ISSN 3043-1042

HEXA 01 - Cosmic Knots