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Arab Bank Switzerland | Digital Art

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Since 1996, Rhizome (@rhizomedotorg) has played a crucial role in the digital art field, establishing and expanding its cultural presence while pioneering best practices in the preservation of artworks threatened by technological obsolescence.

We were proud to support that mission at Rhizome’s 30th anniversary benefit dinner. Thank you to everyone who joined us in celebrating this milestone, and to Rhizome for three decades of championing digital art. by @abs.digitalart

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When people think about AI-generated art, they usually think about the resulting output: the image generated by a technical process deemed mysterious or unimportant. But what if the most revealing part of the work happens long before the finished picture appears?

Charlotte Kent (@lucyscribbles), editor of the new monograph “Sofia Crespo × Anna Ridler: A Field of Collaboration,” reflects on how the duo’s attention to process upends tech’s fever dream of effortless automation.

Read the full essay on the ABS Substack. Link in bio.

Commissioned and developed by Arab Bank Switzerland as part of Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler’s 2025 Artist of the Year award, Sofia Crespo × Anna Ridler: A Field of Collaboration is published by @hatjecantzverlag.

Cover image: Detail from Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler, 83 Seeds from a Vanishing Mountain, 2023. Image courtesy the artists

#ABSEditorial @annaridler @sofiacrespo by @abs.digitalart

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Botanical forms born of code, now held in print.

Earlier this month at HALLEN 07, we launched “Sofia Crespo x Anna Ridler: A Field of Collaboration”, published by Hatje Cantz — the first monograph on our 2025 Artists of the Year, Sofia Crespo (@sofiacrespo) and Anna Ridler (@annaridler), commissioned and developed as part of their Artist of the Year award. The book gathers their five joint projects from 2023–2025, alongside four critical essays and an interview, tracing how the two artists draw machine learning into conversation with photography, botanical study and other tactile traditions.

Sofia and Anna joined editor Charlotte Kent (@lucyscribbles)for a conversation on authorship, process and what it means to collaborate — both with each other and with machine systems — followed by a signing in front of the artists’ work.

Our thanks to Sofia, Anna and Charlotte for a thoughtful discussion, and to everyone who attended.

Photo: @silke_briel

#absartistoftheyear #hallen_kunstfestival #digitalart #berlinartweek taken in Wilhelm Hallen by @abs.digitalart

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Where machine learning meets the natural world:

London-based Anna Ridler builds custom machine learning systems from hand-labelled datasets, Argentine artist Sofia Crespo explores the intersections of biology, image-making, and artificial life. Together, they build a very successful artist duo which investigates the links between artificiality and nature.

Our new publication “Sofia Crespo x Anna Ridler: A Field of Collaboration.” collects the five joint projects (2023–2025) that won the duo the 2025 Arab Bank Switzerland Artist of the Year Award.
Inside, an exclusive interview and critical essays explore how the artists bridge cutting-edge AI with botanical study and tactile traditions, treating technology as a living, evolving ecology.

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📸:
1: © Detail of Snapshots: Orchids, 2023, Image courtesy of Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler
2: © Detail of unique polaroid print, Long Short Term Memories (sketches from a garden in Argentina), 2025, Image courtesy of Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler
3: © Detail of unique polaroid print, Long Short Term Memories (sketches from a garden in Argentina), 2025, Image courtesy of Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler
4: © Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler, Long Short Term Memories (sketches from a garden in Argentina), 2025, 24 unique polaroid prints, 8.8 x 10.7cm each, configurable installation, Image courtesy of Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler

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📚 Sofia Crespo × Anna Ridler: A Field of Collaboration

Edited by: Arab Bank Switzerland
Designed by: Studio Pyda
Artist: SOFIA CRESPO × ANNA RIDLER
Texts by: Tega Brain, Charlotte Kent, Doreen Ríos, Nina Roehrs, Masako Shiba, Catherine Troiano

(English) ISBN: 978-3-7757-6398-1

#SofiaCrespo #AnnaRidler #hatjecantz #hatjecantzart by @abs.digitalart

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Celebrating our 2026 Artist of the Year.

Last week we closed our first Berlin Art Week with the ceremony honouring our 2026 Artist of the Year, Eva & Franco Mattes (@evaandfrancomattes). The award recognises a duo whose longstanding practice examines how media shapes human connection — and who have consistently laid bare the consequences of technological change rather than celebrating it. It also reflects the award’s wider purpose: to champion digital art within the larger contemporary art landscape.

The year ahead brings a newly commissioned work for the Arab Bank Switzerland Art Collection, developed with the artists over exhibitions and public programming to come.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for the ceremony, and to Eva & Franco for a memorable evening.

Trophy design by Sven Adolph (@design.momentum)

#absartistoftheyear #evaandfrancomattes #internetart #digitalart #berlinartweek

Photo: @silke_briel by @abs.digitalart

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For three decades, Eva & Franco Mattes (@evaandfrancomattes) have been finding new ways to misuse the internet, working with computer viruses, forged biographies, found memes, and AI models trained to imitate their own practice. While they are rightly heralded as Net Art pioneers, their willingness to work at the bleeding edge of online culture has made them consistently early to grasp how new technologies would reprogram their human users. The result is a body of work that reads as a counter-history of the internet itself.

In a new interview following their receipt of the 2026 Arab Bank Switzerland Artist of the Year, the Italian-American duo discuss authorship, automation, and why artists are more like computers than they’d like to think.

Read in full on the ABS Substack. Link in bio.

Cover images from the artists’ “Eva & Franco & Computers” project, an archive of hundreds of photos of the duo in front of computers taken from 1999 to today.

#abseditorial #netart #evaandfrancomattes by @abs.digitalart

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Installation views of our presentation at HALLEN 07, on view 5–13 September.

Featured artists: Andreas Gysin, Olia Lialina, and Sofia Crespo & Anna Ridler.

@andreasgysin
@sofiacrespo
@annaridler
@hallen_kunstfestival
 Photography: @silke_briel

#BerlinArtWeek #HALLEN07 #ArabBankSwitzerland #olialialina #digitalart by @abs.digitalart

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The vanishing flora of the Swiss Alps, regrown by a machine.

In the curator’s words, Nina Roehrs on 83 Seeds from a Vanishing Mountain (2023) by Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler — a work that turns to AI not to record eighty-three endangered Alpine species, but to imagine what they might yet become, holding extinction and invention in the same image.

83 Seeds from a Vanishing Mountain (2023), on view now at HALLEN 07 from 5–13 September.

@sofiacrespo
@annaridler
@hallen_kunstfestival
@berlinartweek

#berlinartweek #hallenkunstfestival #arabbankswitzerland #generative_art #digitalart taken in Wilhelm Studios by @abs.digitalart

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Join us for the launch of A Field of Collaboration, the new monograph on Sofia Crespo (@sofiacrespo)and Anna Ridler (@annaridler).

Published by Hatje Cantz (@hatjecantzverlag) and edited by Charlotte Kent (@lucyscribbles), the book gathers the artists’ five joint projects from 2023–2025 for the first time, alongside essays by Tega Brain, Doreen Ríos, Masako Shiba and Catherine Troiano, an interview by Nina Roehrs, and extensive documentation of their process. Together they trace how Crespo and Ridler bridge machine learning with photographic practice, botanical study and other tactile traditions — moving beyond the digital sublime toward a profound attentiveness to the contemporary moment.

Developed by Arab Bank Switzerland as part of the artists’ 2025 Artist of the Year award.
The launch takes place this Friday, 11 September, 5pm at HALLEN07 — a panel with the artists, moderated by Charlotte Kent, followed by a signing. Details on the flyer.

Book link in bio.

@tegabrain
@doreenrios
@masakoshiba
@cattroiano taken in Wilhelm Hallen by @abs.digitalart

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The cheerful motifs of the early web let loose across the hard-faced front pages of the news.

In her own words, net-art pioneer Olia Lialina on Online Newspapers: Postfactual Edition (2017–2018) triptych, showing at HALLEN 07. Begun in 2004, her Online Newspapers series adorns scanned newspaper front pages with first-generation animated GIFs collected over decades. Here, across three works, that treatment is applied to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung front pages picturing Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un — setting the pageantry of political authority against the amateurish glitter and modified cursors of the early internet.

Online Newspapers: Postfactual Edition — (Part I – Trump 2017, Part II – Putin 2017, Part III – Kim 2018) is on show now at HALLEN 07 from 5–13 September.

@hallen_kunstfestival
@berlinartweek

#olialialina #berlinartweek #hallen07 #arabbankswitzerland #netart taken in Wilhelm Hallen by @abs.digitalart

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An evolving choreography of characters, making and unmaking a grid of windows without pause.

Andreas Gysin’s Lattice (2025) builds evolving geometric patterns from the characters of the extended ASCII set. Each screen shows only a fragment of a much larger computational surface that runs on beyond the frame — at HALLEN 07, spanning six vertical LED panels, each 2 × 3.5 metres.

Originally commissioned by Arab Bank Switzerland for the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the work takes its cue from the building’s mashrabiya-inspired façade: a grid of windows, each subdivided into ever-smaller geometric elements. That principle becomes a plane of 248 × 248 windows, every one governed by a different pair of rules — so no two ever behave alike.

Lattice is on show at HALLEN 07 from 5–13 September.

Experience Lattice running live – link in bio

@andreasgysin
@hallen_kunstfestival
@berlinartweek

#berlinartweek #hallen07 #arabbankswitzerland #digitalartist #generativeart taken in Wilhelm Hallen by @abs.digitalart

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A generative program, animated GIFs on political front pages, and AI-conjured Alpine flora — three practices, one presentation.

Arab Bank Switzerland makes its @berlinartweek debut at HALLEN 07 ( @hallen_kunstfestival ), bringing together three works that each think through technology, image and data in a different way:
▪️ Andreas Gysin (@andreasgysin ) — Lattice (2025) ▪️ Olia Lialina — Online Newspapers: Postfactual Edition – Trump, Putin, Kim (2017–2018) ▪️ Anna Ridler ( @annaridler ) & Sofia Crespo ( @sofiacrespo ) — 83 Seeds from a Vanishing Mountain (2023)

Curated by @ninaroehrs

HALLEN 07 | Sept. 05–13  📍 Wilhelm Hallen 

#berlinartweek #hallen07 #arabbankswitzerland #ABSDigitalArt by @abs.digitalart

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