./spiral
Curated by Atay Ilgun Jonathan Carmel (jonooo)Presented by SuperRareEleven artists revisit formative works, tools and systems to ask how digital art carries, revises and remakes its own history.
SuperRare presents ./spiral, a group exhibition curated by Atay Ilgun and Jonathan Carmel (jonooo), bringing together eleven artists who helped shape the languages of AI, generative systems and protocol-based art. Responding to the spiral brief, they revisit formative tools, methods and unresolved ideas through new digital and physical iterations, including interactive systems, ceramics and print-based works, and ask what persists, what has changed and what might come next.
./spiral ꩜pens at Fondazione Aversan໑, New York, on 3 September 2026 and runs thr∿ugh 10 September 2026; the full 𖧪nline release 𖧪pens via SuperR⭑re on 4 September 2026, while the exhibiti𖧪n is still hanging.
A field encounters its own history
Tools in these fields change quickly enough that work made only a few years ago can already bear the marks of a distinct technological moment. Artists are reopening early models, recovering obsolete or abandoned systems and reexamining work made before today’s generative-AI interfaces and blockchain-based markets became familiar. What once looked like a glitch, failure or technical constraint can now be read as period style and a record of process.
The work, continued
Robbie Barrat returns to the visual language of his early pix2pix and StyleGAN experiments, extending it through UV printing on Plexiglas, where the synthetic landscape takes on a new material presence. Helena Sarin uses her own early AI work as source material for ceramics, bringing model, image, object and token into relation. Rhea Myers’ Grinding revisits ideas from her earlier blockchain-based works, using code and cryptography to examine how digital systems shape authenticity, ownership and value.
Return, not retrospective
Taken together, the works place a recent history of generative, AI and protocol-based art within a longer lineage of artists working with computation, networks and machine-made images. ./spiral approaches that history as unfinished, asking what remains active within earlier works and what new forms they might now take.
The spiral gives this process a form: not a closed cycle, but a return shaped by everything accumulated in the meantime. Each artist determines how that extension takes shape, from a single work or sequence to a physical object or generative system. Co-curator Atay Ilgun is among the eleven participating artists. Rather than looking back at a finished chapter, ./spiral treats earlier work as material for what comes next.
“We are still early. We've been getting earlier since long before NFT mania. Art onchain doesn't turn in a flat circle, it intensifies in an endless spiral - each cycle tighter than the last and each one running into the next. My 2014 smart contracts are still running. My latest work picks up where they left off. See how in ./spiral, thanks to Jon and Atay.”
Rhea Myers, artist