Editorials

Peter Bauman, Le Random’s editor in chief, attended Art Basel, Basel 2026 and its various side events and exhibitions. He connects his thoughts and a mini-diary to the discussion surrounding the Art Basel talk, “Barbarians at the Gate," with Tina Rivers Ryan, Trevor Paglen, Erick Calderon and Natasha Degen. Bauman suggests that the Zero 10 digital sector and anti-fair Basel Social Club are less barbarians than civilized "Normans," challenging the status quo but ultimately part of the institutional art world. The true "barbarians" are the general public who currently feel excluded from art spaces, emphasizing that the industry must produce work and find sustainable economic models to engage them.

The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation’s Carl Thoma (President) & Kathleen Forde (Director and Curator, Media Arts) joined Peter Bauman on the occasion of Interference: The Interactive Art of Daniel Rozin at The Museum of Art + Light (MoA+L). They cover the origin and evolution of Carl Thoma's collecting instincts as well as Thoma Foundation's collecting thesis and loan philosophy for Digital & Media Art. They close by discussing the art-historical framing of Rozin's Interference. The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation stewards a 1,700+ work collection spanning Art of the Spanish Americas, Digital & Media Art, Japanese Bamboo and Post-war Painting & Sculpture. It supports the field through loans, research, exhibitions, conservation and over $26 million in grants since its founding in 2014.

Virtual worldbuilding artist john gerrard spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) on the occasion of his year-long LACMA project, SPIRITS as well as work appearing at Art Basel's Zero 10. The LACMA work, SPIRITS, consists of live 3D sculptures of sandals and shoes from beaches across the world. The project culminates on June 21, 2026, with a summer solstice dance at LACMA featuring Richie Hawtin. They cover gerrard's twenty-year arc from early game engine works to browser-based public art; the entanglement of petroleum, plasticity, and modern life; and why gerrard believes the game engine is the most important medium of our time.

Artist Evil Biscuit spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) before the release of card nft 2, the artist’s trading-card-game-inspired project, first appearing with SOLOS Gallery at Felix Art Fair in February 2026. They discuss the project's evolution from card nft, Biscuit's digital-to-physical process, and how the work's emphasis on destruction and rebirth is material as much as conceptual.

Luba Elliott is once again curating the Art Gallery at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference, a leading annual gathering for computer vision and deep learning research. Elliott is exhibiting two dozen works at the forefront of creativity and AI on-site at Denver's Colorado Convention Center (June 5–7, 2026) and 114 online at the CVPR 2026 Art Gallery. The curator speaks with three shortlisted artists about their creative and conceptual approaches to AI: Nick Oh & Alex Park, Avital Meshi & Dorte Bjerre Jensen, and Xia Liu.

Virtual worldbuilding artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen speaks with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about the centrality of fieldwork and process to his practice. They discuss archiving vanishing environments in virtual worlds, the play between structure and daydream in his creative process and the embodied sensibility behind Steensen’s slow, textured approach to digital worldbuilding. An exhibition of his work, Otherworlds, is on view at Phi (Montreal) through September 13, 2026.