SuperRare (@SuperRare): A Return That Does Not Repeat

A Return That Does Not Repeat Inside ./spiral, eleven artists revisit formative works, tools and systems from where they are now Curated by @tyaagnliu and @im_jonooo ./spiral begins with a simple invitation: return to an earlier work, process, system or unresolved idea, then extend it from the present. The condition is not repetition. Artists were not asked to remake a successful work, reconstruct a former style or commemorate an anniversary. They were invited to identify something from their past that remained active and discover what it could become after years of changes in tools, materials, platforms and artistic practice. The result is a group exhibition spanning AI, generative systems, onchain art, software and physical work. Across eleven artists, return becomes a method for producing difference. Why return now? Digital art has developed within an unusually accelerated sense of time. Tools and platforms appear, become culturally dominant and are replaced within a few years. A model can become obsolete while the artist who first used it is still deciding what they learned from it. An artwork can be declared historic while its creator remains in the middle of an evolving practice. This speed affects more than technology. It shapes how work is released, discussed, collected and remembered. Attention is continually directed toward what is newest, leaving earlier experiments to survive in old folders, discontinued software, running contracts and half-resolved ideas. ./spiral asks what might happen if those earlier works were treated as active material rather than completed history. The exhibition grew from a series of conversations between its curators, Atay Ilgun and Jonathan Carmel. What began as a discussion about early AI and the rapidly forming history of digital art gradually moved toward the artists themselves. Again and again, the same pattern appeared: practices rarely progress in a straight line. Artists return to old questions, recover abandoned experiments and recognise possibilities that were not visible the first time. The spiral became a way of describing that movement. It returns without placing the artist back at the same point. Different forms of return The artists responded to the invitation in markedly different ways. Helena Sarin carries the visual language of her early neural work into ceramics. Her Dos ídolas del Campo sculptures are coil and slab built, fired to cone 6 and imagined as functional deities. Forms once produced through machine learning are translated into objects shaped by hand, fire and physical use. Artonymous returns to material that was almost erased. While clearing an old computer, the artist rediscovered 1,002 discarded pix2pix outputs from early experiments with machine learning. These partial, failed and visually unstable images now form the source material for AI TRASH, a p5.js system that continually assembles them into new corrupted canvases. The work does not clean up or disguise the limitations of those early models. It allows their failures to become the material of a new generative system. Rhea Myers’ Grinding approaches return through computation and language. The work applies the brute-force search associated with proof of work to foundational terms in abstraction: point, line, plane and volume. Each additional letter makes the desired result exponentially less likely to appear. Form is not simply drawn or declared. It must be found through an increasingly demanding process. Elsewhere in the exhibition, artists return to their earliest work on SuperRare, recover material from abandoned drives and reconsider systems that have continued operating long after their original release. These works do not share a single medium or aesthetic. What connects them is the recognition that earlier work is never encountered unchanged. The artist has changed. The surrounding culture has changed. The technology may have disappeared, matured or taken on meanings it did not originally possess. To return under those conditions is already to make something new. Not a retrospective Many of the artists in ./spiral helped shape the development of AI, generative and onchain art. It would therefore have been easy to frame the exhibition around origins, firsts and pioneers. But that language can turn a living artist into a monument to an earlier moment. ./spiral is not an attempt to settle the history of digital art or present a definitive account of who mattered. It approaches that history as unfinished and still being negotiated by the artists who participated in its formation. This distinction matters in a field whose history is unusually recent. The artists associated with its foundational periods are still working, experimenting and changing direction. Their early work can be viewed alongside what followed without treating the earlier moment as the conclusion of their significance. The exhibition also resists the idea that an artistic practice must move forward by leaving its past behind. An abandoned process can contain an unrealised possibility. An obsolete tool can reveal something about the assumptions built into its replacement. A failed image can become the foundation of a new system. Return, in this sense, is not retreat. It is a way of asking what remains unresolved and what can now be seen differently. ./spiral proposes neither a straight line of progress nor a closed cycle of revival. It offers recurrence: a return that carries change with it. Not a retrospective. A return that does not repeat. ./spiral is presented by SuperRare at Fondazione Aversano in New York from September 3–10, 2026, with an online release beginning September 11. Join us for the public opening on September 3. RSVP for the opening