bitforms at 25: From CD-ROMs to Art Basel’s Zero 10

Steven Sacks opened bitforms gallery in Chelsea in November 2001. Two months after 9/11. Manfred Mohr plotter prints, CD-ROMs, and Casey Reas software running on custom-built PCs. The gallery turns 25 this year, and the arc from that Chelsea storefront to three consecutive Art Basel Zero 10 appearances traces the full trajectory of generative art’s institutional arrival.

Origins

Sacks came from a family antique business, got an MBA, co-founded a dot-com creative agency, burned out, and sensed the bubble bursting. The 2001 Whitney Biennial’s “bitstreams” show and SF MoMA’s “010101” convinced him there was room for a gallery that treated digital tools with the same material seriousness as paint. He opened on personal savings.

The Infrastructure Problem

The early years were defined by problems no traditional gallery faced. Mohr could only produce plotter prints until 2002, when he released his first live generative work on a custom-built PC the gallery helped source. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer needed specialized industrial cameras and heart-rate sensors. Work lived on CD-ROMs and Zip drives that degraded. Sacks launched a “Software Art Space Initiative” in the mid-2000s—custom-made boxes with printed CDs in editions of 100, pitching collectors on the idea of a devoted home screen for art.

Expansion and Its Limits

By 2005, Wired called Sacks “The King of Digital Art.” The gallery ran a Seoul space from 2005-2007 and a San Francisco space from 2021-2023. The SF experiment is instructive: big tech money in the Bay Area did not translate into gallery business. The audience existed; the purchasing habits were somewhere else.

The Art Blocks Inflection

“Until the launch of the Art Blocks platform in November 2020, generative art was an incredibly niche, specialized area. After that, it exploded.” The gallery now represents artists whose work circulates on-chain and in institutions simultaneously. Daniel Canogar builds sculptural installations from discarded electronics and has also released generative work on Tezos. Casey Reas co-founded Processing in 2001 and launched Feral File in 2020.

Art Basel 2026

At Art Basel this June, bitforms made its third consecutive Zero 10 appearance. The gallery sold Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s PanopticChiasma—synchronized illuminated lightbulbs using recorded human heartbeats—for USD 180,000 to a private foundation in Ukraine. The sale reflected a broader market shift documented in the Art Basel/UBS report published in July: digital works now rank as the 3rd most acquired medium among high-net-worth collectors, behind only painting and sculpture. 51% of 3,100 surveyed HNW individuals bought a digital artwork in 2025. Digital art’s share of total sales value rose from 7% to 10%.

Current Program

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy open “ReLensing” at the Allen Street space on September 10. Manfred Mohr, now in his 80s, appears in “New Humans: Memories of the Future” at the New Museum through August 9. Sacks maintains a program spanning from Maya Man in her 20s to Mohr in his 80s—few galleries anywhere hold that generational spread with a single medium focus.

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