The Infinite Node Foundation launches its permanent Palo Alto (US) hub with “10,000,” the first major exhibition devoted to CryptoPunks (2017), Larva Labs’ (Matt Hall and John Watkinson) canonical PFP (profile picture) NFT collection. Following last year’s acquisition of the collection’s IP from Yuga Labs, NODE positions the algorithmically-generated portraits as a process-based artwork where “the marketplace is a living exchange that hums with activity.”

MoMA adds eight CryptoPunks (2017) and eight Chromie Squiggles (2020) to its permanent collection—donated by their creators (Larva Labs and Erick Calderon), collector communities, and DAOs including SquiggleDAO. Building on the museum’s 2023 acquisition of Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised (2022) and Ian Cheng‘s 3FACE (2022), the acquisition marks another institutional stamp for on-chain art. “The moment we’ve been building toward has arrived,” notes pseudonymous collector Cozomo de’ Medici, who donated a Punk, on X.

Casey Reas shares his first impressions of FF1, Feral File’s $450 USD open-source art computer, and its potential to reshape how digital art is encountered domestically. Writing as both co-founder and user, he frames the device as a shift in viewing conditions—where sustained attention determines the quality of experience. Of note: Reas traces an arc from 2010s platforms like Sedition and Electric Objects to the present, framing purpose-built products as “tools for living with art” in everyday life.

Mika Ben Amar’s Ad Space drops on Verse, presenting 111 compositions generated by a custom Chrome extension that strips websites down to nothing but ads. The Berlin-based artist’s resulting spartan canvases foreground the surveillance apparatus—targeting algorithms, behavioural profiles, the data-brokerage economy—that underwrite ‘free’ content. “I trained Google to only show me weird ads for this,” Ben Amar notes on social media.

Building on cyberethnographer Ruby Justice Thélot’s ARTnews meditation on AI and digital folk art creation, critic Louis Bury lists ten examples—art, books, essays—that speak to this tension in 2025. Bury’s picks include Dean Kissick’s dissection of “The Vulgar Image,” Agent 5.5’s QAnon-esque John Pork TikTok lore, artist Maya Man’s “funhouse vision of TikTok vernacular’s over-the-top banality” for the Whitney, and Nadia Asparouhova’s cult hit book Antimemetics (2025).

Feral File presents its first-ever solo exhibition, Maya Man’s “StarQuest.” The American artist’s titular AI-generated video series explores the high drama world of competitive dance, processing 111 eight-second scenes through custom software that recombines them into new choreographies. At its centre is “AI default girl”—a synthetic performer for whom “visibility depends on compliance, and the image must continually regenerate itself to stay seen,” writes curator Nora O’ Murchú.

What would it mean for a forest to own and manage itself? Terra0’s Autonomous Forest (2025) is an experimental, living artwork that rethinks ecological regeneration and stewardship through collective, blockchain-based governance. First theorized in their 2016 white paper, the group—finally—introduces a legal prototype with LAS Art Foundation: Two newly acquired woodland plots near Berlin are now DAO-managed, challenging years of monocultural and profit-driven forestry.

Bootloader, the first experimental platform from objkt labs (the R&D wing of the objkt NFT marketplace), launches as an open-source generative art system on Tezos. It allows artists to create SVG-based algorithmic art stored directly on-chain with code remaining mutable post-mint—collectors can update their pieces as artists tweak underlying systems. The platform challenges the NFT paradigm of immutable editions, treating code as living creative material.

The TRANSFER Data Trust celebrates its public launch at New York’s Pier 57, completing TRANSFER’s evolution from a gallery LLC into a data cooperative. The decentralized, artist-owned archive and value exchange network functions as an “open culture stack” designed to collaboratively manage and maintain digital artworks in perpetuity. According to founder Kelani Nichole, “this emergent care model offers a new approach to media art valuation, conservation, and governance.”