Berlin’s creative underground came alive this week as Art on Tezos transformed Charlottenburg’s Wilmersdorfer Str. 151 into a living gallery for digital art, performance, and philosophical inquiry.

Across four days (Nov. 6-9) of screenings, talks, and installations — with satellites stretching to Kreuzberg and Mariannenstraße — the event brought together some of the most thoughtful voices exploring the relationship between human expression and machine intelligence.

The event was a meeting of minds and mediums, with performances that bridged art and technology, discussions that examined creative authorship, and conversations that stretched late into the Berlin night.

Here are 5 takeaways from the whirlwind week.

*Franziska Ostermann* *performs at Art on Tezos Berlin’s Opening Party, The Second Guess booth. Credit: Rebecca Goodwin*

Performance Bridged Digital and Physical

The most compelling moments were the performances threading through the schedule, connecting the theoretical to the tangible.

In Lauren Lee McCarthy’s “AUTO Berlin,” the fantasy of driverless freedom became a study in collective surrender. Participants powered the “vehicle” with their own voices, singing words they didn’t choose, fed to them one line at a time. The piece blurred authorship and agency, transforming anxiety about automation into a strangely communal ritual. For its Berlin debut, the work evolved into a networked performance spanning multiple locations with distributed choreography that questioned how autonomy functions in systems built on coordination and consent.

At Thursday’s Opening Party, OONA’s “Dear Guests” offered a parallel meditation on visibility and perception, featuring an iridescent dress that only appeared through a camera lens. SOFF’s “The Post-Human Artist Is Present” and Franziska Ostermann’s “The Poet as Cyborg” reading carried that spirit forward, blending performance, poetry, and technology into something immediate and human.

*P1xelfool performs at Art on Tezos Berlin’s Opening Party, objkt booth. Credit: Rebecca Goodwin*

P1xelfool’s dual appearances, first in “e/pi./dermis Performance” and later in the “Technomasochisms” conversation with Objkt curator Kika Nicolela, continued this thread, exploring glitch as both vulnerability and method. Even Sabato’s “Inflationary Pressures” blurred roles, transforming curation into live performance through its “art deliveries,” small improvised gestures that reframed distribution as dialogue.

Together, they set the tone for the week, reminding attendees that digital art can provoke thought without losing emotion and that the most memorable works are those that make people look twice, then think harder.

MÆANDER by Spøgelsesmaskinen at bitforms booth, Art on Tezos Berlin. Credit: Trilitech

Technology as Collaborator, Not Competitor

If Thursday’s Opening Night highlighted digital art’s performative edge, Friday and Saturday’s daytime sessions turned to process. The focus was less on showing finished work and more on exploring how artists are collaborating with technology itself. Rather than formal sit-down panels, they unfolded as open gatherings around the works, with artists and curators speaking directly with the audience. The result felt organic and alive, a reflection of the very systems they were discussing.

In “The Bigger Your Pool,” AI pioneers Mario Klingemann, Kevin Abosch, and Terence Broad — moderated by The Second Guess’ Anika Meier — tackled the creative paradox of collaboration with nonhuman intelligence. Klingemann dove into his work with generative music while Abosch traced his journey from science to machine learning to synthetic photography.

Killer conversation on AI with artists @quasimondo, @kevinabosch and @Terrybroad, moderated by @artontezos_ curator @postanika 🎤 pic.twitter.com/rkqXz3UMBA
— Now Media (@nowmedia) November 7, 2025

Later, Jess Tucker’s conversation with Boris Eldagsen explored prompting as a performative act and the tension between realism and rebellion in his practice. Eldagsen, the photographer who famously rejected the Sony World Photography Award after revealing his winning image was AI-generated, spoke about using the medium not to imitate reality but to challenge our trust in it.

In a conversation with Kika Nicolela, Deltasauce compared his process to his father’s work as a woodworker. He described how AI similarly gives him “scraps” — imperfect pieces that he sorts, shapes, and assembles into a narrative, collaborating with the machine’s irregularities to find form and meaning.

Scorpion Dagger at Accompart’s booth, Art on Tezos Berlin. *Credit: Rebecca Goodwin*

While plenty of conversations didn’t center on AI, the theme of human–machine collaboration threaded through the week. At bitforms gallery’s session “Simulating Nature, Shaping Reality,” Spøgelsesmaskinen and Trilitech’s Head of Arts Aleksandra Art discussed how the artist works with technology to create interactive light installations that respond to viewers’ movement and presence. His MÆANDER series draw inspiration from natural elements like water, using algorithms to generate shifting patterns of color and form. The takeaway remained consistent throughout the day: technology is not a rival but another material to shape.

*Qubibi’s “Hello Berlin” exhibition at Galerie Met. Credit: Courtesy of Galerie Met*

Side Events Added Soul

Berlin’s off-site activations helped give Art on Tezos its pulse. They spilled the week’s ideas into cafés, lofts, and late-night spaces, proving that some of the event’s most interesting art still happens off the main stage.

At “Browser Views: Exhibitions in an Internet Café” on Kottbusser Damm, objkt.labs and objkt.one reimagined a relic of the early web as a gallery. Between espresso machines and glowing monitors, screens pulsed with pixelated works: a love letter to Net Art and the messy, communal internet that birthed this movement.

Across the river, “Art After Dark at SOMA” extended the dialogue into the evening. Artists, curators, and attendees gathered in a striking Kreuzberg space where projection, performance, and sound unfolded as one.

At Galerie Met, qubibi’s “Hello Berlin” offered a quiet counterpoint to the week’s bustle. The presentation combined a series of digital prints with a looping video installation, translating the Japanese artist’s generative practice into both physical and moving form.

Together, these off-site activations offered different flavors across the city and captured what made the week distinct: the feeling that digital art isn’t confined to its pixels, but lives wherever curiosity and creativity gather.

*Community-made Tezpoles, project by Salawaki x Time at Teia booth, Art on Tezos Berlin. Credit: Rebecca Goodwin*

The Tezos Art Community Is Strong

For all the talk about innovation and infrastructure, what really stood out in Berlin was the people.

This is a quirky and eclectic community that survived the 2022 crash, watched bigger chains capture mainstream attention, and responded by doubling down on what actually matters: the artists and the work.

Between panels and performances, the crowd oscillated between earnest discussion and inside humor. One fan-favorite activity was a Teia initiative to “make your own Tezpole,” a tongue-in-cheek nod to a viral moment from a past Tezos exhibition that the community has since reappropriated as cultural lore.

Familiar faces like Sasha Stiles, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Kevin Abosch, Mario Klingemann, and Ganbrood anchored the week’s programming, embodying the blend of experimentation and integrity that’s kept Tezos at the heart of digital art. Many of them have been here since the beginning — from the early Hic et Nunc days to today’s network of platforms and curators — and their presence in Berlin underscored how Tezos has evolved without losing its core DNA.

*Matt Medved, Nikita Diakur, Aleksandra Art, Sasha Stiles,, Kika Nicolela, Danielle King & more at Art on Tezos Berlin’s Opening Party. Credit: Rebecca Goodwin*

Berlin Was the Perfect Canvas

What made Art on Tezos: Berlin resonate wasn’t just its lineup but its location. The city and the chain share the same DNA, both serving as creative refuges for people who build outside the mainstream. I tweeted back in 2022 that “Tezos is the Berlin of NFTs:” cheaper, grittier, more experimental, and a little bit punk rock. Two years later, that comparison feels even truer.

Tezos is the Berlin of NFTs.
— medved (@mattmedved) April 29, 2022

Berlin’s layered history of experimentation, resistance, and rebirth mirrors the ethos that has defined Tezos from the start. Both attract iconoclasts who value independence over polish and substance over spectacle. It is the same reason artists still flock to Berlin, drawn by the freedom to make something meaningful without needing permission.

*Teia’s room at Art on Tezos Berlin. Credit: Courtesy of Art on Tezos*

From Kreuzberg’s converted warehouses to Mitte’s minimalist galleries, the week unfolded like a cross-section of the city itself: intellectually rigorous, occasionally chaotic, but unified by curiosity. Conversations spilled from panels into bars, new collaborations sparked in hallways, and code felt like a shared language.

Art on Tezos: Berlin was about endurance and the artists, curators, and technologists showing up to build something lasting. In the end, it felt less like a conference and more like a reunion, proof that the future of digital art is not being engineered in sterile labs or market dashboards but in imperfect, communal spaces where imagination and technology still collide.

*Oona* *performs at Art on Tezos Berlin’s Opening Party, The Second Guess booth. Credit: Rebecca Goodwin*