In recent years, the boundaries between art, technology, and social systems have become more intertwined. Digital acceleration is now shaping contemporary life and influencing how knowledge is disseminated. Access to global culture and creativity is now inseparable, and education has become one of the defining frontiers of the digital age.

Serving towards that purpose, artist Cole Sternberg has been working on a mission to transform global data into a vast, living ecosystem of art. Commissioned by Giga, the UNICEF–ITU initiative working to connect every school in the world to the Internet, the artist took the result of this challenge to the Grand Palais at this year’s Paris Photo with a gigantic piece of digital and generative artwork titled “a garden“.

*Sternberg’s Digital installation “a garden”at Paris Photo Grand Palais, November 20*

Over one million digital artworks

Taking center stage on the “Balcon d’Honneur” under the invitation of Paris Photo’s digital curator Nina Roehrs, “a garden” is a monumental generative project comprising over one million digital artworks, one for every school in Giga’s expanding database. It serves as an evolving on-chain map that bridges art, technology, and radical global change.

Giga’s core work begins with astonishing facts: 1.3 billion children are still living offline, and no one actually knows how many schools exist globally. To address this, the organization has spent the past six years building an AI system capable of locating and mapping every school on Earth. The scale is staggering. Giga has now mapped over 2.2 million schools and supported improved Internet access in more than 24,000, impacting roughly 11 million students.

When Giga invited Sternberg to develop a large-scale artistic response to their data architecture, the concept expanded rapidly. They initially presented the project during 2024’s CfC St. Moritz, a highly curated digital assets and blockchain conference that kicks off each year with industry talks on decentralization, geopolitics, digital currency regulations, innovative finance, and institutional adoption, among others.

Sternberg and Giga’s live art auction by Christie’s Geneva at CfC St Moritz, Switzerland, January 2024, photo courtesy of CfC St Moritz

In 2024, the staggering pool of global finance leaders, crypto investors, and industry experts counted honorary guests including Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu, Algorand CEO Staci Warden, Arthur Hayes of Maelstrom’s family office, Eric Voorhees, founder of Venice AI, and Sheila Warren, founder of the World Economic Forum and former CEO of Crypto Council for Innovation.

As part of CfC St Moritz, a live auction led by Christie’s Geneva of Sternberg’s physical artwork and standalone NFTs took place to support Giga, UNICEF, and ITU’s initiative. Overall, the combination of digital and physical works was granted for $100K to collectors. The on-chain auction featured 24 works curated by Nina Roehrs. Several other major fundraising efforts raised nearly $1 million.

NFT Collector and Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu with Giga’s co-founder Christopher Fabian at CfC St Moritz, Switzerland, January 2024, photo courtesy of CfC St Moritz

Physical and digital processes

Sternberg is long known for a practice that bridges physical and digital processes. California-based, he had already begun exploring generative, on-chain artworks several years earlier. After a nine-month development process, he released his first fully on-chain series with Art Blocks, opening what he describes as “an entirely new way of thinking about form, authorship, and scale.”

Sternberg’s idea for Giga was to craft a work that could visualize the humanity behind the numbers. While the digital works for “a garden” evolve from data, Sternberg’s physical pieces come from a much more unpredictable process, a kind of collaboration with landscape and weather.

Cole Sternberg in front of his physical installation at CfC St Moritz, 2024, photo courtesy of CfC St Moritz

Each canvas begins as a thin wash of pigment on Italian linen, layered with photographic prints of nature from California to the Engadin in Switzerland. Then a performative transformation happens: the painting is dragged through a lake, or occasionally buried in snow, letting water, silt, and wind reshape the surface. “They age like old jeans,” Sternberg says during an interview. “I can control maybe seventy-five percent. It’s a balance between nature, technology, and experimentation.”

“It’s a balance between nature, technology, and experimentation.”
COLE STERNBERG

For Paris Photo, a totemic installation was created and placed on the highest levels of the Grand Palais, linking Sternberg’s practice back to the mountains where much of this project originated.

One of Cole Sternberg’s digital works for “A garden”, 2025, photo courtesy of Cole Sternberg

With “a garden”, Giga and Cole Sternberg have created a new model for how art can participate in global systems change. The project is not just symbolic; it is functional. Each artwork is a marker, a record, a node, and for many schools, a first step into digital visibility.

It’s also an invitation. To imagine a world where every person is connected. Where data has soul. And where the map of the world is not a series of blank spaces, but a vast, growing garden