The Wrong Biennale: Making Space for Error

From November 1, 2025 to March 31, 2026, the seventh edition of the largest digital biennale, The Wrong, titled The Wrong Returns, brought together artists working at the intersection of technology and contemporary art. It explored what happens to art when technology ceases to be a tool and becomes a muse and a source of inspiration. Its focus was on practices engaging with artificial intelligence, algorithms, and digital culture. Curator Julia Sysalova led the biennale-participating project Code Error and, together with several of its artists, shared reflections about the project.

Founded by artist and curator David Quiles Guilló, The Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale has, from the outset, defined itself not as an online version of an exhibition, but as a form of art that exists natively within the network. While the pandemic helped legitimize online formats, The Wrong had anticipated this shift much earlier. Its model was built around the deliberate absence of a physical venue, allowing the project to grow from an experimental initiative into one of the key infrastructures for digital art.

Since its first edition in 2013, the biennale has brought together more than 13,000 artists and curators, received an honorary mention from the European Commission’s S+T+ARTS Prize, and joined the International Biennial Association (IBA). Its main hub is located in São Paulo, Brazil. 

The Wrong exists as a distributed system of autonomous online pavilions and physical “embassies.” In different years, physical exhibitions have taken place in cities such as Buenos Aires, Santiago, Milan, Barcelona, Montevideo, Lima, Quito, Valencia, Melbourne, Los Angeles, and Rio de Janeiro. While the early editions documented art’s presence on the web, later ones moved toward stronger curatorial frameworks and theoretical reflection on the digital environment. Today, it is a large-scale network of exhibitions presenting one of the broadest overviews of digital art in the world, where the curator acts simultaneously as the author of the concept and the architect of the interface, and the artist works not only with the image but also with navigation and the logic of the browser window. In this format, the viewer stops being a visitor and becomes a user, exploring the work through clicks. Thus, The Wrong can be understood not so much as an exhibition, but as a dynamic media environment, a distributed infrastructure for digital art.

The Distributed Aesthetics

The seventh edition of The Wrong presents digital art not as an aesthetic, but as a way of analyzing technological reality. Many projects work with data as artistic material, with the interface as a medium, and with the algorithm as a co-author of the artistic process. In this context, artificial intelligence appears not only as a tool for generating images, but also as an object of critical analysis: artists explore the limits of its autonomy, its learning mechanisms, and the forms of its influence on human perception.

At the same time, it is precisely in this conjunction that the fragility of the idea of technological neutrality becomes visible. AI here becomes a new cultural infrastructure shaping the modes of production of images, memory, and knowledge.

Curatorial pavilions in The Wrong #7 are independent conceptual environments. They do not simply bring works together; they create micro-topologies, their own logics of navigation, temporal regimes, and visual grammars.

Thus, the biennale becomes a platform for discussing how new systems transform the very concept of artistic authorship, the image, and the viewer’s experience. It is here that the concept of error becomes central. If algorithmic culture strives for predictability and the elimination of deviations, art, on the contrary, produces them, turning to glitch as a productive state of the system. For this reason, the concept of glitch becomes one of the fundamental themes of the biennale. It reveals the hidden digital infrastructure and creates a space for alternative forms of visual thinking.

Code Error. The Laboratory of Glitch

Code Error, biennale participant

Many pavilions of the biennale address this theme from different angles, ranging from the study of algorithms to the analysis of digital identity. My curatorial project Code Error develops this line, focusing on system instability as an artistic and research method. In this context, the idea emerged to consider glitch as a form of knowledge, which became the starting point for shaping the pavilion and selecting artists. It was important for me to propose that artists work not with a technical anomaly or a visual effect of digital culture, but with an analytical tool for its understanding.

One of the key shifts is the transition from the artwork as an object to the artwork as a process. The project exists not as a fixed form. It is a processual web-documentary system—it evolves, interacts with context, and its participants and research aspects change.

The project looks at glitch from three perspectives: technical, cultural, and bodily. It shows glitch not as one artistic strategy, but as a space for multiple interpretations. In this sense, the Code Error pavilion proposes a reading of contemporary algorithmic culture through its mutations. The project becomes a dynamic archive in which each artist explores a particular type of glitch, creating their own “episode of error” within an ever-changing archive. For this reason, authorial commentaries become an important part of the project: they make it possible to see how the same concept transforms into different artistic languages. In these statements, algorithmic disruption becomes a personal artistic experience.

This transition is particularly evident in the work of Veera Romanoff, where glitch becomes not an effect, but a moment of exposing the system.

Veera Romanoff (Finland), Code Error:

My metaphor of creating the world from a glitch captures the moment when the system ceases to fully control the production of meaning. The algorithm strives for continuity, predictability, and the elimination of error. Glitch, on the contrary, reveals a crack in this logic. In that moment, the mechanism itself becomes visible, the code, the structure, the way reality is read. At that point, the algorithmic order ceases to be transparent and becomes an object of observation and doubt. And it is precisely this doubt that opens a space for human decision.

Here, glitch is understood not as a failure of the system, but as a moment in which its hidden structure is revealed. However, error in digital culture manifests not only at the level of the algorithm. It also becomes visible where the digital model encounters physical reality and bodily experience.

Veera Romanoff. Fragile Eden, single-channel video, 2025

Julia Fleet (United Kingdom), Code Error:

My experiment demonstrates the boundary between simulation and existence in reality. Algorithms are becoming increasingly precise in modeling physical parameters; however, simulation remains a theoretical model rather than an experience. They are capable of analyzing form and predicting movement, but bodily experience lies beyond computation. And it is precisely in this that the human remains fundamentally irreducible to code. In water, the body constantly adapts to pressure, lack of air, altered gravity, this is a physical experience of environment. When an algorithm attempts to reproduce such states, it relies only on external features, on a visual process, and therefore violates the causality of movement and distorts anatomy.

Julia Fleet. Specimen of Survival, digital iteration, video, 2025

If the works of Romanoff and Fleet explore the boundary between algorithm and physical reality, other artists in the project turn to a more personal dimension, memory and the transformation of a private archive within the digital environment. Error becomes a form of epistemological rupture, allowing one to move beyond predictable scenarios of user behavior.

Svetlana Fenster (Cyprus), Code Error:

Initially, the transformations that awaited me in the digital environment were perceived as a loss. I had been collecting lace for many years, these are domestic, deeply personal objects. I expected that AI, transforming a family pattern according to its own logic, would give a new plasticity to familiar patterns. However, the “storage system” turned out to be different: the unique dissolved into impersonal repetition. By asking what lies behind “error,” I discovered a space of belonging beyond specific time and biography. The expansion of the private into the scale of the collective revealed forms that are especially compelling for me as an artist. One could say that the individual became part of a collective memory that continues to weave its pattern beyond the human hand.

Svetlana Fenster. Unweaving Memory, video, 2025

Within the pavilion, a collective aesthetic of destabilization, fragmentation of memory, and bodily vulnerability takes shape: images disintegrate, data loses integrity. It functions as a micro-model of digital vulnerability, where glitch becomes a method for producing a new sensibility.

Nelya Akimova (Czech Republic), Code Error:

My work uses artificial intelligence to “meet” someone dear to me who has passed away. It becomes a mediator between my memory and its absence. Error here is not a technical malfunction, but a space of misalignment between how I remember her and how she appears on the screen. In this discrepancy, a new form of presence emerges—not biological, and not fully digital, but vulnerable and oscillating. In my video, I bring my mother back not as a documentary image, but as a ghostly Columbina, fragile, touching, almost theatrical. She plays at being a ballerina, as if trying on a role that remained in the past. For me, this is not a reconstruction, but an attempt to approach loss through the algorithm.

Nelya Akimova. Girl with a Silver Smile, video art, 2025

However, error is not limited to either digital systems or human memory. In a broader sense, it underlies evolution itself, where chance and mutation become sources of new forms.

Ksenia Mazheiko (Spain), Code Error:

Biologists may forgive me, as an artist, for a free interpretation, but for me evolutionary glitch is a mechanism that allows one to move beyond fixed identity. Nature goes beyond its own boundaries in search of new forms. In doing so, it realizes one of its key values, diversity. Nature seems to iterate through random combinations in search of new specialized forms of life. At the same time, it limits this search, balancing novelty with another essential value—adaptability. Not all “discoveries” prove viable in the long term. Yet it always leaves the possibility of returning to an earlier identity by restoring “broken” segments of DNA. Thus, each error already contains the possibility of a new error.

senia Mazheiko. Error: One Step to Freedom, video, 2025

In digital culture, where, as Jean Baudrillard suggested, simulacra increasingly precede reality, error becomes the moment when this logic is unexpectedly exposed. Glitch reveals the paradox of the contemporary image: the original no longer necessarily precedes the copy, and authenticity emerges within the very process of reproduction. It is precisely in this zone of instability—between algorithmic generation and human intervention—that a new model of authorship begins to take shape.

Alena Rezanova (USA), Code Error:

In my work, error emerges within the very logic of digital reproduction. We are used to thinking that there is an original and then its copies. I deliberately disrupt this logic. The video begins with an image created by artificial intelligence. Such an image has no original, it appears as part of an endless stream of digital images that can be copied again and again. After the digital image, I create a physical painting by hand. This means that the original appears after the copy. This glitch interrupts automatic repetition and returns human participation. It is at this moment that the author appears.

Alena Rezanova. DreamScapes.x // Glitch of Sufficiency, video, digital loop, 2025

In this sense, disruption becomes a way of restoring uniqueness to the image within an environment of infinite repetition. Within the distributed structure of The Wrong, the translation of a digital project into physical space plays a special role.

A distinctive feature of The Wrong Biennale is its system of so-called “embassies”—physical spaces that create a bridge between the distributed online infrastructure of the biennale and the material experience of the viewer. In the Code Error project, such a space became TAG Gallery in Los Angeles, where the project was presented as a video program of twelve works by participating artists. Unlike the network version of the project, where works exist in the browser environment, the embassy format translates them into a cinematic space of collective viewing.

This transition from interface to physical space creates an additional layer of interpretation: algorithmic mutations and glitch structures, originally born within code, begin to be perceived as independent visual events. Thus, the embassy acts not only as an exhibition venue, but as a point of translation between two modes of existence of digital art—networked and material. Glitch becomes a language through which critique of algorithmic normalization becomes possible, and through which the right to complexity, instability, and mutation is asserted.

In this sense, our pavilion does not simply reflect digital culture—it models its future form: distributed, processual, and fundamentally imperfect. The biennale itself demonstrates that digital art is no longer defined by technology as such. It operates with modes of perception.

Code Error fits into this logic as a micro-model of digital vulnerability—a space where artificial intelligence acts simultaneously as co-author and opponent. It produces forms that the artist cannot fully control, and it is precisely in this that new visual thinking emerges. In the era of algorithmic prediction, error remains one of the last zones of experiment and freedom. Where the system allows failure, space for human choice, interpretation, and imagination reemerges.