HEK (Haus der Elektronischen Künste) is Switzerland's leading institution dedicated to digital culture and the art forms of the Information Age.Based in Basel, HEK operates as an interdisciplinary hub for exhibitions, performances, concerts, festivals and educational programs.,Its collection focuses on software- and network-based art, much of it made by Swiss artists since the 1990s.
More than a conventional museum, HEK has developed preservation strategies for these born-digital works through collaborations with programmers and conservators. Because many of these works have no fixed physical form, they present distinct conservation challenges that HEK addresses as part of its research into digital heritage.Sabine Himmelsbach, HEK's director, introduced a curator's talk on curating process-based and interactive new media art hosted at HEK's Basel venue.
In June 2026, HEK became the first research institution to present work at Art Basel, through the fair's Zero10 digital art initiative, in a non-commercial, education-focused presentation that departed from the fair's usual gallery-sales model.,For the presentation, HEK exhibited five early net art works from its collection, dating from the 1990s to the early 2000s. Among them was hek.history.etoy.com (1994–2016) by etoy.CORPORATION, a self-described corporate sculpture, documenting the collective's projects and performances since 1994. Also on view was JODI's Max Payne Cheats Only (2004), a two-channel video built entirely from cheat codes and glitches drawn from the video game Max Payne.HEK's works appeared at Zero 10 alongside decades-older computer art by Vera Molnár and Harold Cohen, positioning HEK's early net art within a longer lineage of computer-based art.
