Hackatao is the collaborative name of Italian artists Sergio Scalet and Nadia Squarci, who met at art school in Milan and began working together in 2007.The duo's practice spans ceramic sculpture,painting,and digital and generative art,and explores the intersection of humanity and technology.They were among the first artists minted on SuperRare in 2018, alongside XCOPY, Coldie, and Robbie Barrat.
Hackatao's earliest works, called Podmorks, are small ceramic totems decorated with drawings and paint that combine both artists' individual styles.The duo began experimenting with generative art forms on SuperRare in 2018.By 2023 Hackatao had sold over $27 million worth of digital art since 2018.In 2020 curator Eleonora Brizi included their work in “Renaissance 2.0.2.0”, an early exhibition of digital and crypto art in Rome, where 550 people attended the opening despite no institutional backing.,
In 2021 Hackatao made Hack of a Bear, an augmented-reality work responding to Leonardo da Vinci's Head of a Bear drawing, commissioned by Christie's in collaboration with MOCA and curated by Eleonora Brizi, and unveiled during Christie's Classic Week in London. Brizi also curated Hack the Borders, a series of works Hackatao made in collaboration with the band Blondie.At the end of 2021 Hackatao launched Queens+Kings, a project of 6,900 algorithmically generated avatars made in collaboration with NFT Studios and supported by Sotheby's, in which collectors could alter, or "hack," an avatar's traits.Hackatao's work was included in the 24 Seeders installation at “DYOR” at Kunsthalle Zürich in 2022, alongside artists including Botto, Matt Kane, and XCOPY.
In 2023 Hackatao began Aleph-0, a generative art project made with Insigħt and powered by Art Blocks Engine, extending the generative experiments the duo had started on SuperRare in 2018.,In 2025 Hackatao made GLITCH THE PAINTBOX on an original 1980s Quantel Paintbox as part of the Paintboxed Tezos World Tour, describing the process as “working on the edge between analog and digital”.
