Each year, Art Dubai Digital explores the intersection of new media art and technology to expand our understanding of contemporary culture. The 2025 edition is curated by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, an independent curator and an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. His curatorial framework for 2025 is titled ‘After the Technological Sublime’ and examines how artists and creative practitioners are using artificial intelligence (AI), virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), and other technological advances to interrogate some of the key environmental, social and political challenges of our time.
Having launched in 2021, the section is a unique curated section of the fair that is “really exciting because it allows us to talk about cutting-edge art and technology in a way that other fairs don’t,” says Pablo del Val, Artistic Director of Art Dubai. “It’s a place for discovering new things, having interesting conversations, and pushing boundaries. Gonzalo’s theme links to wider conversations around nature and dystopian realities that can be found throughout this year’s fair and I have no doubt that it is going to spark important debates in the digital art space,” he adds.
Here, the section curator Gonzalo shares more details of what to expect from this year’s digital section.
Why did you choose the theme ‘After the Technological Sublime’ for Art Dubai Digital 2025?
‘After the Technological Sublime’ expands the traditional notion of the sublime — once used to express amazement and fear toward vast natural forces — to human-made creations. From the internet to AI and quantum computing, technological advancements inspire admiration for human achievement, yet they also provoke anxiety, as these systems may surpass our control and divert attention from pressing environmental, social, cultural and political issues.
Art Dubai Digital 2025 will invite visitors to explore how artists and creatives use digital technologies to address these challenges and shape the future. I hope to shift focus back to art and the critical questions it raises about our present, offering a curated experience that explores how digital culture and media art reflect the challenges society and the planet are facing today, and the role digital technology might play as a medium in addressing them.
How have you gone about curating the selection for Art Dubai Digital 2025?
Galleries have been responding to the theme we set, tailoring their applications to present varied approaches. It’s important that this section feels purely digital, this doesn’t mean that every piece will be on a screen, as we might see installations or sculptures that have an augmented reality (AR) component, but we require all to have a digital connection, whether it’s in the design process or the agenda they are addressing, it needs to present a reflection to digital culture.
What can we expect from the presentations this year?
The galleries will present different perspectives, coming from their different geographies and specialisms. Some highlights to point out include our selection of artists from the MENA region. Maryam Tariq — a Jeddah-based artist specialising in light and 3D projection mapping — will exhibit with Hafez Gallery, creating immersive narratives influenced by personal experiences. Mohsen Hazrati, a Berlin-based Iranian artist, will have a presentation with Inloco with a collection of AR, VR and AI works exploring literature. The Istanbul- and Dubai-based gallery Sevil Dolmaci has one of the largest booths in the section in which they will combine physical sculptures with screen-based works. It will include the multidisciplinary art studio fuse*, which is presenting digital works based on the language of old botanical books to reimagine and digitally generate new species of plants. They are beautiful works reflecting on traditional painting practices of documenting flora and fauna but shown through digital media.
International artists highlights include Licia He, whose algorithm-based works will be showing with GAZELL.iO, alongside works by Sougwen Chung, the results of human-machine collaborations. Argentinian artist Six N Five will exhibit with PiXel, Plan X gallery’s expansion into the digital realm, and with Nguyen Wahed, Tokyo-based multimedia artist Lu Yang will exhibit her works that tap into the subcultures of anime, video games and sci-fi.
What can you tell us about the commissions in the digital section this year?
There are several new commissions and they not only respond to the theme but also look at the connections between art, technology and wider global issues. Three of the works that we are presenting raise questions around the impact of technology on the environment. Ouchhh Studio is presenting a large-scale, AI-driven installation called MOTHEREARTH that transforms climate data from different locations around the world — like air quality, humidity levels or temperature changes — into a monolithic visualisation. The morphing, complex shapes remind us that there is something dark behind the overuse of, or over reliance on, technology. The New York-based data and kinetic artist BREAKFAST will present Carbon Wake, a digitally controlled kinetic installation that transforms real-time energy data collected from cities around the world but that also changes and moves as people interact with it. The third commission is by the Italian artist Jacopo Di Cera, and it is a huge sculpture called Retreat. It’s 4 metres high and made up of bundles of cables connected to a server and over 30 upcycled screens that show the Brenva glacier in the Italian Alps, which is melting at a speed that we haven’t seen before. This piece is at the entrance to the digital section because it reflects this idea of the ‘sublime’ perfectly — these mountains that used to cause great awe in people doing the ‘Grand Tour’ around Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries are now part of a work showing the kind of wonder and fear that we have around technological advancements and their impact in the 21st century.
What role do you think digital art can play in reflecting on such societal challenges?
An important part of our digital culture is approaching these constant technological changes from a critical perspective, which is what we are aiming at for Art Dubai Digital 2025. There is always a new buzzword within the digital art and technology world, which is exciting, for example right now AI is capturing all the attention. But we must not only look at the technology but also what that medium is trying to say. The three-day Digital Summit talks programme will bring together museum directors, curators, artists, and digital art experts to look at topics including AI bias and history-erasing algorithms; visual activism and protest art in GIFs and memes; and the environmental impact of our increasingly digital lives.
