Art Dubai Digital: Ila Colombo

On the occasion of Art Dubai Digital 2026, five artists were invited to respond to a shared set of questions about their practice, their planned project for Art Dubai Digital, and the curatorial framework “Myth of the Digital”, which considers how technology shapes contemporary narratives of authorship, spirituality, and the body. This text presents the answers of Ila Colombo, who approaches AI as a site of biological and computational becoming in her project.

What themes or questions are guiding your practice right now?

Ila Colombo. I keep returning to a fundamentally anthropological question: what happens to our sense of self, our embodied, spatial, biological self, when we create?

These spatial instincts don’t disappear in digital environments, they transform. When I’m working with technology and generative systems, there’s still a felt proximity between me and what’s emerging.

So the question guiding my practice right now is about “distinction” or the “states of becoming,” this inherited binary between artificial and natural, synthetic and biological, digital and human. From an anthropological perspective, every tool humans have ever made is an extension of our cognition, our bodies, our social structures.

AI is no different. It’s not separate from nature; it’s an expression of it. And within that, I’m exploring metamorphosis, materiality, and the space between the biological and the computed.

What defines the project you’re presenting at Art Dubai Digital?

Ila Colombo. The presentation is about genesis, not as a metaphor, but as a condition. There is a moment in the experience of giving birth—having gone through birth and motherhood myself—where the physiological and the psychological become indistinguishable. Your body is reorganizing itself and that transformation is the emotional and conceptual spine of what I’m presenting with Artise gallery.

The SynthoGenesis triptych anchors the presentation. These three works freeze distinct moments in the arc of inception and creation, not biological, not artificial, but something in between. Genesis doesn’t belong to one domain. The triptych holds that tension, three frozen instants in a process that is, by nature, continuous.

Then Inkrelease and Residual Releases move into a different register, slower, more meditative. These are sister series about ink as a carrier of memory. Ink drifts, expands, refuses to hold its shape, and yet it leaves something behind.

And finally, The Form of Resonance Looking Inwards and The Form of Resonance Looking Outwards bring everything into color, deliberately. These works are about sound-shapes and inner voice, about the emotional reality of existing at any given moment.These spatial instincts don’t disappear in digital environments, they transform.

When I’m working with technology and generative systems, there’s still a felt proximity between me and what’s emerging. So the question guiding my practice right now is about “distinction” or the “states of becoming,” this inherited binary between artificial and natural, synthetic and biological, digital and human.

From an anthropological perspective, every tool humans have ever made is an extension of our cognition, our bodies, our social structures. AI is no different. It’s not separate from nature; it’s an expression of it. And within that, I’m exploring metamorphosis, materiality, and the space between the biological and the computed.

How does Myth of the Digital resonate with your practice and thinking?

Ila Colombo. What interests me, and what my artistic research keeps reinforcing, is that our biological instincts don’t disappear in digital environments. They translate. So where exactly is the line between natural and artificial? I can’t find it. Fire was technology. Language is technology. AI is no different in kind, only in speed and compute scale.

And nature itself is generative. Metamorphosis isn’t a poetic metaphor I’m borrowing from biology. It’s the shared operating principle. So, what the myth of the digital reveals to me is that creativity was never ours to lose to machines, because it was never exclusively ours to begin with. Art is part of Nature. We participate in it.

Art Dubai Digital 2026: Ila Colombo

_Positions on the "Myth of the digital"