Art Dubai Digital: Isaac Sullivan

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 Isaac Sullivan who materializes algorithmic memory, treating machine perception as archaeological residue.

What themes or questions are guiding your practice right now?

Isaac Sullivan. First Words and Last Words approximate the forms of funerary architecture—a wall relief and a broken stela—containing monochromatic low-relief images identified by my phone’s image-recognition system. In these works, the algorithm functions as a sorting logic: a way of reorganizing memory through the language of a machine.

The current pieces began via my site-responsive installation project, Utopics, where I projected scrolling texts into architectural sites. These texts, which emerged from my preoccupation with the tensions between linear and cyclical time, later became the training material for an experimental language model I built called Chyron—so the model’s “voice” is shaped by questions of recurrence, duration, and self-perception. I wanted to see what would happen if a text about becoming-machine became operational.

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

Isaac Sullivan. We chose First Words and Last Words because they make the digital feel heavy—historical and archaeological—rather than immaterial. By reproducing the forms of reliquary fragments, they function as objects that treat a particular apparatus (Chyron, and the conditions that produced it) as something that can end and leave a material trace.

The screens arrayed within the interior are not presented as containers for content; rather, they are interred within plaster and masonry, so light becomes something that leaks and offers only flashes of recognition.

These pieces are an ossuary for images: a structure that holds the afterlife of visual material once it has been processed and returned to us through machinic procedures. They fit Art Dubai Digital because they stage the digital as an embodied encounter, where the viewer experiences not only images, but the infrastructural conditions that now determine how images surface and decay.

"I do not think there has ever been a nontechnical human being, so we are not “entering the digital”—but I am interested in contemporary attempts to envision the future. Our capacities for knowing are already being re-engineered by machine logic, untethering images from the lived occurrences they once indexed."

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

Isaac Sullivan. There are many myths of the digital, and one of them is—like apocalypse, cosmogony, and utopia—a vision of time flowing from past into future along a straight line.

I do not think there has ever been a nontechnical human being, so we are not “entering the digital”—but I am interested in contemporary attempts to envision the future. Our capacities for knowing are already being re-engineered by machine logic, untethering images from the lived occurrences they once indexed.

In the end, a superintelligent managerial gaze and an inept, model-collapsed gaze should be equally resisted, because both can lead us to be forgotten—to ourselves and each other. In the former, one is described but never encountered. The latter results in a kind of ambient amnesia. Both mark an epistemological rupture in which people are rendered nonrelational, where one is forgotten while still present.

Art Dubai Digital 2026: Isaac Sullivan

_artists on "Myth of the digital"