Art Dubai Digital 2026: Rachel Rossin

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 Rachel Rossin who interrogates perception and cognitive sovereignty across painting and immersive systems.

What themes or questions are guiding your practice right now?

Rachel Rossin. I started programming at age five, which made working in the digital space a second language. Before coding, I was painting and drawing like all kids do.
Painting is a practice of slowing perception down. A finished painting is analogous to communicating in hormones or pheromones. If you spend time with a painting you’ll find it speaks the same way anything beautiful does and goes far beyond language. It is a palimpsest for the nervous system.

The virtual is a lossy mental space where I work experientially and relationally, often using installation or the viewer as the arbiter of the work, as I did in the Whitney Museum and KW Institute commission, The Maw Of: the viewer’s palms became the stage for the XR piece. Both approaches inform and influence one another.

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

Rachel Rossin. Understanding the black boxes we operate in and under. I develop my own AI tools as a way to expose creative patterns and use them as mirrors for my cognition or problem-solving.

They are exposing and simulating patterns but are never the authors of my work, as I find simulating authorship to be a dull gimmick. I think of my work and practice as a heuristic for these times.

"First, a reminder: technology extends our physical and cognitive faculties, which almost always comes at the cost of ceding the corresponding faculty. This extension and distribution of capacity is one of the defining conditions of contemporary technology, especially in cognition and psychology."

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

Rachel Rossin. First, a reminder: technology extends our physical and cognitive faculties, which almost always comes at the cost of ceding the corresponding faculty. This extension and distribution of capacity is one of the defining conditions of contemporary technology, especially in cognition and psychology.

This is what AI intensifies: what does cognitive sovereignty look like now? We get to ask whether embodiment should be optional or distributed. And this is why we need less simulation, and more real art now more than ever.

_artists on "Myth of the digital"

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Morehshin Allahyari, Moon-faced, 2023, Installation image from ...

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Solimán López, IRIDIA, presentation, 2026.

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Solimán López exposes the mineral, energetic, and economic infrastructures that sustain the so-called immaterial realm.

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This interview is part of a series on Art Dubai Digital 2026.

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