Art Dubai Digital 2026

Launched in 2022, Art Dubai Digital was conceived not as a niche annex to Art Dubai, but as a platform to bring together the emerging communities of art and technology, establishing a framework for looking at digital art with rigor, context, and discernment. Five years on, it has shifted decisively beyond its early screen-based presentations. Installations, kinetic works, painting practices informed by AI, immersive environments, and computational sculpture are seen across the section, reflecting a broader understanding of digital art as a trajectory within contemporary art history rather than a parallel category.

Under the title “Myth of the Digital,” this year’s edition questions the stories we tell about technology—from techno-optimism and solutionism to authorship, spirituality and the body. Drawing on the root of the word technology, technē, meaning art, craft and skill, the curatorial framework resists simplistic binaries such as human versus machine, natural versus artificial, material versus virtual. Instead, it positions us as hybrid beings, already entangled with the systems we build. In this context, digital practices are not speculative futures but expressions of how we see, think and produce meaning now.

These conversations were conducted in the context of Art Dubai Digital 2026 for The AI Art Magazine No. 3—Spatial Intelligence, before the fair was reconfigured as Art Dubai Special Edition 2026.

_artists on "Myth of the digital"

Ila Colombo, The Form of Resonance Looking Outwards, 2024.

Ila Colombo

Ila Colombo approaches AI as a site of biological and computational becoming.

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Isaac Sullivan, screenshot of Chyron's first words, from the artwork First Words, 2022.

Isaac Sullivan

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

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Morehshin Allahyari, Moon-faced, 2023, Installation image from What Models Make Worlds, ...

Moreshin Allahyari

Morehshin Allahyari reclaims myth through feminist and anticolonial methodologies, using digital tools to reactivate suppressed narratives.

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Rachel Rossin

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

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Solimán López, IRIDIA, presentation, 2026.

Solimán López

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

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Art Dubai’s Special Edition 2026 takes place at Madinat Jumeirah from 15 to 17 May 2026 and is free to attend upon registration.