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.
The five artists featured here offer distinct responses to that premise.