We used to marvel at technology. Now we’re starting to question it. At Art Dubai Digital 2025, the machines still shimmer — but the wonder feels different this year. Curated by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, After the Technological Sublime holds a mirror to our infatuation with innovation and asks: what are we not seeing?
Breaking the Spell of the Machine
The show draws on the idea of the sublime — once used to describe the beauty of vast and terrifying natural forces — and reframes it through the lens of technological overwhelm. We no longer look at mountains and oceans in awe; we look at neural networks, quantum simulations, self-replicating code. But while today’s systems dazzle, they also blur, distort, and distract.
This year’s digital section is a response to that shift — a call to slow down, look again, and read between the lines of the algorithm. The artworks on view don’t simply showcase what technology can do — they interrogate what it’s doing to us. Krista Kim’s ambient digital meditations feel almost like breathing exercises for a screen-fatigued world. Alper Derinboğaz turns data into topography, drawing invisible borders between the ecological and the artificial. Tatsuru Arai lets AI-generated flowers bloom in uncanny loops — beautiful, yes, but eerily off-kilter.
Elsewhere, Maryam Tariq, presented by Hafez Gallery, works with light and 3D projection mapping to create spaces that feel both grounded and ephemeral — luminous thresholds between physical and digital experience. Beirut’s Art on 56th shows a tactile counterpoint: Daniah Al Saleh reprograms memory with subtle code-based interventions, while Sara Chaar’s scratched and layered paintings give the screen a skin, a sense of weight and wear.
piXel, the digital arm of Plan X Gallery, introduces the dreamlike finesse of Six N Five, known for his collaborations with brands like Cartier and Microsoft, alongside Deekay Kwon’s emotionally charged animations — equal parts diary and digital theatre. And at GAZELL.iO, the human-machine interface is pushed further still: Zach Lieberman’s poetic code sketches, Licia He’s algorithmic compositions, and Sougwen Chung’s collaborative robotics all unfold with startling intimacy.
There’s a quiet recalibration happening here. Where past editions may have leaned into tech’s future-forward seduction, 2025 feels more reflexive. Less utopia, more unresolved terrain. Even the format — with immersive video, generative AI, sculptural data visualisations, and light-based works — avoids a single aesthetic direction in favour of something more polyphonic, more human.