Tech art can be like glue. It sticks to your consciousness in many ways and tends to not erode so easily.
At Art Dubai 2025, held at Madinat Jumeirah, Art Dubai Digital stood out from the rest of the artworks, exploring themes around futurism, climate change, sustainability, the recycling economy and even a bit of self-introspection.
Walking past recycled flowerpots that housed digital flowers on screens in actual mud (Fioriture Sintetiche, Matteo Mandelli and Luca Baldocchi), I found myself standing in front of a phygital installation by Iranian artist Mohsen Hazrati, which was a combination of handcrafted sculpture, Persian poetics and artificial intelligence. Small ceramic bird sculptures with the PDF logo adorned a wall.
Imagined as a system for channeling questions toward an unknown source, the work seeks to fuse the tradition of bibliomancy with machine learning, exploring how divination might manifest within virtual and data-driven environments. The installation consists of 15 ceramic bird sculptures embedded with NFC technology. When scanned, each sculpture triggers a custom-built algorithm that delivers personalized divination—generated in real time from open-source digital material. Think of it as speaking to an AI fortune teller.
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The project draws on Fal e Hafez—a centuries-old Iranian practice of seeking guidance in the volume of poetry “The Divan” by 14th-century Persian mystic Hafez. Replacing the traditional budgerigar that selects the verse at random, Hazrati invites the algorithm to act as an interpreter. Drawing from Hafez’s texts as prompts, the AI system generates short, context-aware readings, merging classical literature with contemporary code.
“I started this research in 2017. This tradition is very important not only in Iran but worldwide. Many people were getting answers based on this tradition and stories. So, I thought how digital artists could help this circle and make this tradition more alive,” says Hazrati, who is managed by Inloco Gallery. “Then I researched how AI could be a tongue or literature or an alphabet to talk to users.”
Climate change was a central theme among the digital displays at Art Dubai and rightly so. From melting glaciers to wind patterns and ocean temperatures, artists stretched every medium to make viewers think about the single biggest problem facing humanity today.
Brooklyn-based data and kinetic artist BREAKFAST is renowned for his moving sculptures that react to the world in real time. His Warming Seas, Oceans and Water series use live feeds pulled from the web – we are talking wind patterns, ocean temperatures or human interaction.
Warming Seas, for instance, visualises real-time ocean temperature data through motion and reflection. Each piece focuses on a specific coastal location, translating rising sea temperatures into shimmering patterns of gold that spread across a field of deep blue.
Created using BREAKFAST’s custom-engineered flip-disc medium, the works react to live climate data pulled from the ocean near each represented city. As the sea warms above its historical average, gold foil “bubbles” emerge—each one representing a pocket of heat within the ocean. The hotter the temperature, the more gold appears, transforming the surface into a glowing, data-driven portrait of change, the artist’s official website explains.
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BREAKFAST, the professional name for artist and founder Andrew Zolty, says we live in a futuristic world and art can fuse a visible gap that exists in creating more noise on climate change.
“We are all on devices. Art, in some ways, has been lagging. What I am trying to do is find this in-between and utilize technology to tell stories that you can see and feel,” BREAKFAST explains on the sidelines on his work at Art Dubai. “There is something different about these pieces where I can take climate change and energy data and put in front of you in real time,” he adds.
Elsewhere, Italian artist Jacopo Di Cera’s screen-based installation Retreat displays the story of a rapidly melting world. The installation – made using more than 30 upcycled screens and other pieces of e-waste – looks at the Brenva Glacier in the Italian Alps, which has lost more than 300 meters of thickness. In just the last 20 years, the glacier has retreated by 200 meters. Supported by digital art platform CIFRA, the multimedia installation also features an immersive soundscape by artist Massimiliano Ionta.
Standing in front of the discarded monitors, and hordes of wires, it’s hard not to feel like you are part – and somewhere responsible – of this climate crisis. “We thought that in the digital section of Art Dubai it’s not only important to showcase the work that reflects the idea but also the technology,” Anastasiya Dzhioeva, artist relations manager at CIFRA, tells Esquire India. “The actual shape of the artwork reflects the melting iceberg.”
This was not the only structure at Art Dubai’s digital section that stood tall and caught eyeballs. Ouchhh Studio’s Motherearth, the world's first cross-continental AI data sculpture, combines real-time climate change data from Ouchhh's permanent AI data sculptures with artificial intelligence. As part of a three-part global project, the sculpture is connected to two similar AI data sculptures in Beijing and Mexico City. The striking, colorful visuals are generated using data streams from Nasa’s network of 20 satellites, which feed all three installations, including a monolith-looking structure.
“This is a long-term project in our studio since 2016,” says Ferdi Alici, founder and director at Ouchhh Studio. “The AI algorithm creates a 100-dimensional data from the climate data, which translate into the sculptures and artwork that you see. But that’s not all. The artwork and monolith in Dubai talks to our other permanent structures in Beijing and Mexico City,” adds Alici.
Many of the works from Art Dubai Digital 2025 are travelling installations and artwork. If you didn’t see them in Dubai, there’s every chance you can see them in a different part of the world.
That’s the thing with digital art. It’s constantly on the move, evolving and never letting go.