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Curator of Art Dubai Digital 2025, Gonzalo Herrero Delicado joins us to discuss the fourth edition of the fair's sector, which explores how artists are using digital technologies to respond to today’s most pressing issues. Based in London, Gonzalo also works with Serpentine Galleries and teaches at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. In this episode, he discusses how the fair will bridge digital and contemporary art through large-scale public commissions, and the role of artists in addressing the climate crisis.
Technology is a medium - not a category. That's Gonzalo Herrero Delicado's central argument, and it changes everything about how he curates. When you treat technology the way you treat oil paint or clay, you stop dividing the art world into "digital" and "traditional" - and you start asking better questions about what any work is actually doing.
Gonzalo Herrero Delicado is an architect-turned-curator based in London who teaches at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, and works with Serpentine Galleries. He curated Art Dubai Digital 2025 under the theme "After the Technological Sublime" - bringing four commissions that bridged contemporary and digital sections, including work by the Hybrid Experience Collective, a NASA satellite data totem, a Breakfast Studio kinetic sculpture responding to climate data, and Giacopo Di Zera's installation using 30 recycled screens to display the Bravia glacier. He has also co-curated "Virtual Beauty" at HEK Basel, which subsequently travelled to Somerset House London.
"After the Technological Sublime" is a curatorial position as much as a theme. The sublime of technology - the awe it produces, the expectations it sets - is something art has been processing since the Industrial Revolution. Gonzalo Herrero Delicado's curation asks what comes after: once the awe has settled, what does technology as a medium actually let us say about climate, about beauty, about the body? This conversation explores how he built that programme at Art Dubai Digital, what the "Virtual Beauty" exhibition revealed about the relationship between technology and body image, and why he thinks collectors should build chronological collections rather than focusing exclusively on NFTs.
Technology as medium, not category
The insistence that technology is "just a medium like clay or oil painting" is not a dismissal - it's an elevation. It places tech-based work in the same critical conversation as all other contemporary art, with the same demands for conceptual rigour and historical awareness.
Art Dubai Digital and the bridging commission
The four commissions Herrero Delicado placed at Art Dubai Digital were designed to bridge the gallery's contemporary and digital sections - creating conversations between practices that normally exhibit in parallel. This curatorial decision is an argument about what digital art is part of.
"Virtual Beauty" and the transformed body
The HEK/Somerset House exhibition explored how technology transforms beauty standards and body image - territory that connects digital art to much older conversations in feminist and body-based art. The curatorial framing made those connections visible.
Collecting advice: go chronological
Herrero Delicado's advice to collectors - build a chronological collection starting from 1970s art and technology, and diversify beyond NFTs to sculpture, VR, and AR - reflects a curator's understanding of what gives a collection meaning over time. Context is everything.
"Technology is just a medium. It's an artistic medium that they are using in the same way that it's clay or oil painting or cardboard."
The framing questions matter enormously for collecting. If you think of "digital art" as a separate category from contemporary art, you'll build a collection that looks like a subcategory. If you follow Herrero Delicado's framing - technology as medium, practice as the subject - you'll build something with richer context and more coherent meaning. This episode will change how you think about what you're assembling.
Unlocked is the podcast by 100 collectors - the global network for digital art collectors. Each episode, we speak with artists, curators, collectors, and builders shaping the digital art world. No market speculation. No hype. Just honest, substantive conversations about art, practice, and what it means to collect today. New episodes release throughout the year. Find Unlocked on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 100 collectors is a membership network. [Explore membership →]
