Commissioned as a digital platform, The Learning Garden extends the exhibition of After Rain and the year-long Biennale Encounters beyond their physical location and temporal framework. Exploring the themes and questions running across this Biennale edition, works presented in online formats focus on research-based practices, including a selection of newly commissioned digital works and content from other participating artists. This conversation unpacks the possibilities of the digital and new media for reaching wider audiences. It also considers how new tools have been inspiring artists to venture into new explorations and looks at expanding notions of authorship and place as shaped by digital formats.

Tara Aldugaither is an artist, curator, and vocalist. In 2020 she founded Sawtasura (meaning “voice of the image”), a community-based reimagination platform focusing on women’s musical histories in the Arab Peninsula. In addition to her curatorial work with private and public entities, Aldugaither’s practice extends into programming, publishing, and performing musical culture as an alternative form of continuing embodied knowledge in collaboration with artists from across the Arab-speaking world and beyond. Tara Aldugaither is a participating artist in DCAB 2024. Her new commissioned work in collaboration with media artist Joe Namy can be found on The Learning Garden, the digital platform of the Biennale, which can be accessed via https://garden.dcab24.art.

Alfredo Cramerotti is Director of The Media Majlis Museum at Northwestern Qatar. He works at the intersection of contemporary art, digital formats, film and video, performance, communication and online worlds. Cramerotti was Director of MOSTYN, Wales, UK and Co-director of Art Dubai Digital 2024; of IAM Infinity Art Museum, the first blockchain-based art museum; Co-founder of Multiplicity Art Consultancy publishing and curatorial platform dedicated to women and female-identifying artists working with advanced technologies. He holds a PhD in communication design from the European Centre for Photography, University of South Wales, Cardiff.

Priyageetha Dia addresses Southeast Asia plantation histories and its contemporary legacies including speculation of the tropics, and ancestral memory meeting machine logics. She primarily works with computer-generated imagery (CGI) and has developed a digital vocabulary that explores the connections between technology, labour production, and environmental destruction. Her sensorial environments translate colonial histories into a space of visceral experience. Priyageetha Dia is a participating artist in the DCAB 2024, her work Spectre System (2024) can be found in the exhibition hall B5.