The Artist
Don Diablo is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of music, visual art, and technology. His practice forms a cohesive universe where emotion, data, and imagination converge. With roots as a globally acclaimed music producer, he evolved into an artist who transcends categories and builds new modes of sensory experience.
His work spans digital installations, immersive environments, NFTs, video and sound pieces, sculptural objects and fashion. He merges high-tech media like AI, drones, VFX, algorithmic systems, with physical and crafted elements. The settings of his work shift fluidly between gallery, stage, public space, and digital realm.
“Neo-Nostalgia is my language for the future, technology as a way to create warmth.”
Don Diablo
At the heart of his work lies the tension between human and machine. Under the concept of Neo-Nostalgia, Don Diablo explores how technological progress and human emotion intersect. His art reflects a search for authenticity, empathy, and meaning in an algorithmic age. Technology in his work is never neutral but a tool, a subject and a counterpart at once.
Interview
How does your current artistic practice relate to your musical work, is it an extension, a counter-reaction, or something entirely new?
It’s one ecosystem, not a separate branch, but a symbiotic whole. My music is sound design, rhythm, emotion; my visual art translates those into space, image, and technology. The same themes that live in my tracks, futurism, humanity versus machine, emotion in the digital age, resurface in my art, but often in a more physical or abstract form: digital installations, NFTs, objects, immersive environments. So yes, it’s an extension, but it also breathes on its own outside the frame of music.
What do you want people to experience or take away from your work?
Whether it’s through music or visual art, I want people to feel like they’re traveling beyond familiar borders, to step outside their daily patterns and be moved by something unexpected, futuristic, emotional. I hope they ask themselves: What does it mean to be human in a technological future? What does nostalgia feel like in a hyper-digital world? Where does freedom exist in an algorithmic reality?
Ultimately, I want my work to spark something, a sense of wonder, a question, a personal connection to creativity. Many of my pieces are also deeply personal, tied to childhood memories or my life on the road.
How do you approach ideas like control, humanity, progress, and ethics?
Control, and letting go of it, are central to my work. I believe progress only makes sense if we keep our humanity: empathy, storytelling, vulnerability. Ethics isn’t a side topic; it’s at the core. Who builds the tech? For whom? What do we do with it? My work aims to make those tensions visible. Humanity, to me, means asking not only what’s possible but what’s meaningful.
Which artists, thinkers, or tech pioneers have influenced your thinking?
My inspirations always sit at the crossroads of emotion and innovation. From a young age I was fascinated by storytellers who built complete worlds out of sound and image, filmmakers like George Lucas, Christopher Nolan, and Stanley Kubrick. They taught me that the future can be both mechanical and human.
In visual art I’m drawn to creators who blur boundaries between art, design, and technology, Hajime Sorayama’s chrome futurism, Zaha Hadid’s organic architecture, Refik Anadol’s AI dreamscapes. Artists like Virgil Abloh, Beeple, and Yayoi Kusama inspired me to think beyond traditional forms, to create experiences that stretch across dimensions, from gallery walls to the metaverse.
Musically, my universe is built on emotion, geometry, and motion, the pioneers Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, Kraftwerk, Daft Punk, Hans Zimmer shaped my sense of sound as architecture for the soul.
In everything I create, sound, image, installation, I try to build bridges between past and future, human and machine, analog and digital. My art is a reflection of that endless journey: nostalgic, cinematic, and always in motion.
Themes & Motivation
Process and Collaboration
Each work begins with a feeling, a tone, or a color. Then sound, image and technology converge through experimentation. Don combines digital techniques such as CGI, AI, drones, and interactive systems with artisanal processes. Collaboration is essential: he works closely with designers, engineers and his global community: the Hexagonians. Viewers are not passive observers but active participants in a hybrid experience where physical and digital layers intertwine.
Visual Language and Motifs
His aesthetic vocabulary is defined by geometry, light, reflection, and motion. Music serves as the architecture of his visual compositions. Rhythm shaping tension, intensity and emotion. Recurring motifs include time, identity, control and the thin line between nostalgia and futurism. Each work seeks harmony between the organic and the synthetic, between human warmth and digital precision.
Context and Relevance
Don Diablo positions himself as a bridge between pop culture and contemporary art. His practice opens complex conversations around technology, ethics and identity to a wider audience, contributing to the democratization of art. Inspired by figures such as Refik Anadol, Zaha Hadid, Virgil Abloh and Beeple, he views art as a dynamic ecosystem where disciplines, time and media remain in constant flux.
Intention and Future
Through his work, Don Diablo shows that technology doesn’t have to distance us: it can become a window toward deeper humanity, memory, and connection. His ongoing ambition is to create large-scale, hybrid installations that merge sound, image, and interaction into a single shared experience.
Collaborations
K11 and Sotheby’s
In collaboration with K11 Don created HΞXAVΞRSE a pioneering convergence of physical and digital aesthetics, exemplified through a series of outdoor art sculptures in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Studio Drift
Together with Studio Drift Don created three pieces that research the line between nature, technology and music. With FORΞVΞR DRIFTING they created a digital piece based on the short film “Drifters”. Co-commissioned by Aorist and TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Space, SOCIAL SACRIFICΞ animates a flying school of A.I. fish that “swim” through the Church of San Lorenzo. BLOCK UNIVΞRSΞ reimagines the solar system in block formations that defy gravity.
Trevor Jones and Alotta Money
For ΞTHΞRΞAL Don created the unsetteling melody that accompanies this piece. In addition to the 1/1 NFT, the owner also received a physical 1/1 ΞTHΞRΞAL painting and a physical print of the original Ethereum Boy painting.