Navigating Time: Sonia Gil on AI, Longevity, and Digital Art
Digital Original launched its first Instagram Live with a conversation that opened far more than a drop announcement. It became a deep dive into the intersections of longevity, AI collaboration, sustainability, and the evolving identity of digital art. At the centre of it was Sonia Gil — an architect-turned-digital artist, born in Rio de Janeiro and now based in Berlin — presenting her new series The Art of Navigating Time.
Three works from the series are listed exclusively on Sonia Gil’s storefront, powered by Digital Original.
The Instagram Live with Sonia Gil marked the official start of the auction, and her works are now available for bidding.
The Origins of The Art of Navigating Time
Longevity isn’t a trend for Sonia — it’s a long-term intellectual and artistic pursuit. She curated a full exhibition for the São Paulo Longevity Forum. Held from 27–29 October, the forum was packed with screens—large and small—designed for talks about the future of aging and the business of longevity.
Instead of letting the screens sit idle between sessions, she transformed them into a platform for AI-driven art by women artists. She invited nine female artists and joined them as the tenth participant, creating a space where new work, new technologies, and historically marginalised voices could meet a new audience outside the confines of traditional art spaces.
Her motivation was clear: women have been historically erased from the art canon. They face a different kind of visibility as they age. Longevity and AI—two major disruptions—felt like the right arena to reclaim space.
Three Works: Presence, Transformation, Collaboration
The series The Art of Navigating Time unfolds in three moments that mirror the emotional arcs of living in a world defined by uncertainty:
Presence
A solitary figure stands in a vast white space — a visual metaphor for embracing impermanence, staying grounded in life’s continuous flow, and accepting the “flux” that carries us forward.
→ Transformation
A figure dissolves into a melting environment. Here, Sonia speaks to the constant disruption that shapes our inner and outer worlds — technological acceleration, demographic shifts, and personal evolution.
→ Together
Three figures stand together in an open field of white. This work highlights what Sonia believes is the central pillar of longevity: connection. Movement sustains the body, intellect sustains the mind — but other people sustain the soul.
“We need others, we need connection,” Sonia said.
→ AI as Artistic Collaboration
Sonia’s journey with AI didn’t begin with fascination for algorithms but with her background in mapping, geography, and watercolour abstraction.
She spent 20 years in architecture working with aerial photography, city mapping, and digital collages. When she transitioned to digital art, she began feeding AI with her own materials — watercolour scans, imaginary maps, layered collages — and then worked through cycles of prompting, curation, and re-feeding.
She describes AI like she describes watercolour:
“You don’t have full control. It brings you new things, but you are the driver. You decide to use it or not. You decide to create new concepts for this new image and to go further with it, or not. It’s incredible.”
For Sonia, the concept always comes from the artist. AI becomes a collaborator that expands possibilities, not a generator that replaces authorship.
Why Blockchain Still Matters
Sonia entered the NFT scene in Berlin during the height of the hype. She minted her first works with the help of the NFT Club Berlin, which supported artists through the process.
But the excitement around NFTs quickly vanished. Sonia stayed, searching for models that had real value — not speculation. That’s what attracted her to Digital Original.
“I think it's a very interesting concept to have your store, your auctions, your sales, and you mint when you have a collector, ” highlighted Sonia.
She sees the merge between AI-driven communities and Web3 communities as a natural next step.
Closing Thoughts
Sonia Gil’s series The Art of Navigating Time weaves together aging, technology, memory, sustainability, and the future of digital expression.
Three works from the series are available exclusively on Sonia’s Digital Original storefront.
The auction is now live, and we invite you to explore the pieces, place your bids, and become part of this evolving story.
