Cristina Schek on Digitalism, Imagination and the Unseen
As Digitalism takes centre stage at British Art Fair, Cristina Schek reflects on imagination, photography, digital creation, nature and the strange territory between the real and the imagined.
Making her British Art Fair debut within the DBA: Digitalism platform at Gallery 14, Block D3, Saatchi Gallery, Cristina Schek presented a body of work rooted in photography, digital montage, layering and transformation.
Her practice began with photography and the darkroom and developed through digital montage, layering and transformation. Here, she discusses the tools that shape her work, the sources that continue to feed it, and why technology remains a means of reaching the image rather than the subject of the image itself.
These reflections were first developed in connection with curator Rebekah Tolley’s essay The Rise of Digitalism: A New Movement in Art, which considers Digitalism not merely as a category, but as a condition, a way of perceiving, feeling and making in the digital age.
1. What does Digitalism mean to you, not just as a term, but as an artistic condition?
Cristina Schek:
I used to think of myself as a Surrealist, and in many ways, I still am. But we’re living in the age of Digitalism now, and it’s changed the way I see, think and create.
I am, at heart, the photo-sensitive kind; I think in pictures, I dream in layers. I started in the darkroom, where I could spend hours lost in silver and shadow. Photoshop gave me wings. It offered light as a brush, time as a texture, and an infinite surface on which to dream. It would be too hyperbolic to say that the digital changed my life, but it has certainly enhanced it.
Digitalism, for me, is not just a method but a state of perception. It’s about reclaiming imagination and slipping past the borders of certainty. It allows me to access unseen frequencies, to reimagine the world not as it is, but as I imagine it. Sometimes it feels like looking through an infinite lens into space; other times, like a close encounter with colour itself. It has become the language through which I now express the surreal, where imagination and instinct can run wild without permission. It’s where joy meets purpose. And where light, not only as image but as idea, becomes my truest material.
2. How do you move from the photograph to the imagined image?
Cristina Schek:
Except for the early years, when the darkroom was a real place and my brother and I spent hours in our father’s photo lab, my work has always been rooted in digital processes; montage, subtle manipulation, layers of image and intention. The camera remains essential, a kind of visual sketchbook. But the real shaping happens in the digital space, where I cut, layer and recompose. It’s a process that feels both instinctive and deliberate, almost like weaving light with thought.
In a couple of recent works I’ve begun using AI to explore video and animation, finding ways to bring still images to life and expand their rhythm in time. I don’t treat AI as the final image but as a tool that lets me animate fragments, textures or moods, adding movement, breath or pulse to compositions I continue to refine in Photoshop. In this sense, AI doesn’t replace my process, it expands it. Maybe it’s the surprise I’m drawn to, the way motion changes perception, helping me challenge the blinkers of narrative and habit. It pits the brain against the eye in a beautiful way.
It’s not about giving up control, but shifting how I hold it, letting intuition shape intention, letting the unexpected disrupt the overly familiar. Digital creation for me is always a balance between clarity and ambiguity, direction and drift. The tools respond to how I move, but they also push back. And in that tension, something alive will surface.
3. Where do you draw inspiration from and has that shifted with the rise of digital tools?
Cristina Schek:
My inspiration comes from the unseen, memory and the imagination. I draw from literature, film, the natural world and especially the landscape of my native Transylvania. Light, clouds, rivers, mountains, these are more than motifs. I find beauty and knowledge in nature, and I treat it as a teacher rather than a subject to be controlled.
I’m also deeply inspired by the language of cinema; by how mood, light and timing can create entire emotional worlds. Directors like David Lynch, Coralie Fargeat, Mike Flanagan and Ryan Coogler show how the surreal or uncanny can be used to explore deeply human questions. I’m equally drawn to visionary voices like Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, whose writing blurred the boundaries between reality, morality and imagination. Similarly, I resonate with writers like Haruki Murakami, Hermann Hesse, Mircea Pricăjan, Mircea Cărtărescu, David Duchovny, Daniel Handler and Anaïs Nin, and many others who understand the emotional logic of dreams. I also find affinity with Surrealist artists, especially women like Leonora Carrington, who turned inner worlds into visual languages.
I’m fascinated, too, by artists and thinkers who work where technology meets imagination, each exploring emotion, perception or narrative through light, code or machine logic. What’s changed with digital tools isn’t what inspires me, but how I access it. The digital space, and more recently occasional experiments with AI in video and animation, give me new ways to return to familiar themes through unfamiliar lenses. It’s not central to my practice, but it can add sparks of surprise that keep the process fluid and instinctive.
4. Your work often feels uncanny, poetic or dreamlike. How do you see reality and the imaginary meeting in your work?
Cristina Schek:
For me, reality and the imaginary are not opposites, they’re entangled. I don’t try to depict the world as it is, but as it feels, as it might be remembered or reimagined. The uncanny enters when something seems almost real, but not quite, like a dream you’re still trying to wake from. I’m interested in that Twilight Zone space. It allows for mystery, for multiple readings, for questions without answers.
Surrealism has always felt like a natural language to me, and not because it’s strange, but because it reveals truths that logic can’t. I’m not interested in fantasy for its own sake, but in using imagination’s visual language to explore memory, identity and the emotional residue of experience. My aim isn’t clarity, it’s atmosphere. I want the work to unfold slowly, like a dream or a half-remembered story. To pull the viewer into a space where they begin to question what’s real, what’s imagined, what’s remembered. In that way, the viewer becomes a kind of co-author. The meaning of the artwork isn’t fixed; it’s something that emerges in the space between the image and the eye of the beholder.
5. Your work is digital in origin, but ultimately becomes a physical artwork. How do you think about that relationship, and what would you say to collectors who are new to digital art?
Cristina Schek:
Even when I’m working entirely in the digital realm, there’s a strong sense of materiality in what I do. I treat images like objects, layered and textured, built slowly. The screen is not just a surface; it becomes a kind of canvas. Photoshop lets me sculpt with light, shape memory, drag colour like a brushstroke. There’s a tactile intimacy to it, even if there’s no physical trace.
Nature is a recurring theme in my work, not just for its beauty, but as a source of knowledge. I draw from the trees, rivers, clouds and mountains of my native Transylvania, not to depict them directly, but to echo their atmosphere.
In an age when technological innovation pulls us ever further from the natural world, I believe it’s more vital than ever to wander, to move slowly and curiously through our surroundings. To observe, absorb, and let the world shape us back. I make images to be wandered through, like forests. Something you don’t rush through, but dwell in. A place you might get lost in for a while.
I don’t create work meant to live on a screen. My images are printed in very limited editions, carefully produced to preserve their nuance and presence, on tactile archival paper and framed with museum-quality art glass. I want the physical artwork to feel like an artefact, something intimate and enduring.
And to collectors who are new to digital art, I would simply say: trust your instincts, collect what resonates.
You don’t need to understand the technology behind a digital work to connect with it, just as you don’t need to know how a photograph was developed or a brush was held. Let the image speak on its own terms. Digital art isn’t a genre; it’s a way of working. Some works are painterly, others conceptual, some are quiet, others disruptive. There is no single aesthetic, and that is part of the richness. The format may evolve, but the emotional pull of an artwork is timeless.