Digitalism in Focus: An Interview with Cristina Schek & Jonathan Mitton – Part II
In this second part of our conversation, Cristina Schek and Jonathan Mitton move beyond process to explore the wider terrain of Digitalism; its audiences, inspirations, speculative futures and what it means to collect art in an age of rapid technological change.
See both artists at the British Art Fair, exhibiting within the DBA: Digitalism platform - Gallery 14, Block D3 (Top floor) Saatchi Gallery, London — 25–28 September 2025.
Q&A (Part II)
6. Do you think digital art changes the role of the viewer? How do you think about your audience when creating your work?
Cristina Schek: “Yes, I think digital art changes how we experience images. It isn’t just something you passively look at. It lingers, glows, slips between worlds. A digital artwork can behave like a memory, it could be subtle, or persistent, or even emotionally charged. I don’t make work for a specific audience, but I do think about the viewer as someone I’m inviting in; not to observe, but to feel their way through the image.
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.”
Jonathan Mitton: “The audience is central to my work; they are integral to the conversation about consciousness, one half of the experiment. I create artworks specifically for viewer transformation. I understand that art must actively engage rather than passively display. You're not just viewing static images but participating in narrative journeys through augmented reality portals and interactive elements. Viewers become co-creators of the experience.”
7. Where do you each draw inspiration from, and has that shifted with the rise of digital tools and platforms?
Cristina Schek: “My inspiration comes from the unseen, memory, mythology 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; of how mood, light and timing can create entire emotional worlds. Directors like David Lynch, Coralie Fargeat, Mike Flanagan, 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 in ways that still feel urgent and poetic today. Similarly, I resonate with writers like Haruki Murakami, Herman Hesse, Mircea Pricăjan, Mircea Cărtărescu, David Duchovny, Anaïs Nin, and 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 also fascinated by artists and thinkers who work where technology meets imagination: like Janelle Shane, Refik Anadol, Memo Akten and Es Devlin; each exploring emotion, perception or narrative through light, code or machine logic. Their work reminds me that digital tools can hold feeling and beauty just as powerfully as paint or ink.
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, 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.”
Jonathan Mitton: “My inspiration stems from a lifelong fascination with the human psyche and its playful dance with media and cultural storytelling. This journey began in art college in the 1980s when I discovered Wilson Bryan Key's "Subliminal Seduction" and became intrigued by the hidden languages embedded in our visual culture.
I see art as a form of cultural archaeology - excavating the layers of imagery, symbols, and narratives that shape our collective imagination. We live in this wonderfully complex web of stories told through television, advertising, social media, and digital platforms that become part of our internal landscape.
My work explores the tension between who we authentically are and the various personas we try on like costumes throughout our lives. The immersive artwork represents a journey through the unconscious mind, populated with fragments of advertising imagery and cultural debris - it's a playful treasure hunt through our shared visual vocabulary. I'm curious about how these external influences become internal characters in our personal narratives.
It's an exciting time to investigate what feels genuinely human versus what we've collectively imagined into existence.”
8. Both of you work with imagery that can feel uncanny, poetic or futuristic. How do you see your work engaging with ideas of reality or the imaginary?
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. To quote The Twilight Zone: “You are about to enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.”
Jonathan Mitton: “I work extensively with 1950s-based imagery and concepts, an era often mythologised as the dawn of prosperity and visual excitement, when mass consumer society was unleashed. The post-war period was marked by rapid transformation: washing machines, television, electric lighting, the spectacle of advertising, and a culture teeming with seductive promises of convenience and progress. On the surface, it was a time of vibrant optimism - streamlined forms, bold colours, a belief in technology’s power to forge a utopian future.
But beneath that glossy veneer, something more insidious was unfolding. The birth of modern consumer culture brought with it not just new freedoms but new forms of control. The machinery of capitalism became ever more sophisticated, teaching us to desire what we’re sold rather than what we truly need. The natural world faded into the background, and the animal kingdom, once central to human existence, was commercialised or forgotten altogether.
My work explores this uneasy terrain. Pieces like “Consumer” from the late '90s and my ongoing “MetaMorph” project interrogate what constitutes reality: is it the saturated, manufactured spectacle of consumerism, or the instinctual, natural world we sprang from? This question becomes more urgent as digital realities now reproduce the logics of mid-century advertising on a planetary scale. The old promises of technology, liberation, convenience, even happiness, have morphed into algorithms of desire and distraction.
So the uncanny flavour in my work emerges from confronting these overlapping realities: we’re surrounded by the artefacts of past futures, living inside and through myths crafted by unseen economic and political interests. As digital technologies become more immersive, it’s crucial that we don’t surrender our capacity for critical reflection. We must ask: whose dreams are we inhabiting, and who benefits from our willingness to dream on their terms? Now, more than ever, it’s time to examine the machinery inside our heads and wake up to what’s at stake in the worlds - real or imaginary - that we build.”
9. What excites you most about the future of digital art?
Cristina Schek: “What excites me most is the sense that we’re just beginning. Digital art isn’t confined to a single style or technology, it’s an evolving ecosystem of tools, languages and ways of seeing. There’s freedom in that. The screen becomes a canvas, a mirror, a stage, even a dream machine.
What I love most is its emotional range. A digital work can be immersive, intimate, disruptive or deeply personal. It doesn’t have to shout. It can whisper. It can haunt. In a few works, I’ve found that AI can add an interesting layer, not as a shortcut, but as a spark. For me, it’s more of a side path, a way to embrace the unexpected, while my main practice remains rooted in digital montage. I think we’re moving toward a space where digital art can be just as soulful, political, poetic or mysterious as any other form. That’s where I want to be, at the edge of the known image, excited to see what reveals itself.”
Jonathan Mitton: “The capacity to manifest complex ideas rapidly and test conceptual frameworks at unprecedented scales. As someone who spent years developing 3D photography equipment - I appreciate both the painstaking craft of tool building alongside traditional art-making techniques to realise one’s ideas.
What excites me most is the experimental possibilities - the ability to prototype abstract concepts and translate them into finished pieces that would have been impossible to create through traditional methods alone. It's like having access to an entire research laboratory where you can test the boundaries between consciousness and artificial intelligence, between individual psychology and collective digital memory.
This represents a fundamental shift in how we approach the creative process. Instead of being limited by material constraints or technical skill gaps, we can focus purely on conceptual innovation and aesthetic curation.”
10. What advice would you give to collectors or audiences who are new to digital or AI art?
Cristina Schek: “To collectors, I would 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. Approach it with curiosity. Digital art isn’t a genre; it’s a way of working. A space where intuition, experimentation and technology intersect. Some works are painterly, others conceptual, some are quiet, others disruptive. There’s no single aesthetic or meaning. That’s part of its richness. Digital art lives beyond the frame; it can be editioned, archived, exhibited on a wall or in immersive formats. Just like any other medium, its value lies in its ability to move you, to stay with you. The format may evolve, but the emotional pull is timeless. To echo curator Rebekah Tolley, I believe we’re entering a moment where digital art is gaining real traction as an investment. With growing recognition, now is an excellent time for collectors to explore this vibrant and expanding field.
At the British Art Fair, I’ll be presenting extremely limited editions of my work, treated with the same care as any fine art practice. Though digital in origin, these are rare, carefully crafted pieces: archival prints on paper designed to outlive us with today’s technology, paired with museum-quality glass to preserve nuance, beauty and value for generations.
Jonathan Mitton: “I see this period as analogous to the birth of Dada and Surrealism in the 1920s. Imagine being able to collect original works by Duchamp, Man Ray, or early Dalí when they were just emerging. We're in that pivotal moment now - the artworks surrounding us at Digitalism represent the birth of a major art movement.
However, not all digital art carries equal weight. Look for integrity and genuine artistic intention beyond mere technical novelty. The most valuable pieces will be those where the technology serves a deeper artistic vision, where there's real conceptual depth beneath the surface innovation.
Having exhibited at venues from Art Miami to the Barbican, I've learned that lasting artistic value comes from the marriage of technical mastery with authentic creative vision. In digital art, this means finding artists who bring both technological sophistication and deep understanding of art history, psychology, and human experience to their practice.
Don't just buy because something looks impressive on screen - seek out the artistic passion and conceptual rigor within the work. We're witnessing the dawn of an entirely new era in human creative expression, and the pieces that will endure are those that push boundaries while maintaining connection to the fundamental questions that have always driven great art.”
See both artists at the British Art Fair, exhibiting within the DBA: Digitalism platform, Gallery 14: Block D3 (top floor), Saatchi Gallery, London, 25–28 September 2025.
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Cristina Schek is the ‘photo-sensitive’ kind. She thinks in pictures; her imagination is always in focus. A Transylvanian Surrealist Digitalist based in London, she creates conceptual portraits that explore identity and the nature of representation, drawing inspiration from literature, film and art history. Often working as her own model, Schek appears in a range of guises; whimsical, romantic, and rich with visual puns that are as playful as they are profound.
Completely self-taught and far removed from traditional or documentary styles, Schek sees the camera as merely a tool. Her passion lies in storytelling, following intuition into the unknown, layering and manipulating her photographs into creative montages. Subtle digital alterations, often developed over months, result in meticulously composed works influenced by the Surrealists and Old Masters.
Her work has been shown internationally at major art fairs including the London Art Fair, British Art Fair, Art Miami, Palm Beach, NY Art Fair, LA Art Show, as well as in museum exhibitions such as Elmbridge Museum and Kingston Museum in London. In 2025, Schek was awarded First Prize in the Young Masters People’s Choice Award and was Highly Commended for the Young Masters Rudolph Blume Foundation Acquisition Award. As a result, she will present new work in a special exhibition in early 2026.
Previous accolades include the Young Masters ‘Focus on the Female’ Award (2021), and in 2023, she won the W4 Fourth Plinth with The Ceiling In The Sky, a monumental 4x4m public artwork installed in West London.
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Jonathan Mitton is a pioneering multimedia artist whose four-decade practice spans holographic art, 3D imaging technology, sculpture, and AI-assisted creation. A Royal College of Art graduate with distinction, Mitton has consistently operated at the intersection of consciousness, technology, and human perception, anticipating and helping to define new directions in contemporary art.
His ground-breaking holographic work includes the revolutionary "Time Machines" - motorised display devices that became iconic in the field - and the controversial "Hardcore Holography" exhibition (1994), later included in the Barbican's "Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now" (2007/8). As both artist and inventor, Mitton developed the Mitton Linear Rail 1, a precision 3D imaging device that successfully bridged commercial technology with fine art practice.
Collaborative projects include stage design for Echo & The Bunnymen's international tour (1992) and founding the Surreal Vintage movement (2012-2025). His work has been exhibited internationally from Art Miami to the Barbican, with pieces in collections including the Museum of Holography (Washington).
Currently, Mitton pioneers AI integration with traditional practice through his "MetaMorph" project, developing "visual algorithms" - automatic paintings that seed AI-generated animations exploring consciousness and collective memory. His work investigates the playful tensions between authentic human experience and culturally constructed identities, using 1950s consumer imagery as archaeological material for understanding contemporary digital consciousness.