Surreal art never fails to fascinate, motivate and stir the imagination, leaving baffled onlookers musing over the phenomenal imagination of the artwork’s creator. This intense wonderment over such fascinating creativity can certainly be applied to the work of a 20-year-old IT student known as Xetobyte, who has created some of the most shockingly transcendent photo manipulations ever known.

Using his computer, Xetobyte uniquely combines bizarrely arbitrary images, such as buoyant clocks, a swarm of crows, sedated butterflies, suspended swings and floating umbrellas, to create uncannily surreal images, representative of the “anti-gravity” and capricious pictures that we often visualise in dreams and even nightmares.

The talented IT student’s abstract images depict the very concept of ‘digital art’, a general term used for a range of artwork that utilizes digital computer programmes and creates visions of beauty, humour and life. With society’s increased reliance on digital forms of technology, more and more ‘digital artists’ are emerging from the woodwork.  

Other artists creating digital masterpieces include Andrew Wallerstein, an electronic artist, who explores his own personal conceptions of digital space, with photorealism and stark algorithm, and Brian Cole, an abstract artist from Texas, who specialises in creating bright and colourful digital paintings.

To concur with their ‘digitally-inspired’ creations, increasingly digital artists are displaying their unique work in virtual galleries. Spanish artist Alfredo Consalez Nunez presents his digital photography and artwork on his ‘virtual studio’.

Although creating superbly abstract computer generated paintings may be evolving as quickly as the technology assisting such masterpieces, the concept is not entirely new. Almost a decade ago the long-established and experimental British musician Brian Eno was walking home in London and noticed a giant, blank plasma screen was empty at a posh dinner party. Describing the large blank screen as a “missed opportunity”, it provoked Eno into using computer software to generate slowly moving imagery from digitized slides of hundreds of his paintings. The artist called his ever-evolving multimedia visual and sound-art installation “77 million paintings”.

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