Ctrl+Alt+Dream - Surrealism Then and Now
Surrealism has always been a movement of transformation - of thought, of form, of perception. Born in the wake of World War I, the movement emerged as both a rebellion and a revelation: an effort to unlock the unconscious mind and expose the hidden logic beneath our waking world. Artists such as Man Ray, Joan Miró, André Masson, René Magritte and Salvador Dalí expanded the limits of what art could reveal, crafting dreamlike images that questioned not only what we see, but how we see.
Ctrl+Alt+Dream: Surrealism Then and Nowreexamines this revolutionary impulse through a contemporary lens. The exhibition brings historic works from the Castellani Art Museum’s permanent collection into dialogue with digital artworks created through artificial intelligence. Despite the century that separates brushstroke from algorithm, these artists - past and present - share a common pursuit: to make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.
As viewers move through the exhibition, they encounter the evolution of surrealism as both a practice and a philosophy. The analog dreamscapes of early surrealists find resonance in Laura Rankin’s1980s drawing Man, Woman, Dog, Bird, Banana in a Room, a surreal psychological interior that anticipates today’s digitally constructed realities. Rankin’s work serves as a bridge between the tactile and the virtual, reminding us that surrealism is less a historical style than a persistent way of seeing - one that transcends time, technology, and medium.
In the digital age, this lineage extends into the realm of machine learning and text-to-image generation. Contemporary artists such as Inge Schuster (Denmark) and David Szauder (Hungary) use platforms like DALL·E andMidjourney to transform written language into visual experience. Their AI-generated works harness algorithms as collaborators, exploring the intersection of human imagination and machine interpretation. What once was automatic drawing has become algorithmic dreaming - a new form of surrealist automatism for the 21st century.
Galleries: Click on the pictures to enlarge
Through painting, photography, and digital projection, Ctrl+Alt+Dreamasks viewers to reconsider the nature of creativity itself. Can a machine dream? Can code capture emotion, memory, or desire? These questions are not only technological - they are deeply human. The dialogue between traditional surrealists and today’s digital visionaries reveals that our search for meaning through the irrational endures, even as our tools evolve.
Interview for the CAM Magazine
Your work often exists between the real and the imagined - what draws you to that space?
I have always been drawn to the space where something feels both familiar and slightly out of reach.
It is in that quiet shift - where reality begins to soften - that something more open can emerge.I think that is where imagination and memory meet.
You approach AI like a camera. How does that shift how you think about authorship?
I see both AI and the camera as tools in my practice.
With photography, I shape the image through editing - I remove, add, and adjust until it holds the atmosphere I am looking for.
With AI, I can begin the story more openly and then continue refining it.
Authorship lies in the choices - what I search for, what I select, what I keep, and what I remove.
It is not the tool that creates the image - but the eye behind it.
Nature appears frequently in your work. What role does it play in your imagery?
Nature is a kind of grounding in my work.
Even in constructed or imagined spaces, it brings a sense of something real and timeless.
It often becomes a quiet counterpart to the human presence - something that holds, observes, or simply exists alongside.
Your videos feel quiet and serene. What do you want viewers to notice in that stillness?
In the stillness, small things become visible.
A movement, a gesture, a pause.
I hope the viewer stays for a moment - long enough for something subtle to unfold.
How do you know when a piece is “finished” in such an open-ended process?
A piece is finished when it stops asking for something more.
It is not a clear decision, but more a feeling - a balance where nothing is missing, and nothing needs to be removed.
What does transformation mean in your practice?
Transformation is often something quiet for me.
It is not about dramatic change, but about small shifts - in light, in mood, in presence.
Something becoming something else, almost without being noticed.
What do you hope viewers feel when encountering your work?
I hope the viewer feels a sense of calm, but also a sense of connection.
Perhaps something they cannot fully explain - but still recognize.
For artists who are curious about working with AI but don’t know where to begin, are there specific tools or approaches you’ve found most meaningful - and how do you keep the process feeling personal and intuitive?
I would say: begin simply.
The tools are not the most important - it is more about what you are looking for.
For me, it has been meaningful to combine AI with other processes, such as editing and refinement.
That is where it becomes personal - in the choices you make along the way.
Your work is presented in dialogue with historic Surrealists like Miró and Magritte in CAM’s exhibition. How do you see your AI-assisted images continuing—or quietly reshaping—that Surrealist tradition of exploring dreams, the subconscious, and the space between reality and imagination?
I have not worked with the intention of aligning myself with earlier Surrealist artists.
The connection feels more like something that arises naturally when working with images that move beyond the purely real. My process is not so much about translating text into images, but about moving from image to image. One image leads to the next - through small shifts, adjustments, and a visual intuition. It is a way of working where meaning emerges along the way, rather than being defined from the beginning.
If there is a connection to surrealism, it may lie in this openness - in allowing the images to find their own quiet logic, and in trusting what appears between them. What may be different today is not the intention, but the pace and the tools. The process has become more fluid — and perhaps more subtle.
Less a constructed dream — and more something that slowly reveals itself.