D: In 2021, just before New Year's Eve, I was in the studio when Ilya [Bliznets] burst in shouting, “I sold an NFT!” 🤭

By that point, I already had a body of digital work, mostly abstract glitches derived from my physical pieces. I was experimenting a lot with digital space at the time. When the first version of DALL·E appeared, I was fascinated by its imperfections and often incorporated it into my work. I also loved the glitches produced by DALL·E 2 — it felt incredibly painterly.

After Ilya's announcement, I remembered that I had a Twitter account. That's where my NFT journey began.

D: Yes, I have a classical education, and at a certain point, I had to break through my own perceptual boundaries and the rules imposed by institutions. However, through studying painting, I came to realise that it can, in fact, be anything.

I see painting less as a medium and more as a method of creating work, and I believe that method can be transferred to any form. Painting can take the shape of an installation, a digital image on a screen, an object, and so on. Art history offers countless examples of this idea. Katarina Grosse's work, for instance, is a perfect demonstration of what painting can become.

For that reason, I try not to separate traditional painting from digital painting, because the essence of painting can manifest itself anywhere.

I don't actually remember the exact moment when I transitioned into digital painting. It most likely emerged from experiments aimed at distorting or dismantling conventional methods of image-making. I think one of the fundamental impulses of an academically trained artist is to break the rules. That's probably where the glitch entered my work.

The move into digital space also played a role. Digital media is often perceived as something less professional, less legitimate, somehow "wrong". In a broader sense, the transition from analogue to digital can itself be understood as a kind of distortion.

All of my digital and NFT works deal with distortion, deformation, and glitches in one form or another. Eventually, these explorations coalesced into a unified visual language, but even before that, they were connected through a shared conceptual thread.

In my digital work, I pursue the same artistic goals as in traditional painting. I love colour and texture, and I pay close attention to composition, form, and spatial relationships within the image.

As for the process itself, I use several tools, most often Stable Diffusion and Photoshop. Sometimes I apply additional glitch effects, but most of the work happens in Photoshop. I frequently employ collage techniques, assembling compositions from disparate fragments and then blending everything into a painterly surface. In many ways, that too is a very traditional painterly strategy.

D: I am interested in digital technologies and their impact on our lives, culture, and perception of the world around us.

Alongside digital painting, I create physical paintings, objects, and graphic works. Yet all of these practices are connected through the same central concern. For me, the technological world is simultaneously fascinating, vibrant, and unsettling, and that contradiction is often embedded in my work.

I've always loved dystopian stories and films where you encounter a beautiful, immaculate scene but cannot shake the feeling that something is wrong. Everything appears too perfect. There may be no obvious reason for concern, yet you keep waiting for a monster to emerge from around the corner, or for reality itself to prove artificial.

I think this is a particularly fertile space for art. It allows us to pose questions without offering definitive answers. Art always leaves room for open-ended narratives.

D: Yes, there is a certain cinematic quality to my work, though it serves more as a hint of a narrative than a fully formed story. My images tend towards abstraction, and I use recognisable scenes or protagonists as points of entry rather than as narrative devices.

What interests me is creating a situation in which the viewer, while attempting to decipher the image, inadvertently enters a story of their own. I'm less concerned with telling a specific story than with establishing a particular mood. It's closer to marking out a path along which the viewer's consciousness can travel, rather than directing them towards a predetermined narrative.

D: Yes, my earlier work was much more influenced by cyberpunk and punk aesthetics, and that sensibility is still there somewhere in the "root folder". At a certain point, though, I found myself drawn to a less literal visual language — something more slippery, something that could move between images and meanings. Once you begin analysing your own visual vocabulary, there is often a desire to move away from the obvious and become a little more elusive. I think that process ultimately led me to this newer body of work.

The title of the series is actually borrowed from a film of the same name. It's a rather sad cult film about a young girl whose imagined reality differs dramatically from the world around her. The film itself has been criticised, but I've always been fascinated by its beautifully romantic title. These kinds of contradictions and mismatches have always interested me. That said, I wouldn't describe the series as a direct dialogue with the film. Rather, it unfolds my own interpretation of what that title might mean.

Throughout the series, there is a recurring desert landscape in which a hallucination, mirage, figure, narrative fragment, or fleeting image appears. Yet the closer you move towards it, the less distinct it becomes. In many ways, the work continues my exploration of the deconstruction of meaning and perception. There is also a subtle nod to the early collaborations between Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí.

[@forgetdali screams]

D: Yes, this is the series I would like to continue developing. Alongside the digital works, it already includes a number of physical graphic pieces, and I've prepared a canvas for what comes next — I think there will be several paintings as well. I'm also planning to create a few more video works within the series.

To answer your question about where I see myself, I would say somewhere in the search for a balance between these different forms. Increasingly, I feel that this balance is necessary and that a sense of wholeness can only emerge at that point of equilibrium.

Visually, the series may evoke fragmentation or splitting, but in reality, these images strive towards harmony. One of the questions I am asking through this body of work is whether such harmony is even possible. In that sense, the concerns are actually quite fundamental: the search for balance, for stability, for some kind of point of support in a world where that may no longer exist.

It seems to me that the contemporary world poses an overwhelming number of difficult questions. It moves at extraordinary speed, collides with us, or perhaps more accurately slips away from us. Balance increasingly feels like an unattainable luxury, while human vulnerability becomes ever more apparent.

As an artist, it is important for me not to miss this condition, but to capture it. Although, as I mentioned earlier, it no longer feels like a fleeting moment. It has begun to feel like a permanent state of being.

D: In our space, we have chosen to focus on solo and duo projects. For the exhibition, it was important for don't buy and me to establish a dialogue between two artists working with digital media.

As the first exhibition of the year, we wanted it to feel light and understated — something that could mark a beginning, a new chapter. At the same time, we wanted to explore the relationship between digital and physical art.

I created a series of graphic works by hand, but each piece has a digital counterpart: its original digital sketch. I selected several digital paintings and reduced them to their "skeletons", translating them into line drawings before bringing them onto paper. Maintaining a connection between the digital and the physical has always been important to me.

don't buy presented a selection of video works, and we also produced prints of two pieces to further emphasise this dialogue and bring everything together within a shared visual field.

Both of us work with glitch aesthetics, albeit in very different ways.

The exhibition turned out exactly as we had hoped: open-ended, with plenty of room for interpretation, allowing each viewer to discover something new, recall a memory, or simply spend time reflecting on their own associations.