Do you remember Etch A Sketch, the red plastic toy with the glass window where you create line drawings with knobs? Or kaleidoscopes? Bits of glass falling into geometric patterns shot through with stars, spikes and fleurs-de-lys? Ever wonder how the things worked?

What we have in the young London artist and techno-wizard Susan Collins is one of those high-end inventors who creates magical and inspiring works of art with her technological expertise and unique perceptual imagination.

Let me say it plain: go to her major solo show Seascape, which has just opened in Bexhill, commissioned by the De La Warr Pavilion and Film and Video Umbrella. Seascape consists of a variety of seascapes that gradually reveal themselves pixel by pixel, tiny square by tiny square, across a screen, changing again as soon as one picture is in place and time has caught a new image.

The imagery has been collected over the course of a year by webcams installed at five key vantage points on the coast, between Margate and Portsmouth. The endless fluctuations in each day's light and the variations in moving objects such as stones, shells, passers-by and tide, boats, birds, moon and clouds are recorded and played back, in a way that mimics but far surpasses time-lapse photography. The same views of the quickening of light and seaside motion that have hypnotised painters for decades are given a new twist and shudder by Collins's broad strokes, penetrating vision and hyperintellect.

The result is awe-inspiring. Some of the pictures are sombre, as though taken from a spaceship. Some of them are playful, as when the boats look like confetti sprinkles when pictured over time. Some displays are serene, such as when the blue of the water becomes green-blue, then bluer than blue. The pink of the sunset is a tint that only Nature can produce - like liquid candy floss mixed with a radiant purity. The icy orange-sorbet stripe of sunrise is the colour of elation.

Collins is a digital media and environmental artist whose canvas is wide open public spaces, seasides, skies, city arenas, haunted houses and online virtual places. She teaches at the Slade, has collaborated with the architect Sarah Wigglesworth on Classrooms of the Future, was nominated for a Bafta for Tate in Space, exchanged the skies of Penzance and Sheffield in a magic act of projection called Transporting Skies, lit up the drains of London in Light Up Queen Street, was featured in Newcastle's Glow project and is currently creating another pixel-by-pixel transmission from a haunted house in an online art installation called Spectrascope (join online to follow its progress). Up next is a residency in Australia.

“Transmission, networking and time” are the tools she primarily works with, she says. To describe her electronic art is like describing the work of those little gremlins behind the scenes of everyday reality who keep the illusion of solid matter in place - propping up our internal fantasies that we're actually eating breakfast, driving cars, going to the office and playing in the park. It's hard not to start stuttering when you describe something this smart and esoteric, sexy and complicated. No wonder she's won every prize there is.

Continually spinning out the data that has been collected from the remote cameras by the sea, the images of Seascape are constantly generated and renewed pixel by pixel, from top to bottom and left to right in horizontal strips. It took more than a year to gather, archive and arrange (according to visual impact) all the digital images from the five webcams. Each display is projected into a frame about 30in by 40in (76cm by 100cm). The data in each display is whatever transpired by the coast in intervals of six and a half hours - the time it takes for the tide to come in and out. The image changes in the same way that the real landscape changes throughout the day, but at a faster speed. If you prefer to stand back and absorb each electronic display in a trance, you can enjoy them as a kind of impressionistic blur of subtle movement and colour.

Many of the digital paintings under Collins's masterful design choices end up resembling Rothko. Strips of sky above wisps of sunset on top of blurs of boat trails over wands of waves, atop bands of sand in a delicate, shimmering linear abstract; a ribboned layer-cake of mood, colour and motion. Things turn Klimt-like at dusk, pixelated gold and black.

Other displays are more obviously recognisable as the boats, sand and sea that they photograph. It depends on Collins's choices of images to share and the amount of change that the landscape has gone through during the seven-hour period. To take your favourite image home with you, you can get a Seascape print.

Collins is fascinated by the way that electronic space enables us to experience physical space in an amplified way. She likes to tease out and torture the ephemeral into view, showing us what's usually only subliminally registered . Personal space, private hauntings, impressions of time, space and movement over time - all are highlighted by her gorgeous displays. Outer and inner space change places, motion becomes stillness, moon becomes a streak.

The mesmerisingly slow pace of the transmissions combined with the rapid transit of days and nights gives the paradoxical impression that fast and slow are interchangeable. It is like watching a comet that looks pasted in the sky while you simultaneously integrate the fact that it's travelling at mind-boggling speed. Her digital paintings take you through fear, intoxication, confusion, release and homecoming. She has invented a style that communicates what it's like to land on a distant planet and discover that your trajectory has brought you to Earth after all. If you like to be challenged, you'll like this exhibit. If you like to be soothed, you'll like it, too. If you're as computer challenged as I am, you'll still find her art visually stunning, the colours heart-meltingly delicate. Just skip all inadequate descriptions of how it works and follow the yellow-green-white- blue-pink road.

Seascape 2009 is at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, East Sussex (01424 229111; www.dlwp.com), to June 14

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