Dossier
Method
Dario Srbić builds instruments that take a body at its limit and give back an object. A performer climbs a ladder that goes up through the ceiling; four of his sensors read the fear in her skin, the effort in her muscles, her heart, her attention, and in the same room, while she is still climbing, a printer turns those signals into a column. When she comes down it is finished. It is not a record of the climb. It is what the climb became after passing through everything that is not a body.
That is the shape of the practice — body to signal to code to matter, three displacements, each charging a toll. The Other One, made with the performance artist Elana Katz since 2025, does not hide the toll: the cylinders' surfaces are the accumulated distortion of every transduction, phonographic grooves for an experience no microphone attended. What survives is a second body, related to the first by exactly what the translation cost.
The apparatus is tuned to the room and not to its own capacity. A large institutional hall produced arousal undifferentiated enough that one channel said everything there was to say; a small room, where fear, focus and triumph can be told apart, earned four. How many channels to listen on is a curatorial decision, not a technical one.
Srbic calls the operating principle libidinal geometry: Mandelbrot's fractional dimensions crossed with Lyotard's libidinal economy, wagering that a machine which cannot feel can still express what it cannot feel. The discursive is what a system can state. The figural is what escapes statement and shows itself anyway. The instruments are built for the second job — to make something unmistakably about desire that contains none of it.
They do not imitate. A trained network moulds itself onto forms that already exist and is congratulated for producing something nearly like them; these agents are sent out walking. In Contingent Determinacies an agent wanders a voxel grid into an accreted shape, rewarded for staying printable and for growing rather than being designed — a simulacrum whose original was never issued. Duchamp found an object; what is found here is a process. And the agent is not trained so much as attuned: it learns in time, by moving, folding the past into the next step instead of fitting itself to a target. In the source code, training is called attunement, parameters are tensings, learning is folding. The naming is not decoration. It is where the thinking is done.
Together Alone leaves the single body for a relation, and inverts Sherry Turkle's title on the way past. Two drawing robots inscribe a ten-metre roll for the length of an exhibition, coupled by three things: the artist's mood, pinged in from another country; an audience in the room; and the trace each machine has already laid, which the other can find and follow. They react locally, in their own firmware, with nothing planning from above. The machine deliberately not built here is the seeing machine — the camera may modulate their style, never their pace — because one eye above two puppets would only illustrate the thing the work would rather be. The aloneness in his title is Arendt's solitude: a condition, not a deficit.
The first thing the pair drew was a double portrait after Gonzalez-Torres — two equal rings overlapping, one bot at rest inside the shared lens. Close up, each ring is a bundle of ten misregistered passes with the ink broken on the tooth of the paper. The richness is in the misregistration. A single circle would have been avoidance; two that fail to coincide are a portrait.
One question runs underneath, put each time to a different material: what becomes of desire — arousal, pain, excitement — when it is made to travel through instruments that have none. The answer is never a copy of the feeling. It is a form that could only have arrived this way.
Biography
Dario Srbić, born in the former Yugoslavia, lives in Berlin, Germany and London, UK. Dario started coding as a twelve-year-old and always felt that the machine was not merely executing the code, but also emanating an inexplicable sensuousness. Initially fascinated by the dark arts of algorithmic trading in the business world(s) he transitioned through philosophy into the equally dark sciences of algorithmic art. His current practice examines the embodiment of desire (arousal, pain, excitement) into code and expresses it in artificially (ready)made sculpture and performance.
Dario holds an MA in Photography from Central Saint Martins and a PhD from the Royal College of Art.
Education
- 2017–2024
- Royal College of Art, PhD Fine Art Research, with Professor Johnny Golding
- 2013–2015
- Central Saint Martins, MA Photography, with Dr Daniel Rubinstein
- 2013
- Autocenter Summer Academy, workshop with Jorinde Voigt
- 2011–2012
- OSTKREUZ Schule für Fotografie, workshop with Jörg Klaus
- 2009
- Campus Photoespaña, workshop with Stephan Ruiz
Prizes / Selections / Awards
- 2015
- Lowe Mullen NOVA Award, shortlisted
- 2014
- The Photographic Angle Award, juried winner of MA Photography bursary
- 2013
- ArtSlant 3rd 2013 Showcase competition, juried winner in the Photography category
- 2012
- Descubrimientos Photoespaña, selection
- 2011
- Eikon Photography Competition, selection
Conference, Symposium & Seminar Presentations
- 2019
- (Algo)Rhythmic Refrains, (Un)Sound Barrier, Royal College of Art, London
- 2019
- Can a Robot Become a Desiring Body?, NAFAE Conference, Royal College of Art, London
- 2018
- (De)Generative Art: Rules-transgressing Algorithms, EVA London, London
- 2017
- (R)encounter in Digital, paintingdigitalphotography, University of Derby, Derby
- 2015
- Fissures in the Image of Thought, Photography in 21st Century, London
- 2014
- Ghost in the Image, Twice Upon a Time Conference, Birmingham
Collections
Ursula Blickle Videoarchiv
Contact
Email: [email protected]