Dossier

Method

A 3D printer has been printing for twenty-four hours when Dario Srbić opens the window. The plastic cools faster, and a crack runs through the print: a recording, in the object itself, of the translation it went through (When the Heartbeat Aches, 2021). His works are made of such translations, from the mathematical to the physical to the mental and back, and every translation carries the untranslatable with it. Thirty seconds of a performer's movement, exposed onto one negative, erode the negative's sharpness and its colour (7 1/2 Minutes Solo, 2013). What does not survive the passage intact is kept, and worked with as a productive error.

Machine-learning frameworks, with the datasets and parameters they come with, enter his work the way readymades did, not as found objects but as found processes, and Dario runs them at the edges of their functioning. In (Algo)Rhythmic Refrains a language model was given as little of Eva Hesse's diaries as it could handle, until it stuttered into refrains: Art, I I I I … Duchamp's found object belongs to the past tense; what these processes make is founding, in the present participle, still in the middle of its becoming. Dario likes to watch the print being printed. In Corpus (2009) he had a video camera watch the viewfinder of a Hasselblad while it photographed his body sixty times, and the video went blind each time a photograph was made.

Dario codes his frameworks in C++ and Rust, and the names take longer than the functions, because a name that needs a comment points to a design that does not sit right. When he rebuilt Contingent Determinacies in Rust after the thesis, he rewrote the vocabulary of reinforcement learning until the code read as philosophy. Integrate sounded too scientific and dry, so the agent absorbs its experience, and there is a limit to how much it can absorb. Its policy probes the manifold without changing it. It differentiates its next step (a nod to Deleuze), enacts it, and performs a gesture. Training is attunement; the configuration is a tensing, and each of its sections a formant. The source tree reads like a table of contents: attunement, tensing, resonance, folding, cohering, modulating, sculpting.

What Dario sculpts is the reward. No part may be disjunct, so every sculpture stays printable within the volume of a given printer; the reward grows with the bounding volume raised to the power of three halves, which pulls the agent outwards, in tension with the rule on overlapping cubes; and more rules emerged while he sculpted the process. Reward one behaviour too generously and the agent repeats it almost as an addiction, and can hardly get away from it. There is no original to copy, and Plato, uninvited into the algorithm, can only repeat: false copy, false copy, false copy, a simulacrum.

Bodies entered his work as performers before they entered as signals: in front of the Super 8 camera he held (Pflegeleicht 30 °C, 2006; Fragments, 2008, where he is one of them), and in Penal Strokes (2018) his own body, repeating a gesture after Sol LeWitt as long as the body could stand to perform it, while a robot performed the same rule beside him and its behaviour did not in any way resemble the peaceful and deliberate strokes it had been given. Now they enter as signals. Sensors on the skin, the heart, the muscles and the scalp bring the sensuousness of sentient beings into the simulated environments of artificial agents, and no single sensor captures all of arousal. In The Other One, made with Elana Katz, the room decides how many channels to listen on: one in the large hall in Boston, four in the small room in Berlin. The emotion is not classified and then illustrated — it is inscribed as geometry and stays undecided in the object. The recordings are kept, because a performance, once recorded, can return as new sculptures.

Biometric curves are not only fractal but multifractal. Mandelbrot looked for fractal shapes in Euclidean space; Libidinal Geometry, Dario's fusion of Mandelbrot's fractal geometry with Lyotard's libidinal economy, looks for the shapes of desire and whether they can be expressed in the Euclidean space a printer builds in. In Landscapes of Pain a needle touched his body, and a multifractal analysis of the skin's response became a surface of fear, excitement and the ambiguity they carry. One word carries the excess across all three worlds: tensor, from the Latin tendere, to stretch. In machine learning it is the array that stores the data, in the body the muscle that tenses, and in Lyotard the tensorial sign.

For Dario, contemporary art is where the rigour of philosophy and the rigour of science can work on the same object, and where a mistake paired with chance is allowed to find what a plan would not. In Together Alone two robots draw on one roll, and no signal drives the work alone: the drawing is what emerges between them.

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, Libidinal Geometries and the Problem of Emergent Art: From Duchamp’s Found Object to Complex Adaptive Systems in Sensuous Environments, with Professor Johnny Golding

2013–2015

Central Saint Martins, MA Photography, with Dr Daniel Rubinstein

Workshops

2019

PACT Zollverein, IMPACT19—Weaving Traces, with Ingrid LaFleur, Meg Stuart, Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere

2018

PACT Zollverein, IMPACT18—Matter in Movement, with Forensic Architecture, Jaya Klara Brekke & Paul Feigelfeld, Christiane Kühl & Chris Kondek

2013

Autocenter Summer Academy, with Jorinde Voigt

2011–2012

OSTKREUZ Schule für Fotografie, with Jörg Klaus

2009

Campus Photoespaña, with Stephan Ruiz

Prizes / Selections / Awards

2015

Lowe Nova Awards, 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]