When walking through the former factory Federico uses as his art studio, one reaches a room filled with long storage shelves serving as an extraordinary library of materials. There are hundreds of organic and inorganic samples. Rocks, shells, shards of colored glass, elaborate cast glass forms, all imaginable types of concrete, exotic-looking branches and leaves, dried seaweed, corals, precious minerals, a multitude of pieces of rare and completely common wood, coal, samples of soil, pigments, ancient petrified creatures, and the list goes on and on. These specimens are not obviously organized, as they would be in a natural history museum. They are not here to be admired, but to be touched and worked with. You won’t find a speck of dust on any of them because they are frequently moved around, put into new juxtapositions, held, and lived with.
While travelling extensively with his father during his childhood, an Argentinian documentary director Edgardo Díaz, Federico spent many months of each year in Andalusia or in the north of Italy. Even as a young boy, he felt a strong attraction for observing nature. Trying to understand recurring patterns, the properties of natural substances, bonds between trees, plants, and the soil around, tasting fruit that in his place of birth – 1970s Czechoslovakia – was so exotic and unfamiliar, it made him wonder about and search for its connection to a particular landscape and environment. One of his strongest memories from this period is of vast olive groves. He speaks fondly of his first encounters with the red soil around them, wondering about the color and attempting to grasp what it meant when his dad explained that this peculiar coloring is caused by the presence of iron in the soil. At that time, such an answer seemed very abstract but it sparked more curiosity about specific compounds and substances under the visible surfaces of things. Edgardo often travelled to Venice with young Federico. In this beautiful city, his attention suddenly shifted from nature to structures made by man: the gleaming, smooth, literally sublime marble walls of Venetian churches; the palazzos, with their highly elaborate decorative patterns that were so unlike, yet so similar to what Federico had known from nature. Suddenly he remembered that the olive trees, covered in gnarled, seemingly dry bark, he felt so strongly about, were thousands of years old, while these structures had witnessed only a few centuries. The element of time came into play in his thinking and together with it an endless stream of questions that went on to resonate throughout his life and work.
His studio is always filled with people, young women and men walking around in states of deep concentration, with virtual reality headsets on or inspecting newly made objects, architectural models, or long rolls of paper concealing designs for upcoming projects. It is easy to lose a sense of space and time trying to figure out what is actually happening when a forklift holding a large slab of patterned concrete comes your way and you have to get out of its way at the last minute. And here comes Federico, intensely focused on a conversation with one of his colleagues, showing him something on his phone and explaining what needs to be done next …
As a teenager, Federico was a dedicated pole vaulter. His body became the focal point of his observations. At that time, possibly unconsciously, his field of interest expanded to include each movement of every muscle, his reactions to exertion, need for appropriate nutrition and just the right amount of sleep. Yet the whole time he always felt the need to represent the surrounding reality and its layers with his hand by drawing or writing. After finishing primary school, he decided to attend a secondary art school. By this time, Edgardo was already quite disillusioned with the politics of the Soviet Bloc as it no longer had anything to do with the progressive leftist dreams he had about Czechoslovakia when he emigrated from the right-wing military dictatorship in Argentina. His critical political stance made it impossible for Federico to study at any school of his choice, so he was involuntarily sent to work as a mechanic at Czechoslovak Railways’ maintenance facilities. What seemed to be a painful injustice, gave Federico a profound understanding of heavy machinery and optimized labor. While fixing train engines, he made this otherwise tedious work more bearable by learning about every single component in these machines. When he finally got a chance to attend art school in the late 1980s, Federico had already gained first-hand experience with many topics that later started to form the backbone of his artistic practice – be it an attentive understanding of nature, the history of architecture, the inner workings of industrial machinery, or the human body itself. During this period, Federico established close ties with the Czechoslovak dissident movement, specifically with the Prague circles of Václav Havel. His long discussions with scientists and philosophers, such as Ivan Havel and Zdeněk Neubauer, broadened his perspective and started to sow the seeds of interest in the theory of computing and artificial intelligence.
It is impossible to overlook what appears as decommissioned robotic arms. One is covered in gold leaf, and both sit motionlessly next to one of many pillars supporting the building. It is hard not to think about the videos from Elon Musk’s giga-factories producing Tesla cars or new futuristic battery packs. All these thoughts and images hit you even stronger in the next room where one fully operational robot, three times the size of the earlier mentioned ones, is surrounded by a group of people and making something on the ground. As you approach it, you see that the arm is equipped with an extrusion tool and one by one, it is putting down the layers of a material resembling concrete to create a intricate pattern of organic-looking shapes.
When Karel Malich, one of the most influential Central European sculptors of the second half of the 20th century, started to teach Federico at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, he told him, “Don’t be like a 19th century artist. You don’t need to master techniques with your hands. What’s important lies within ideas, philosophy and the representation of the world as others can’t see it.” At that time, Federico, only 17 years old, wanted to manifest his thinking through painting, combining realistic and abstract visual language. Malich’s simple, yet crucial critical comment made him search for alternative forms of expression. Federico’s first semester work was a musical composition influenced by avant-garde minimalist composers of the late 1960s such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and La Monte Young. Federico performed the piece on a synthesizer himself. The conservative, craft-oriented members of the jury were almost enraged. At the same time, a couple of progressive thinkers nominated Federico to receive a school award for the most inventive work of that year. Soon afterwards, Federico found his way to the first distributors of Silicon Graphics Computer Systems in Central Europe and started to master this state-of-the-art equipment, the most powerful computer workstations of the early 90s.
Making use of what at that time was an extraordinarily complex and far from user-friendly graphic interface, he began to model simulations of alternative perspectives of reality, later combined with elaborate holophonic sound environments and interactive digital animations. Because only international industrial giants and research departments at top universities had access to such technology at the time, Federico’s work seemed as if it had come from a sci-fi movie. Only after the global PC market started to distribute simplified, accessible versions of such hardware and software did he decide to abandon this direction, convinced that computer-generated images no longer challenged his search for new forms of expression.
While watching, with fascination, the robot work, one cannot miss one significant factor here: the human presence all around. In automated factories, endless hall are carefully set up to assemble industrial products that have already undergone a battery of tests. Human presence is no longer needed there. Here in the studio you do not see the precision or the results of previously made decisions. This is a place of experimentation, of a constant challenge to everything that already has been proven right and functional. And there is Federico, standing among all those people operating the robot in real time, ready to come up with a new strategy or approach at any moment. Many are doomed to failure, but some offer a potential new direction. The sci-fi scenario of intelligent robots has not arrived yet. Without these operators and Federico’s vision, this robot is but a silent tool.
Around the upcoming turn of the millennium, Federico, having left behind the art milieu for some time, turned all his attention to utopian architectural visions and application of his experience with computer-generated imagery and planning in real life. Together with a large team of professionals working both in the field of science and humanities, as well as with other artists, architects, and politicians, Federico came up with a project of a new type of artificial intelligence and virtual-reality powered university – an entirely new form of education embodied in a prototype building. He later implemented segments of the project in various architectural designs. The technology did not yet exist to turn the whole project into reality and this led to his decision to focus on the relationship between the human body and technology as well as on their interaction. Yet again, Federico began translating his vision of the world into artistic projects, turning hitherto inexecutable concepts to abstract material forms. Consistently following technological development, he conceived projects utilizing rapid prototyping techniques and, later on, robotic fabrication, with the intent of creating art without the touch of a human hand.
When you walk up the stairs in the production floor, you find yourself in the office area. The rooms here are not merely offices, but separate workshops filled with computers and hundreds of small gadgets. It is often hard to say what they are all for. What might catch your attention is the sound of rhythmic, repetitive music. Soon you realize that it must be … Steve Reich’s “Piano Counterpoint”, is it not? Most likely. You follow the sound and walk to the very end of the corridor, arriving at a small room with large windows and custom-made studio speakers. And there sits Dmitrij, Federico’s main coder and a young architect who spent a couple of years at Federico’s studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague. The speakers are his creation. He greets you warmly and shows you what he is working on – a model for the ideal optimization of movement by the robot you saw earlier. He also lets you have a peek at large prints of digital architectural blueprints. This will be the foundation of our new sculpture, he says. This indeed sounds like an understatement, considering how highly complex the design is. Dmitrij explains that the structure in question is not just any small sculpture, but rather a monumental object the size of a small building. It is hard not to experience a sense of awe.
His manifesto of “non-human made” objects was a daring attempt to demonstrate and clearly define how profound reliance on machines is becoming. Nevertheless, human presence, the body itself, and, above all, the accentuation of the human hand play a crucial role in all the resulting works. Robotic arms functioned as a natural extension of the artist’s hand in a manner not dissimilar to how a painter or a sculptor would use the brush or the chisel. The conceptual basis of each new project addressed a variety of pressing sociopolitical and environmental issues. Questions of mediation and a search for a common language between the three essential elements of single equation – nature, human, technology – can be found in everything Federico does. His robots built monumental objects and sculptures, painted delicate compositions, and worked side by side with humans on real-life performances. At first glance it might have seemed that Federico is merely programming complex digital solutions, but the truth lies elsewhere. His hand was the main “actor”, recording thought processes on paper in the form of beautifully executed elaborate drawings, sketches, mental maps, and endless notes, comments, references, and solutions for each problem later transferred into the digital realm by his team.
Federico suddenly appears in the doorway, asking Dmitrij for a specific set of blueprints; and he quickly hands him an iPad with everything Federico needs. And there is J. M. Ledgard, a Scottish journalist, novelist, and AI expert who spends a few months a year in the Czech Republic lecturing at the Czech Technical University. Ledgard is a one-of-a-kind believer in technology when intertwined adequately with the power of imagination. He and Federico had met several years ago and started to work on an art project together. They sit down in the conference room and start a discussion about depictions of wild boars in the canon of art history, mentioning briefly here and there the references to artificial intelligence, Boston Dynamics robots, and the limitations of the present-day machine vision. Something big is cooking here.
Over time, certain places became truly precious for Federico. He kept returning to isolated places, valleys, riverbanks, and mountain tops, over and over again, studying them with the precision of a scientist and sensitivity of a poet. Places from his childhood in Italy and Spain, nature reserves in the Czech mountains, and many more. He has never forgotten the red soil of the olive groves or the marble walls of churches and palazzos in Southern Europe. Attentive viewers will find that all these influences are reflected in his very own visual language. Only once he showed one of his favorite landscapes directly in a video work. Otherwise, he has kept them concealed as an invisible inspiration. Over the last few years, Federico has been working on a long-term project based on the behavior of wild boar, an animal inhabiting one of the areas he frequently visits. His attention is temporarily turning away from man, shifting instead towards animals and their future connection with artificial intelligence.
It’s getting late, another long day at the studio. Night has already come without anyone really noticing. Somehow time goes by differently around here when there are so many tasks to be accomplished at the same time. Federico’s indispensable studio manager Anna is packing all the necessary materials and sending him an exact, tight schedule for tomorrow’s trip to Berlin. They are going to meet researchers from the Natural History Museum, specialists in wild boar behavior, and the curator of a new foundation focusing on intersections between contemporary art and technology. All the possible breaks between meetings are filled with visits to exhibitions of artists such as Philippe Parreno or Olafur Eliasson. It’s going to be yet another busy day, just as Federico’s whole life has been.
Throughout the years of my collaboration with Federico, I actually realized that dialogue and writing are the principal media of his artistic practice. Our long discussions about history, the current state of society, all imaginable visions of future technological developments or their current state were accompanied by his notebooks and pencils. Even though his iPhone is an inexhaustible repository of reference images, his Moleskine notebook is filled with ideas that all his projects are based on. There always comes a moment when Federico suddenly picks up his notebook and starts to read his complex, highly poetic, yet carefully composed sentences. Later on, he adds a sketch of a potential visual representation of those thoughts. There is such an ease to the movement of his hand, such a gentle and, at the same time, resolute style of expression. All those elaborate technological solutions, all that coding, 3D rendering, and final moves of robotic arms start with the gestures of his hand over a sheet of paper. Years of observation and learning to understand what the relationship between us, human beings, and our environment could indicate and what it could mean, shows how patient and focused Federico is. Each and every creation of his shows how experienced and meticulous he is in his work. The message of that Karel Malich’s comment was brought to fruition. Federico’s hand is not making art for art’s sake. His hand does not illustrate or replicate patterns seen elsewhere. With every gesture, his hand creates new reality.
Jen Kratochvil, Curator
Director of Kunsthalle Bratislava