Quick Facts
Biography
Federico Díaz, a visual activist of Czech-Argentinean descent, lives and works in Prague. Since the 1990s he has used new media to reveal immaterial aspects of everyday reality of our natural environment which are elusive through primary human senses. Díaz’s work is typified by the language of algorithmically-generated art and systems art, increasingly more intense channels of direct communication with the viewer and the ability to follow his basic creative premise, which says that art is created without the touch of the human hand. He uses media and technologies as a socio-political catalyst of social changes.
He has exhibited at the Mori Art Museum Tokyo, CAFA Museum Beijing, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica Linz, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Basel in Miami Beach (in collaboration with MoMA PS1), the Florence Biennale and at the 53rd Venice Biennale. In 2010 he represented Czech art at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai. In 2007 he received the Premio Internazionale Lorenzo il Magnifico for digital media at the Florence Biennale.
From 2007 to 2014 Díaz was the Head of the Supermedia Studio at Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague.
MoMA PS1 founder Alanna Heiss comments, “Federico’s work embraces new and alternate ways of creating and communicating, and I imagine that five years from now, he will be seen as a visionary within the art world.”
MASS MoCA Director Joseph C. Thompson aptly calls Díaz, “the ultimate shape-shifter.”
Studies
He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague (1990–1997), where he studied under Karel Malich, Stanislav Kolíbal and Aleš Veselý.
In 1993 he received a scholarship to Alexander Dorner Kreis. He has also completed a research fellowship at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and at the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA-Ljubljana).
Teaching
Federico Díaz was a lecturer at Masaryk University in Brno, where he took part in creating the Digital Media specialization at the Faculty of Social Studies. In Prague was the Head of the Supermedia Studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (AAAD), which he founded together with Rafani art group member David Kořínek. He has also lectured at Columbia University in New York City, Storefront for Art and Architecture, University at Buffalo and Gramazio & Kohler Architecture and Digital Fabrication, ETH Zürich.
Work and Identity
Díaz is often associated with a pro-science orientation in contemporary art. In his case, though, the borders have been established differently. He does not operate within the limits of research, exploring with pre-set parameters that he would expound on in the language of art. Science is not a foundation on which Díaz would build his artistic expression. In his work, science and art are two entirely equal, integral parts, and Díaz’s work as we know it would not have come into existence without the interaction and overlapping of the two.
Philosopher Miroslav Petřiček, who has worked with Díaz since 2008, says “Art is an analogue of science, but we just don’t know which serves as a model for the other.”
For Díaz, science is not a mere aesthetic backdrop; he attributes importance to it as a framework of understanding. He is a pure humanist scientist, a methodical observer of modern man, in whom and for whom he attempts to unveil the things that we, overloaded by technology, are ceasing or have ceased to notice. It is paradoxical, yet entirely logical that to uncover what has been lost, he uses the very cutting-edge technology that tends to distance us from our very selves. As a techno-optimist, Díaz is sending out a clear signal: it is possible to accept a machine as the closest tool to the human soul not just as an extended arm, but rather as a much more substantially extended soul.
Díaz’s work is formed together with sources of inspiration from throughout 20th-century art. The roots, or the lines of the interwoven network of influences, pass through Bauhaus and László Moholy-Nagy and Kazimir Malevich, a specific interpretation of artist Zdeněk Pešanek’s work from the realm of Czech art and continuing through new disciplines developed in the 60s and 70s, materialized in the contemplations and work of sculptors Naum Gabo, Sol LeWitt and Gertrude Goldschmidt, and on to his own contemporaries, such as Tomaso Saraceno, Carsten Nicolai, Roxy Paine and Eduardo Kac. Karel Malich, Díaz’s teacher and mentor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, holds an invaluable place for Díaz in the interconnected system of thought. His lifelong approach to art and the concept that the world is a field of diverse energetic vibrations have been essential to Díaz’s development as a unique individual in contemporary art.
His foundations in the 1960s and 70s are also evidenced in his work with major international curators from that period. Alanna Heiss, the founder and till recently the Director of MoMA PS1 in New York, requested that Federico Díaz’s monumental installation Ultra represent MoMA PS1 at Miami Art Basel. She explains,
“Diaz’s installation, ULTRA, is in many ways a visualization of metaphysical space. With roots in Eastern Europe and South America, Díaz’s interest in futurism and modernism stems from two continents. His practice encompasses the Utopian attitudes of the 1960s as well as the advanced materials of this century.”
Thomas M. Messer, Director Emeritus of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, says the following about Diaz’s work: “The work of Federico Diaz may be seen in terms parallel to music, which is made up of tonalities and of rhythms. In the visual arts, these elements correspond to colors and forms. Díaz’s static and kinetic elements thus combine to yield a high degree of expressiveness, which, again as in the case of music, remains without representational intent.”
While the artistic mainstream is firmly anchored to the Nostalgia, Socio-Political Criticism and Irony, Díaz speaks about the power of man, opportunities for better education and understanding among societies and peoples.
Oeuvre
Karel Srp, City Gallery Prague’s Chief Curator for many years, writes in his essay ‘Federico Díaz’s Machines of Desire’:
“Díaz, unlike his predecessors who worked with novel techniques and materials in the 20th century, managed to make people perceive his attitude neither as experimental and Utopian, hovering on the margin of the art scene as a potential prototype of a future mainstream, nor as alternative, presenting another option to the prevailing view of art. Since starting to exhibit, he has been accepted as a natural part of the ‘young’ generation of the day, even though he articulated his experience in unusual ways. Diaz did not draw sharp lines between the old and the new consciousness. He refused to accept that alongside a given consciousness, freed of all obstacles that it had created for its own protection, there should be another consciousness, independent of it. He preferred to reveal the existing consciousness and enrich it with new layers and strata hidden below the known ones. He ventured into areas where no one had been before him on order to bring back experience that had been swallowed by oblivion. Díaz strove to renew what had been lost in an expanded and new way of gaining knowledge.”
The essay was written for Federico Díaz’s monograph Resonance, published in cooperation with MoMA PS1 and Charta Books in 2008.
Installations
Dehibernation I, II (1993-1994)
A specially created environment equipped with six interconnected sets of 92 speakers playing richly-structured sounds at various frequencies while mixing words in different languages. In addition to acoustic perceptions, the installation also has a visual and haptic effect caused by the characteristics of the material used to construct the work. This was Díaz’s first holophonic environment which was immediately followed by an interactive installation Spin and 7.
Dehibernation was exhibited at the Biennale of Young Art at City Gallery Prague in 1994 and at the Netz Europa exhibition in Linz, Austria.
Visual activism
Robert T. Buck, Director of the Brooklyn Museum from 1983 till 1996 and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery from 1973 till 1982, was the first to use the term “visual activist” in connection with Díaz. Díaz adopted the designation and categorizes much of his work under visual activism.
Sembion (2003-2004)
The project aims to use specially programmed software to transfer speech into visual forms. Voice recognition detects speech used by the viewers in the installations and analyses not the meaning, but the syntax and conventionalized connections, transferring this to a pre-set dictionary of shapes. Using stereo lithography and rapid prototyping, this creates sets of data visualized as systems of meta-blobs. The project was created in cooperation with the Research Centre at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and Jiří Ševčík, a distinguished Czech art theorist.
The project has been presented at Die Algorithmische Revolution at Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Institute of Contemporary Arts London and other venues.
Geometric Death Frequency-141 (2010)
A site-specific installation for MASS MoCA in Massachusetts. Monitoring the space in front of the gallery entrance made it possible to create a model of the movement of solar photons. Individual photons, represented by pixels in the simulation, were replaced with spatial voxels to allow dynamic simulation using Real Flow. Díaz built an animation sequence indicating the sequence of individual phases in the movement of light. The virtual model was then assembled by robots.
Joseph C. Thomson, the Director of MASS MoCA, writes in his text about the exhibition: “As an artist, Díaz is a shape-shifter, though his works are always deeply rooted in physical reality. There is something alchemical or magical about the series of transformations that gave rise to GDF141: the bricks, the clocktower, the window mullions, the glare of windowpanes that, taken together, form our entrance courtyard are reduced to streams of digital data, the photons of reflected light becoming small black spheres meticulously cut, stacked, and glued; the courtyard becomes sculpture but also still contains it ... and all the while Federico remains behind the curtain. If data manipulation sounds dry, this work shows that data too can have metaphoric sweep, fluctuating between stasis and movement, permanence and change, fullness and emptiness.”
Architectural critic and curator Jeffrey Kipnis has described Díaz’s Geometric Death Frequency-141 project as “re-origination”, comparing it to a book-to-film adaptation. “In one sense the film represents the book, yet does so in an entirely new medium, and through this becomes something completely different. In the case of Geometric Death Frequency-141, the “book” is a digital photograph of the museum’s clocktower entry courtyard as taken by the artist, which the artist then transforms into pure data, and modulates using analytical and fluid dynamic modeling techniques, finally rendering the data stream into a three-dimensional sculpture using state-of-the-art computer-aided manufacturing methodologies. The new work thus combines elements of photographic manipulation, data analysis, and computer programming, utilizing new techniques to produce a sculpture completely untouched by human hands.”
Curated by: Joseph C. Thompson
Outside Itself (2011)
The installation was created specifically for the Arsenale at the Venice Biennial 2011 as part of ILLUMInations, an exhibition directed by Bice Curiger. Alanna Heiss curated the project.
The installation was composed of thousands of small black balls grouped into a massive form based on changes in the ambient light as visitors continuously flow by. Two specially adapted robots form and assemble the balls. Each ball represents one photon of light. Optical sensors monitor the impact of light on the space, creating a flow of data and information. The intensity of ambient light changes based on the time of day, the number of visitors to the installation, the trajectories their paths take and the colours of their clothing. The resulting sculpture is literally an “ornament of the masses”.
Eleanor Heartney, a contemporary art critic who writes for Art in America, Artpress, and the author of the Art and Today, says the following about the work in her essay “Federico Díaz: Revelation of the Real”: “Over the last ten years, Díaz has been slowly expanding his vocabulary to take in ever-greater portions of reality. With Outside Itself, he adds real time and movement into his investigation of the interconnectedness of matter, energy, mind, and spirit. Bruce Nauman once created a neon sculpture with a spiralling text that proclaimed “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.” For Nauman, the prankster, the statement was meant ironically. Díaz suggests that we take it completely seriously.”
The essay was published in the Outside Itself catalogue published by Charta Books in 2011.
Curated by: Alanna Heiss
You Welded the Ornament of the Times (2014)
Long-term project of Federico Díaz is based on observing the mass ornament, a reference to research by German philosopher Sigfried Kracauer, a member of the Frankfurt School – a sort of mapping of the specific characteristics of an individual’s movement within their own social unit in various parts of the world. Díaz believes each space is co-created by the distinctive nature of the individual’s movement, tiny distinctions in everyday activities. We all move through our urban environments, consume food, interact with the people in our surroundings, make phone calls, go shopping, point out things that interest us – but each of us does this in a completely unique character that arises from the characteristics of our space. Through his projects, Díaz creates a gradually expanding database of these tiny distinctions, which in the long run may prove crucial to understanding individual identity in an otherwise increasingly globalized world. The central point of the composition comprises a space removed from time. A space where a mechanic is repairing a rickshaw. A mode of transportation that was prohibited from the streets of Beijing this year, as was the way in which rickshaws were made: welding conducted in small workshops. A camera records the mechanic – specifically, six individual segments of his movement, his contact with material, the rickshaw he takes apart and puts back together again as if in an infinite loop.
Walls in the museum acts as a canvases for recording the action; an automated plotter system layers traditional ink on the surface, creating a permanent record of this ephemeral activity. Everything is working at the same time. Man and machine. Layers of the real, the immediate and the recorded blend and merge. Everything extols the only reality of the times.
Curated by: Wang Chunchen
Eccentric Gravity (2015)
The history of Prague Castle’s Belvedere Palace dates back to the 16th century, the times of Ferdinand I of Habsburg, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia, who had the palace built for his coronation ceremony, representing his vision of a new Europe united by peace during his reign. The building was later used as an observatory and as astronomer Tycho de Brahe’s Mathematics House. During the 19th century Czech national revival, Belvedere was to celebrate the Pan-Slavic ideal and Czechness. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it became an exhibition space with a strong connection to the international art scene. Federico Díaz’s project Eccentric Gravity utilises the architectural features of this exceptional Renaissance building, the first of its kind north of the Alps, as the ground plan for a reflection on this rich history while he executes his own vision on the direction of contemporary society. The building’s regular, symmetrical structure collides with the seeming disorder of the unifying principle of the catenary curve, a system of homogeneous, perfectly firm, flexible fibres hanging in a gravitational field. Antonio Gaudí used the hanging chain to build inverse architectural models of arches. Today, when computer-generated planning can make any sort of complicated structure a reality, Díaz returns to the catenary curve as a tool that is independent of our technology, a tool based solely on the basic laws of nature, and uses it to give rise to a city of the future made of artificial stone and geopolymers. This is no actual, concrete city or place, but rather a model for contemplating our dependence on the laws of nature and our own purely material nature. Humans, animals, sculptures, architecture, rock formations – at their very cores they all contain the same minerals, the same materials (though in a different composition) subject to the gravitational field. Amidst the artificial sunlight that Díaz brings into Belvedere and the creative space of the “architect” of our reality, new forms of material communication are generated. The Mathematics House is once again a study, a gallery, and a space for distributing ideas: not the nationalist ideals espoused by 19th century Czech revivalists or the multinational ideals that Ferdinand I strived for, but ideas that are absolutely universal and respect the unifying elements of existence rather than current social contexts.
Curated by: Jérôme Sans
BIG LIGHT (2016)
“Since the Great Augmented Reality War, the global initiative Big Light has been responsible for safeguarding, systematising and distributing human knowledge through augmented reality and artificial pharmaceutical stimuli. Through BIG LIGHT we are able to keep in touch with our history, pushing the new frontiers of human abilities forward to understand the past, present and upcoming days and consequently allowing all citizens the right of equal access to all human knowledge. BIG LIGHT was conceived as a behaviour research lab, enlarged by the chemical department during the War, which was then essential for overcoming this conflict. Later on BIG LIGHT emerged as the architect of our present socio-political structure.”
The Brno House of Arts handed over its historic International Style galleries to the BIG LIGHT initiative and Czech-Argentine artist Federico Díaz, to create an experimental laboratory and its information centre. For several months, the House of Arts’ exhibition spaces have been transformed into scientific facilities for research into the sociological, psychological and even purely physiological aspects of human interaction with augmented and virtual worlds, worlds that now permeate the everyday life of our society. Accelerating technological developments serve more and more as extensions of the human body’s capabilities, rather than mere instruments we control, and as such cause blurred connection with material reality. It is unclear to what extent we control our environment and to what extent we are, on the other hand, controlled by the achievements of our own inventions.
Curated by: Jen Kratochvil
Other works
Exhibitions
Since the early 1990s Federico Díaz has exhibited at leading festivals and new media group exhibitions in Europe and Japan. His first solo exhibition was at City Gallery Prague in 1997, and since that time his solo exhibitions in the Czech Republic have been held at the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Mánes Exhibition Hall, Prague Castle Riding School and the National Gallery in Prague.
He has also exhibited at numerous international exhibitions and prominent institutions, including the Institute of Contemporary Art and Royal Institute of British Architects in London, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (2004), Fondation Electricité de France in Paris (2003), Ars Electronica Festival in Linz (2005) and Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2005). Important recent projects have included MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts (2010) and the 53rd Venice Biennial (2011).
SLS object from his Resonance project is a part of permanent collection at the newly opened FRAC Centre in Orleans, France.
His work is also presented in many private collections, including the Albright Knox collection or collection of Mr. Xavier Guerrand-Hermès.
- List of selected exhibitions by Federico Díaz
Awards
He received a special award from the Nicola Trussardi Foundation for his work Generatrix at Milano Europe Futuro Presente in 2001. In 2007 he received the Premio Internazionale “Lorenzo il Magnifico” award at the Florence Biennale for his project Sakura.
From 1996 till 2002 he was a finalist for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, which is granted to Czech artists under 35 years of age.