Born in Belgrade and based in Los Angeles, Filip Kostic is an internationally acclaimed multidisciplinary artist with a keen eye for technology and reflection on it. The result is a polyhedral oeuvre that includes immersive and new media, video, sculpture and performances (thus far) through which he spotlights the condition of Man deeply hybridised with the virtual world.

Filip mixes the (pseudo)authentic and ordinary life of flesh and bone and society with the pixels of gaming and the entire digital world. With the Bed PC, Filip Kostic VS Filip Kostic, Fortnite and Booty Bay Open Studio, among others, he invades the former into the latter and the latter into the former. Many - almost all - experience the computer and the internet by following the game that these two entities propose; Filip Kostic, on the other hand, grasps and twists them in his hands, understanding them from the outside and from the inside. This opens up possibilities for interrelation, referencing, transposition, reversal.

Moreover, by transposing reality into the virtual and having it explained to the latter, it becomes more graspable. A bit like in adult cartoons.

In your software-opera Running At Frame Rate (2020) you auscultated the computer's heart and made it speak, say what it was feeling while it was operating. Do you believe that machines will develop an emotional tissue like or almost like ours? When can something be said to be alive?

Yeah, that project is an attempt to make a relationship between the player, the simulated image being generated, and the hardware rendering the image. The software would push until it was close to crashing and then back down, constantly teasing that edge of failure. The computer only speaks to the player in the language of its content. It’s a narrative piece so it speaks conversationally, the narrative being driven dynamically by the performance of the computer it is playing on. If it is telling us how it's feeling, it is doing so in a diagnostic sense.
I hope that machines don’t develop any sort of emotional capability. It feels like a boring and wasteful use of what machines are good at - performing remedial tasks to enable Fully Automated Luxury Communism ;-)

You are probing deeply into the meanders of the digital, even sleeping in it. So, at this point, what gives you more confidence and pleasure between looking at a landscape completely rendered by digital technology and a real one? How much do you value the experience of nature - be it the less anthropized countryside or the urban?

I definitely value the natural world a lot. I know I perform the opposite sentiment online with a hustleperneur ‘never stop posting,’ persona and my general reverence for computers… but I get a lot from being out and about, especially with people I love. Believe it or not, before my practice and my professional life placed me on the computer, I spent just as much time in the ocean as I did on World of Warcraft.

Case-study. Speaking of the extreme contamination of the virtual into the real and fictitious identities, what do you think of the instagram entity @poorspigga?

She’s a friend! I got drinks with her the other night – I am a fan of her project and look forward to seeing how the character continues to accelerate.

Can you imagine a realistic future scenario regarding our daily relationship with the Internet and virtual reality fifty, hundred years from now, in physical and psychological terms? What will we lose and what will we gain about ourselves? Also, given that the immateriality of software and algorithms is ironically based on physical components, how do you think relentless technological development will marry with the planet's scarcity of resources and its pollution? Is it futuristic?

The way these tools integrate into the zeitgeist is phenomenally banal. It really only appears strange when zoomed out or isolated enough. I always joke that we will be voting for our government officials and on policy in Fortnite soon, but I think there is truth in that joke. There is a concerted effort by these platforms to create lasting power by integrating themselves into the social fabric , for the experience of being on them to be gamified , and for them to present an income stream for users. The way these things sound when you look at their implications is pretty wild, but they end up manifesting in pretty normal ways… like an inconspicuous register to vote button on instagram. I don’t think this is good.
I think I subscribe to the Holly Jean Buck model, from her book After Geoengineering, of building a sustainable future where the companies that produce these platforms and technologies are used alongside other larger governmental forces to get to a stable and inhabitable planet - this looks like potentially embracing goofy “NVIDIA is going green” PR stunts AND kelp farming, etc. I don’t imagine that we will stop producing graphics cards, servers, processors, and other hardware that is reliant on scarce resources, but we’ve gotta believe that there is a way to do it better. I don’t have time for nihilism.

The lines between real and digital, which physically is less and less tangible, could be said to be like that between form and content, that is, nonexistent since the two elements are one identity. We ourselves are the technology and the virtual worlds we create. From this scenario, it seems that a human being experiences a willingness to dream and to enclose himself in his dream. What do you think and why according to you Man has taken the virtual path by encapsulating reality within this alley as opposed to another? Is there an anthropological explanation for this inner movement of his that can be delineated from the others?

It is really difficult to confront the brutal exploitation of everyday life in late capitalism. It is much easier to confront the atrocious conditions by offsetting them into fantasy – we see it all the time in liberal American politics: Bad Politician = Voldemort, Good Politician = Harry Potter, Good Female Politician = Hermoine – these characters have completed story arcs, they represent idealized versions of all of our nuances, including things like idealized victimhood. World building or creating virtual facsimiles makes a ton of sense and is rewarded within contemporary culture – it’s symptomatic of accelerated capitalism, not the cause of it. It is imperative to note that despite escaping into our dream space, material conditions do not get any better - just as you say, the virtual and the physical don’t actually have any space between them. That being said, creating these fantasies and spending time in them is mostly good… Imagining worlds is how we iterate on our own, we could actually use a lot more imagining of new worlds.
I’m not sure that there is a direct causality between a government not providing something like healthcare or basic services to improve the material conditions of its people and said people understanding the world around them through a concatenation of intellectual properties, but it certainly feels like it is not in our self interest to continue to do so.

Can one ask an artist if they are working on new (and thrilling) projects, and, if so, how would you answer?

I am working on a few things right now! I’ve been obsessed with bas relief sculptures for a while and have been trying to make my own. There’s something there about myth, lore, and tradition that I like, and the form is really enticing to me. Right now I’m just experimenting with material but have been enjoying the process of sculpting them on my computer -> printing -> making a mold of the print -> casting them out of different materials like wax or hydrocal plaster.
I’ve also been working on these figurative sculptures of professional gamers’ hands - specifically their mouse grips and keyboard hand positions. These grips and positions are really irregular and look uncomfortable, but are the way in which these high performing gamers hold their devices. I’m thinking about the failed interface between users and their computer, sport/competition and masculinity, and classical figurative sculpture.

In 2024 I am going to be joining my friends Tomi Faison and Harris Rosenblum for a residency at lower_cavity where we will be manifesting neo-china from the future… watch this space…
And on the slow rolling front, I’m working on a really large project that started from a note to myself that I wrote in 2019 which was “Start an e-sports team as an artwork.” Maybe I’ll keep that one more mysterious ;-)

Are you attached to your home country, Serbia, and in what ways?

I have a lot of love for Serbia. All of us who spent our early life or our formative years in the 90’s in Serbia have a complicated relationship with the place we’re from… I will always have love for and will likely continue to make work in some ways about that place, at varying degrees of directness. Lately, I have been really thinking about my affinity for Turbofolk, or the idea of Turbo in general, which I attribute entirely to my growing up there.

Favorite movie, series and book?

Favorite movie is hard because I Love Movies…. But maybe recently I’d say John Wick 1-4, series would be between Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Forged in Fire, and book is The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin