Interplaying with different media, Filip Custic is a Spanish-Croatian artist based in Madrid who unravels between installation, performance, photography and digital, aiming at the exploration of identity.

His work starts from digital technology and returns to the body, completing the cycle and restoring to the former its complementary roundness, its soft and vivid stereometry. As if the digital evolution was meant to be physical, cyborg, and that at the moment most are still within a uniquely digital median phase - where the previous one was pure mechanical and analog and the final one will be the digital applied to the physical human. In this sense Filip seems to be ahead of his time and one of its forerunners.

The most striking example is the filter that we are familiar with on instagram, applied to our faces caught on camera and therefore still external extensions of us, which Filip finally returns to a real face.

A cyborg art without the usual cyberpunk aesthetic, but rather glam, sexy, provocative, elegant and lustful.

You are obsessed with the body - and what more interesting body than your own as well as a wonderfully curvy woman - and its possibilities for metamorphosis and paradox both digitally and physically. You give the impression that you were a child prodigy assembling and disassembling and rebuilding dolls as a child. Could you outline where this specifically directed interest comes from and where it has its purpose, or rather, what is the vision?

I think we live in an age of ego but also of self-love, so I think our age is very narcissistic so in my work I'm interested in questioning who I am who I was and who I'm going to be. Existentialism in itself is the subject that interests me most right now.

Regarding my artistic practice, and since my beginnings as a fashion photographer, I have learned that little by little, project by project, too many aesthetic canons have filtered into my work that I don't really agree with. I don't reject them because I like the concepts of idealisation, elevation and telling things that vibrate with the present. But right now I'm transforming myself and I don't want to be just the kind of artist who only portrays that kind of aesthetic, idealised beauty. I like to observe beauty also in more raw images. To see diverse beauty wherever it is.

How did your career begin and what, according to you, has brought you so far today?

I am 100% self-taught, yes, it's amazing and it gives you a lot of freedom. I think the education system has expired, the traditional education system makes me anxious. Being self-taught gives me a freedom that interests me, the negative is that it is more complicated and sometimes takes more time. But I like it better.

From then on, and always learning different skills, I worked in photography and art direction for different projects, artists and brands. At a certain point I decided to pursue my career as an artist, for which I have the support of the Spanish institution Colección SOLO.

What is the project you have designed to date that has satisfied you the most, and why?

I think that my last project, Dreamcore, it's on my top five projects, top three maybe, because I experimented with a new tool and I presented in a very interesting place, which is Plaza del Sol in Madrid. I present it on the street. So it was a very gentle and satisfying experience. And I didn't rush on the deadline, which sometimes happens on this one. Everything came at its time and everything was very well organized, so I think that could be one of them.

Identity. What is today's concept of identity that has emerged in your philosophical-artistic reflection over the course of your practice? What is the identity relationship you have with yourself?

In my projects I work at the intersection between technology and the human body, exploring how technological objects can be catalysts for celebrating the diversity of identities. Mirrors and screens become symbols of our contemporary obsession with images and selfies, while other elements I often use in my artistic practice are references to science and art history to add layers of meaning to projects.

I like to look at human behaviour from the outside, like those new cultures we invent out of thin air: memes, or the idea of selfies, or the idea of wearables. The idea of identity that we humans tend to have of ourselves, or how we classify ourselves as humans based on our bodies. The truth is that I feel that if I were alone, I would create inspired by other factors, but because I live in a community and socialise, I absorb a lot of the concepts of the group and group identity in order to create.

What makes you saddest and what makes you most joyful?

What makes me really sad is, like, when something ends sometimes makes me sad. I don't like when good things. Obviously good things end. I don't like that. That makes me sad. And I love being aligned with myself.

Would you ever leave the house dressed - in your estimation - badly?

Fashion changes all the time. So I think maybe it's a great look today, maybe in the future I think it's horrible, but I always try everything. I try to experiment.

What do you think about AI? Do you use it?

I think that artificial intelligence machine learning is a good tool. For me, it's a good tool that can support a human creator. I think that by itself the result is interesting, but it always needs human input.

So I see it as an amazing tool to facilitate some parts of the process of creating. Because sometimes I've struggled to find the element, the picture or the object that I needed for a work. I always say that, technology is a tool created by humans, which are neither good nor bad in themselves, it depends on the use we make of them.

You stated that Spain is experiencing a golden age of creativity. What are the places you recommend us to attend at the moment and the personalities to follow?

Yes, I said that some years ago. I feel now everything is changing. New generations are appearing, and I love that. I feel it's a different moment from when I said that. At the same time, I think Spain has great creativity. There are new tools appearing the time, and new people. So it's very fun to be in the creative circles and see other creatives, how they experiment and how they think. I like to be in that surround.