Carlos Adrián Serna

Carlos Adrián Serna (Bogotá) is an electronic artist and developer of technologies for art. Trained in engineering and computer graphics, he has spent over a decade building the software, hardware, and instruments his own work demands — particularly when the necessary tool does not yet exist.

His work is concerned with what refuses to be defined. In Primer Cero, the piece he has developed with Ymoov since 2021 following a residency at CERN, the question of origin dismantles any mathematical tool that attempts it: divisions by zero, divergences to infinity, indeterminate results. An asymptotic nature that allows one to stand at the edge without ever being pinned down. It is the point where, for Serna, mathematics gives way to poetry.

That indeterminacy is not merely a subject: it is a constructive principle. Serna does not make closed works but systems whose outcome no one can anticipate. Entalpía (2015) — a two-metre membrane scanned by a 3D camera and translated into light and sound by a program he wrote — does not exist unless bodies activate it; each body produces a different piece that will never recur. A research paper from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes in Buenos Aires put it precisely: what these artists build is not the final form of the work but the medium capable of creating it.

Hence, too, his open-source practice. The developments behind Primer Cero are released under Creative Commons — source code, plans, choreographies, conceptualisation — because a work conceived as a medium is not exhausted by whoever signs it.

A second line has run through his work since 2019: how machines see us. It began with getUser(0);, a sculpture of tension about the gaze of systems; continued with RedEsCubrimiento del cuerpo, made with Ymoov and presented at CERN; and arrived in 2023 in Belgrade, where, during a Culture Moves Europe residency, he built a performative installation that applied facial recognition to its own audience. "It is easy not to encounter resistance when the problem is unknown," he wrote at the time. He holds that technical feasibility is not sufficient grounds to legitimise a technological implementation, and he practises what he argues: in 2024, having benchmarked the most recent detection models for an eye-tracking system of his own design, he returned to classical computer vision because it performed twice as fast.

He works with light, sound, code, hardware, and the body, with no hierarchy among them. He is cofounder of the company Ymoov and of the collectives OsciLab and Maracuyá Lab. He has been artist in residence at CERN (Suratómica / Art@CMS, Geneva, 2019), at GRAME — Centre National de Création Musicale's Lips Lab (Lyon, 2023), and at Kvaka 22 (Belgrade, 2023). From 2022 to 2025 he served on the board of AADN — Assemblée Artistique des Diversités Numériques in Lyon. His work has been shown in Switzerland, France, Serbia, the United States, Costa Rica, Peru, Panama, and Colombia.

He lives between France and Colombia. He is an associate artist at Soropila — Santa María Etxea in Hélette, French Basque Country, where he is based six months a year and helps propose and shape the house's artistic activity. In Colombia he is developing El Precipicio, a space for collective creation in Quipile, Cundinamarca.