Carsten Nicolai - Creating space between things

1 May 2005 Category: Features, Recommended

Carsten Nicolai was first invited to Japan for a concert in 1999, when he played with Ryoji Ikeda and met Ryuichi Sakamoto for the first time. Since then, ongoing projects have kept him coming back. Also named aka.noto and alva noto, Carsten Nicolai is one of the most inovative experimental electronic musicians and contemporary artists from Germany. He has had numerous exhibitions and sound installations in various prestigious museums around the world, where he uses sound along with visual and tactile art to create his own microscopic view of creative processes. The aesthetics of his analytic work remind of a futuristic science lab merged with puristic minimalism. In Japan, he is currently showing his video piece “spray” as part of the “open nature” exhibition at the ICC.

Interview by Uleshka

Carsten, you used to work as a gardener and studied architecture originally. How and when did you get involved into art and music?

During my studies I already started getting into fine arts. I was always interested in music, but around 1993/94 i started making music myself. Moving within the creative scene, I was involved in art-bands, performances and experimentation of all kinds. I made a lot of different experiments with tapes at that time, until i finally realized around 1995, that sound is an interesting subject for me. Ever since then sound got more and more integrated into my art works, musically as well as physically.

Where would you position yourself? Are you rather a musician or a visual artist?

Talking about me and my work, both are true and necessary. I don’t want to limit myself to either sound or visual. I always try hard to arrange all media in a way so that it expresses what I want - this is not limited to one medium alone and varies from case to case. I needed a long time to deal with that myself and still it is difficult for people to understand the complexity of the work. One often thinks that using 2 different things like visual and sound lead to 2 different conclusions - to a different content - but in in my case it is all one.

Your work is very analytical. What is it that you are trying to find out? What is the idea behind your abstract constructions?

The subject of my work has a lot to do with general, artistic matters, questions like: What is creativity? Where do we come from? What are our motors? What is coincidence? What is logic? My work is about those questions reaching from natural science to philosophy, binding all media together.

When starting to create an art piece, how do you balance sound and visuals? Do you always start off, having both in your head?

Some things can be perfectly expressed by sound alone and images would only be disturbing. Other times, sound would be possible, but visuals are much stronger and closer to what I want to express and then again, they sometimes overlap perfectly. It really always depends on the case. Theoretically both are possible from the start, but I mostly just let the work go its own way.

Do you then prefer the opportunity to create very complex exhibitions - to have the full range, or do you prefer to concentrate on singular pieces, giving full attention to separate mediums?

You cannot always make such big exhibitions, because they consume too much time and energy. I just had a big exhibition in Frankfurt showing 20 art pieces created in the last 6 years. In such kind of exhibition, the complexity of the subject can be easily understood by the amount and variety of work itself. On the other hand, when making a singular piece, like “spray” also shown at the ICC, this single video installation has to function in the same complex way, expressing the same amount of information, like that huge exhibition in Frankfurt. On a different level, just the sound by itself or one single little fragment of the spray video has to carry and communicate just as much as the whole (installation).

Is that the core of your work then, that one piece communicates just as much as the whole?

No, there are a lot of different cores. Actually - the core itself is invisible. It is something closer to a rotation, a process, a circling around something. When I define polarities in my work, I actually create the space between things. I point to the question I am actually interested in, without naming it.

Spray is actually the third part of a series called transall cycle where you quote “Speed of data-flow is equivalent to the speed of our time. In an era when virtual products of our ideas are expanding, we are simultaneously positioning a calm point in which to settle ourselves.” This sounds very poetic in contrast to your very conceptional work. How important is an emotional approach for you?

I try to keep a balance between conceptional or intellectual comprehension and emotional understanding. It is important for me that a certain depth and variety of both exist next to each other. I am very careful not to sacrifice the one for the other.

That graphic you showed during the “meet the artist” talk here at the ICC points out how extremely conceptual your work is based. Is there still any space for coincidence and free expression?

There is always room for coincidence. Every individual decision is nothing but coincidence, every artistic decision is coincidence. Starting off, all options are always open, but as soon as you choose something, you inevitably limit yourself. If you go for B, A is out. Things might seem simple, might seem logic, but in fact there are so many factors influencing you to then finally go for B - it is such a complex matter we live within, it is impossible to track logic and decision making really, so therefore each choice can actually only be seen as coincidence.

How do you actually make your sounds?

They are all digitally created within the computer. I usually create sounds and have different generators running over it. Recently, I use more and more raw data of computers, interpreted as sounds. You know you can open a word-file as a picture or the other way round. I do the same with sounds, so i would for example open an email as a sound, or a picture as sound… mostly, it doesn’t work that easily, because programs write specific codes on their data, but there is enough shareware out to convert the file-endings and so on. I work a lot with that kind of raw data.

How and when did you actually start to collaborate with Ryuichi Sakamoto?

He came to see me when I played in Japan for the first time - together with Ryoji Ikeda. Ever since then we got along very well. He really liked my music, so this is when I got to make these remixes for him. Back then, he offered all kinds of different material for me to choose from. I was much more interested in his piano pieces, than for let’s say, the electronic pieces he gave me. In the end I went for a really simple, pure piano piece. The idea was to add something to what was already there, to then have a piece in the end where the separation is clearly noticeable.

“Vrioon” was your first album, “Insen” could be seen as the continuation of your collaboration. What is it like to be working together?

Ryuichi is a very open, interested person. It is a growing process and some kind of symbiosis when we work together.

So far, we have only really been working in the studio, doing sessions. Now that we will be going on tour in October, we have to translate our studio work into a live situation. Puristic piano melodies can coexist next to electronic sounds and enrich each other - that is actually the beauty and positivity of this project.

Quite recently, you started to employ people assisting you with your work, in order to be able to make bigger projects, like for example the Syn-chron exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, which will also come to the YCAM in Japan this December.

This installation is a real gateway, a hybrid not only between art and music, light and sound, but also experimenting in the fields of architecture and science. Reaching out that far, what could your future plans be? What other big projects do you have in mind?

I am very much in line with my work. Surely, there are things I would want to realize, but for now I mainly have to discuss that with myself. I just finished my big solo exhibition “anti reflex” at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/Main and there are a lot of upcoming performances and exhibitions this year.
 At the end of this month, I will perform at the cut&splice event in London and there is a meeting of art and science in Latvia in November - just to mention a few. For any further, future projects, I first of all have to step back a little and rethink what the next bigger step could be.

Thank you very much for your time.

2 Comments

1. I just saw “Spray” at the S.M.A.K and that was truly amazing. Great art.

   Posted by: Grayback on December 31st, 2005 at 9:11 pm

2. thanks

   Posted by: bursa evden eve nakliyat on March 30th, 2009 at 9:39 pm

Name

Website

• Similar Articles
• » Meet the artist: Carsten Nicolai and Markus Peljhan
• » Bjørn Melhus- setting up at Spiral
• » Music photography… and some background stories!
• » matt - fresh interior design
• » Snoopy exhibition

• Share and Enjoy:
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• Playtime Vol.2 - Experimental DeluxeCategory: Events & Exhibitions Japan
  April 14, 2005

Notice

As of December 31, 2008, PingMag and sister site PingMag MAKE are both on extended hiatus, and will not be updated for the foreseeable future. We are eternally grateful for your fantastic support over the years.

Search