Spray

Initially an apprentice gardener, then a landscape architect, Carsten Nicolai began his artistic career as a multimedia artistin 1986. Nicolal's works generate perceptible and experiential audiovisual signals by exploring time, space, light, and sound. Often collaborating with sci- entists, Nicolai adheres to the Renaissance ideals of humanism: a profound interest in knowledge and experience in the fields of science, art, literature, and philosophy that combine to create a new understanding of the world. Nicolai's art and music adhere to an overtly formalist aesthetic. He attrib- utes his restraint on content and his focus on the purism of mathematics and physics to growing up in East Germany where everything was inscribed with political propaganda. His minimalist installations create experiential spaces that are sustained by opposites: lightness/darkness; material/immaterial; visi- ble/invisible; positive/negative. In addition to working with video, sound, and painting, Nicolai has created electronic music for many years under the pseu- donym Alva Noto. He runs his own record label, Raster-Noton, with fellow musician Olaf Bender, as a platform for innovative digital music and experi- mental projects in art and science. While Nicolai acknowledges that there is potential emotional sensibility in the work, he explains: "I try to keep a balance between conceptual or intellec- tual 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." Nicolai has a predilection for early twentieth-century experiments with elec tricity and "analog" mechanical apparatuses. He favors the clinical look of the science laboratory in his installations and titles his works with simple, descrip tive words such as anti, reflex, syn, chron, void, sign, polar, spray, or tele- funken, telefunken is perhaps an exception, as the work carries nostalgic, or emotional overtones, at least for Germans of a certain generation. Telefunken was the telegraph address of the Gesellschaft für drahtlose Telegraphie (Society for Wireless Telegraphy), which was founded in 1903 by the tiny largest German electronic corporations, AEG and SIEMENS. In the 1980s became AEG-TELEFUNKEN, which manufactured radios and television sets well as produced many popular music recordings. The company's bankruptcy in 1985 signaled the end of the electronic era in Germany. (The name Telefunken means literally, "cable from afar.") telefunken (2000) is an alluringly simple work that translates audio signals into television images. The audio signals are fed directly into a television mon itor from a CD player. There are thirty tracks on the CD: the first twenty are based on impulse frequencies, which the television interprets as linear struc tures; the last ten are test frequencies of 50-8000 hertz and white noise. The width of the abstract horizontal stripes on the screen is synchronized to the width of the impulse frequencies. telefunken anti (2004) takes the previous version one step further by depriving the viewer of the images produced by the CD. Two flat-screen mon itors are installed facing the wall, so that the visual images emitted by the monitors cast a ghostly halo around the monitors. Only shadows of light emerge from behind the monitors, bringing the "nonvisual" into being, repre senting the materiality of what both can and cannot be seen. spray (2005), a video projection with sound, is designed to be viewed while resting or sitting on a black rubber platform to enable total absorption into the work. The idea behind spray is a computer-generated rendering of the physical properties of a stealth aircraft, which Nicolai poetically circum scribes as a "Lockheed quartz crystal": A black Lockheed quartz crystal is observed at angles: various surfaces are explored. Refraction and deflection give way to a soft absorption in which all light, all information, and all data are drawn into the interior-dissolution of quartz, atomization of crystal: spray. All fragments suspended in space are always part of their original form, each fragment contains the blueprint of its own making, strings of codes, data evaporates, picture information begins to disintegrate. New mechanisms evolve, slowing down and imped- ing readability. These notions lead to the formation of strategies that not only soak up information but also diffuse it. A 2004 self-portrait consists of magnetic tapes on which Nicolai's video portrait is recorded, running vertically across the aluminum surface of the pic- ture. The resulting dense linear structure is literally an analogue to Nicolai's artistic process: I like to work under very precise conditions and in that sense scientific research and artistic processes are more or less the same.
Text written by Curator Klaus Ottmann for the exhibition catalog.