Interview: Carsten Nicolai

The visual artist and musician on his creative practice and fascination with electromagnetic waves.

Carsten Nicolai is a restless researcher, constantly updating his own sculptures, video and sound installations, or, under his moniker Alva Noto, his musical output.

Nicolai’s video installation unicolor featured as a crucial part of the LUX exhibition, held at 180 Studios in 2021. An impressively large LED wall that confronts the viewer with looped colour patterns that are constantly challenging our perception, unicolor reflects Nicolai’s ongoing boundary pushing artistic practice.

This feature was originally published in Fact’s F/W 2021 issue, which is available to buy here.

MAX DAX: Carsten Nicolai, where have I reached you?

CARSTEN NICOLAI: I am currently spending the last days of this year’s summer retreat on one of the many Elafiti Islands. As we speak I am gazing at the endless sea and the distant horizon line.

MD: Is that what you would call an inspiring setup?

CN: That’s why I’m here. Right now, I couldn’t imagine being in the mountains. I am reading Homer’s Odyssey again, and I like to imagine the idea that I am stuck here and, like Odysseus, cannot leave this island for the next few years. I generally like fantastic sailor’s stories. I also like Jules Verne’s Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Two hearts beat in my chest: I long to travel, but I also want to return home.

MD: In other words: You will never find peace of mind?

CN: When you are traveling with a ship you are accepting the eternity of the universe. I at least like to accept that I am only the smallest particle in the universe. To feel small actually helps me to remain humble. To look at the undisguised sea of stars above me helps me to recalibrate and to calm a restless mind. We have gotten so used to skies that are polluted by city lights that cruising on a ship and staring at the night skies really can reset you.

MD: You are rebooting yourself to be able to work creatively again?

CN: Exactly. The older I get the longer it takes. And the fact that we are recording this conversation now is just another proof that being on a remote island doesn’t mean that you are disconnected from the world. The longer you stay away from home the tighter you get reconnected to digital communication channels. That’s not necessarily helpful. To quote Mario Puzo: ‘Just when you think you are out, they draw you back in!’

MD: You’d probably have to be very rich and on a truly remote island without Internet…

CN: I envy guys like Marco Polo a bit who’d leave Venice for five years to explore the world. I mean, he had a wife and children. He’d leave the lagoon and return half a decade later. This is unimaginable in our new time where our planet has become a digital village and where society – or the art world – expects from you to be reachable 24/7. I don’t want to be separated from my family, but I love the idea to disappear for a longer while. Planet Earth has shrunk, so to speak.

MD: Why do you like the idea of being the ‘smallest particle’ in the universe?

CN: I simply like to accept that we humans cannot outsmart the power of nature – and the universe of course.

MD: But you do work in annual retreats, don’t you?

CN: Yes, I guess I cannot stop. But I force myself to handwrite everything into sketchbooks first. Also, I tend to write aimlessly. I try not to focus on a new project, but to stress test new ideas. My ultimate goal is to have no goal at all. But it is a long way to reach that state of mind. My way to get there is to jot down my thoughts into these sketchbooks. When thoughts reappear that I had forgotten in the meantime I draw the conclusion that these thoughts might be more profound than others. Writing down everything that comes to mind without feeling the compulsion to ‘finish’ it can be a very strong compass. That’s why, in hindsight, some of my projects have become long-term projects that I continue to explore – sometimes over the course of decades. Other projects will probably never see the light of day. But at least I have written them down somewhere.

MD: The most beautiful book by Franz Kafka is his diary. It is filled with unfinished stories, poems, sketches and thoughts.

CN: I believe that you don’t have to necessarily execute a project or an idea. According to a concept by Ludwig Wittgenstein, you can bring an idea to life simply by formulating it. In that sense, an idea is like a substance, but an ephemeral one. And I, as an artist, like to work with ephemeral ideas that we can’t really get hold of.

MD: One of the concepts that pulls through your artistic life is an early work of yours, telefunken. By triggering a TV with an audio signal you get unforeseeable visual results.

CN: I am fascinated by electromagnetic waves – they encompass everything from light to colour and sound. Depending on which frequency spectrum I focus on, my work will be visual or musical. But for me this is all one entity. I can lose myself in the microscopic details of such waves. I don’t make any claims to formulate a bigger picture. When I started experimenting with the idea of media transfer I used oscilloscopes. Only later did I start to use computers. In telefunken, I create images with sounds. The TV set that I had bought for my mother when she had to stay in hospital became useless when she died. And as I have not watched television for quite some decades now, I didn’t have any use for it. But I wanted to find the proverbial ghost in that machine. I believe that a signal is a signal. You can take an audio signal and feed it into a video port. The signal is still the signal, but instead of sound you see colours and forms. And vice versa. Trial and error. My aim is to visualise or to make audible frequencies that would otherwise remain invisible or inaudible for us human beings with our limited range of perception. In that sense telefunken clearly became a blueprint for many works to follow.

MD: Why did you stop watching TV?

CN: A TV is a transmitter that turns you into a consumer. But if you use the TV set against the grain it can become a producer of content. The machine stops being a tool to enslave you; it becomes creative itself. That was a real epiphany because I realised that I had just taken the freedom to experiment and to run a machine differently than it had been designed. Doing the ‘wrong’ thing in the ‘wrong’ moment led to something deeply meaningful.

MD: Would you call it a dialogue between man and machine?

CN: Absolutely. An animated conversation between a human and the ghost in the machine. I have always been interested in finding the proverbial error in a system. I admire the work of Takashi Ikegami. He experimented with loop systems where he would program computers to repeatedly compute the same complex arithmetical operation. He waited patiently until the computer began to produce errors. For him that was the first proof of artificial intelligence, a first seed. In that moment I realised that we have to rethink the concept of the error and of failure. If an error occurs that will eventually lead to correcting the error, then that error has to be reevaluated as a starting point for an evolutionary process. In that sense an error has a positive connotation. The error forces you to leave your comfort zone and to take action. As a human being you can only learn and progress from such experiences.

MD: You learn because you are forced to take a deviation. The French situationist Guy Debord has coined the term dérive – to deliberately take a wrong road whilst walking towards a certain destination. Debord claims that this routine of breaking with routines will inevitably lead to new epiphanies.

CN: I am totally with you. Coming back to Homer and his Odyssey, I want to point out that I don’t understand the story as a misguided journey. As cognitive beings we want to understand the world, or the universe around us. And from Homer we learn that the countless deviations of his journey lead to deeper insights than taking the direct route. To err can sometimes open closed or formerly invisible doors to new spaces of faith and cognition. We are definitely capable of creating our own cohesive weltbild.

MD: How does unicolor fit into the picture?

CN: Firstly, unicolor is the result or an extension of all the works that I have done before. It’s like building a house. You start with the basement and, stone after stone, you build the house. If you add the concept of deviation and errors leading to new insights and ideas, unicolor probably could be considered a cousin or distant nephew of telefunken. Over the years I became increasingly interested in the nature of colour. What is a colour? I started an extensive series of works that all had the prefix uni- in their title – unitape, unidisplay, unicolor, etc. All these different works circle around the concept of perception.

In unicolor I try to understand colour. How do we perceive colour? I’ve read this amazing book Laws of Seeing by Wolfgang Metzger that really has left a lasting impression on me. Following that trail I eventually realised that your own brain is actually interpreting the reality around you as colours, and unicolor examines the psychology of our colour perception. Fundamental starting points for the work are Goethe’s work on chromatics, as well as studies, texts and theories by scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz, Werner Heisenberg and Wilhelm Ostwald, and the visual artist and associate professor of chromatics Eckhard Bendin.

unicolor is an 18-metre-long, large-scale video installation with 16 modules that loops over a period of about 30 minutes. At times, the entire screen is filled with a vivid, warm colour gradation, while at others rhythmic patterns of primarily cool colours move up and down the screen like the rising and falling of a barometer. At yet another point, the three primary colours in light – red, green, and blue – gradually blend together and become white. In all of the modules, the selection of the tones is not based on arbitrary, intuitive decisions by me, but rather serves to demonstrate some sort of chromatic theory or optical rule.

Floor-to-ceiling mirrors are mounted on the walls on either end of the screen so that the 16 modules extend into infinity, giving the viewer the experience of full-body immersion in a chromatic space as vast as space itself. The question behind all this is simple: Why do we see things that are not there? Our brain is constantly telling us that that what we see in front of our eyes is reality. But that is just an assumption. With unicolor I examine how that perception can unconsciously play tricks on us.

MD: What tricks is the human brain playing with our perception?

CN: Imagine watching a horse riding through a forest. At all times while you look at the horse a large part of it is hidden behind trees. But because the horse is moving, the human brain assembles also the not-visible parts of the horse into a full silhouette. A similar effect takes place when you add a contrasting colour next to the color you are gazing at. You begin to see something that isn’t there. The human brain is a real trickster and I am truly fascinated by its pocket tricks.

This feature was originally published in Fact’s F/W 2021 issue, which is available to buy here.

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