Carsten Nicolai
German artist and musician (born 1965). Working at the boundaries of music, art, and science, he makes installations that address several senses at once, taking physical phenomena such as the frequencies of sound and light as his subject. As a musician he works under the name alva noto, and he is also known as a co-founder of the electronic music label raster-noton.
Biography
Born in 1965 in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz), East Germany. From 1985 to 1990 he studied landscape architecture in Dresden. He is now based in Berlin and Chemnitz. Since 2015 he has been professor of digital and time-based media at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.
Style
Grounded in minimal expression, his work makes heavy use of mathematical patterns such as grids and codes, and of self-organizing structures. His art works include "Wolken" (2002), "Tired Light" (2007), and the "Moiré" series (2010). He took part in documenta X in 1997 and in the Venice Biennale in 2001 and 2003.
Music and labels
In 1994 he founded the label noton.archiv für ton und nichtton, which merged with Raster in 1999 to become raster-noton. raster-noton was run jointly with Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider.
As alva noto he has collaborated widely: he made several albums with Ryuichi Sakamoto and co-wrote the music for the film The Revenant (2015). With Ryoji Ikeda he forms the unit cyclo., and with Blixa Bargeld he works as ANBB.
To verify
- Reports that raster-noton split again into raster and noton in 2017 (confirmed only on Wikipedia)
- Date of birth (Wikipedia gives September 18, 1965, but the official site gives only the year)
References
- Mentioned in
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