Carsten Nicolai

Carsten Nicolai was born in 1965 in Chemnitz, Germany, and lives and works in Berlin and Chemnitz. He is a visual artist, composer, and musician whose interdisciplinary practice operates at the intersection of art, music, and science. His work seeks to overcome the separation between artistic genres and sensory perceptions, making phenomena such as sound and light frequencies perceptible through both visual and auditory means. Nicolai’s artistic practice is strongly informed by scientific and mathematical reference systems. He works with grids, codes, error, randomness, and self-organizing structures, investigating the relationships between micro- and macrostructures and the ways in which complex processes can generate perceptual and aesthetic forms. His installations often have a minimalist character and translate scientific phenomena into visual, spatial, and acoustic experiences, creating situations in which sound, light, image, and space become interconnected. Alongside his visual art, Nicolai has developed an extensive practice in electronic music under the pseudonyms **noto** and **Alva Noto**. He founded the label noton.archiv für ton und nichtton in 1994, which later merged with raster in 1999 to become raster-noton. His musical work includes collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Ryoji Ikeda, with whom he formed the project Cyclo, as well as collaborations with other musicians and composers. Nicolai has participated in major international exhibitions since the 1990s, including documenta X in 1997 and the 49th and 50th Venice Biennales in 2001 and 2003. His large-scale video installation *unidisplay* was presented in Montreal, Milan, and Frankfurt in 2012 and 2013, while his work has also been shown at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, and the Yokohama Triennale. In 2014, Nicolai received the Grand Prize in the Art Division of the 17th Japan Media Arts Festival for *crt mgn*, a media installation that transforms electromagnetic phenomena into visual and acoustic experience. The work uses neon tubes, video monitors, magnets, and sound to make otherwise imperceptible electromagnetic fluctuations perceptible to the viewer. Nicolai has received numerous international prizes and fellowships, including the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica, the Villa Aurora fellowship in Los Angeles, the Zurich Art Prize, the Villa Massimo fellowship in Rome, and the Giga-Hertz Award for Sound Art, which he received with Ryoji Ikeda in 2012. Since 2015, he has been Professor of Art with a focus on digital and time-based media at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. Across his visual and musical work, Nicolai continues to explore the relationship between scientific systems, technological processes, sound, light, and perception. By translating structures that are often invisible or inaudible into concrete sensory experiences, his practice establishes a distinctive dialogue between art and science while questioning how information and phenomena can be perceived across different media.