Carsten Nicolaï is a German visual artist and musician, who creates sound works published by electronic music labels Raster-Noton and Milles Plateux. His artistic approach is a cross-section of science and contemporary music practises. Through his sound installations and his music, he exploits the limits and creative potential of codes, encrypted formulas and other logical systems that structure our world. In order to do this, he bases himself on solid knowledge and surrounds himself with engineers, scientists or musicians for his projects and expositions. He has collaborated with musicians such as Ryoji Ikeda and Mika Vainio. Carsten Nicolaï is also a member of the band Signal along with Frank Bretschneider and Olaf Bender. He signs his music productions with the pseudonym of Noto, when the focus is on sound as a physical phenomenon, or with Alva Noto when he is attempting a more musical approach, integrating arrangements and rhythms. Interested by the principles of Cymatics, a procedure that renders sound waves visible in a coordinated manner, he often accompanies his minimalist sound compositions with bright visuals generated by software that he himself designed. His music is composed of digital sounds that he reworks, modifying them with looped oscillations and tone generators and by making them evolve in time and space. Through these procedures, he renders sound palpable, almost like matter that surrounds us. Carsten Nicolaï tries to go beyond the existing distinctions of human sensory perception by creating scientific phenomena in the form of sound or visual frequencies, perceptible by hearing and sight at the same time. The sound experiments that he creates under the name of Noto allow him to develop a language that is wholly his own, composed of acoustic codes and visual symbols. In 1997, as part of Documenta X in Kassel, he created a sound work entitled Infinity (¥) which was broadcast across the city, in railway stations, airports, galleries, boutiques and on local radio. Seventy-two tracks of forty-five seconds each make up the work. These "spins" as the artist calls them, are derived from several sources of communication, such as telephones, fax, radio waves and modems that were then reworked by the artist, sampled and looped. It is that circular repetition that gives the work its title and its sense of the infinite. The resulting sounds that are produced are familiar to the contemporary environment in which they are broadcast, their signalling function usually turned into an injunction to a user. They are sound signals of communication, meant to anticipate or awaiting a response. In Infinity, the message they are meant to transmit is no longer recognizable to the listener. It is transformed into a compact mass of sounds, taking part in the construction of a musical environment. The different sounds, therefore, underline the density of sound in our contemporary environment.

Priscilia Marques