Carsten Nicolai: Static Fades

Berlin-based artist and musician Carsten Nicolai, born in 1965, is one of very few contemporary artists who convincingly work in the conflict zone between art, science and sound. Equally respected in the art world and the electronic music community, his works lay open the functional principles of codification, self-organization and perception so that the hand of the artist recedes and the classical notion of an oeuvre is put into question. Drawing on sounds available in our everyday environment, Nicolai creates soundscapes and installations redolent with clicks and blips from telephones, faxes and other technological detritus: he creates an elementary, universal language that eludes rationality, requesting instead to simply be perceived by the individual. This survey spans from Nicolai's well-known 1997 Documenta X project, "Infinity"--in which 72 short audio works were discretely embedded throughout Kassel's public spaces--to new pieces produced for a recent solo exhibition at Zurich's Haus Konstruktiv.