World Premiere of ALVA NOTO – HYBR:ID SESSION and Artist Talk 

One of the most prominent figures working at the intersection of music, art, and science, Nicolai is renowned for his sound experiments in the field of electronic music, in which he creates his code of signs, acoustics, and visual symbols with a firm adherence to reductionism.

Alongside the premiere of his new film at the museum, Nicolai will be in a live-streamed talk discussing his artistic oeuvre and practice.

HYBR:ID SESSION and the artist talk with Carsten Nicolai are presented in conjunction with Orchestral Manoeuvres: See Sound. Feel Sound. Be Sound, where he is an exhibiting artist with his work Milch.

About Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto

Carsten Nicolai is a German artist and musician based in Berlin. For his music works, he uses the pseudonym Alva Noto. Born in 1965 in Karl-Marx-Stadt, he is part of an artist generation who works intensively in the transitional area between music, art, and science.

NOTON is the label founded in 1994 by Carsten Nicolai. The imprint started its activities in 1996 with the release of noto “spin” record. In the same year the collaboration with RasterMusic began and by 1999, the two labels merged into Raster-Noton. By 2017, NOTON started working independently, releasing Alva Noto’s back catalog and collaborative works. Diverse musical projects include remarkable collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ryoji Ikeda (cyclo), Blixa Bargeld and Mika Vainio.

Nicolai toured extensively as Alva Noto through Europe, Asia, South America and the US. Among others, he performed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou in Paris and Tate Modern in London. Together with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nicolai scored the music for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant. The score was nominated for a Golden Globe, BAFTA, Grammy and Critics Choice Award. In 2018, he created the sound design for Iñárritu’s groundbreaking VR project Carne y Arena. More recent collaborations include the score of Richard Siegal’s choreographic piece Oval performed by the Staatsballett Berlin and premiered at the Berlin State Opera in 2019.

Nicolai’s musical œuvre echoes in his work as a visual artist. He seeks to overcome the separation of sensory perceptions by making scientific phenomenons like sound and light frequencies perceivable to both eyes and ears. His installations have a minimalistic aesthetic that by its elegance and consistency is highly intriguing. After participating in international exhibitions like Documenta X and the 49th and 50th Venice Biennale, Nicolai’s works have been shown worldwide in extensive solo and group exhibitions.