From 21 March to 25 August 2024
Carsten Nicolai (Karl-Marx-Stadt, 1965) also known as Alva Noto, a pseudonym he uses for musical productions, is a German artist and musician. Co-founder of the independent label Raster-Noton in 1994, his research constantly moves in the border space between visual art, music and science.
Nicolai began his journey as an artist but it was through his interest in sound and its physical component, of which he initially studied the high frequencies, that he progressively came to electronic music. Aware that music represents only one part of the sound spectrum, the one audible and recognizable by the human ear, in his practice he investigates the expressive and cognitive potential that resides beyond the boundaries imposed by traditionally codified music.
Moving freely between microscopic and macroscopic universes and imaginaries, the work is fueled by the awareness that time, space and sound are eternally connected. Also with a background in architecture, Nicolai explores the possibilities offered by sound to generate physical and social spaces with the intention of "evoking intense atmospheres", a purpose that accompanies all his research and which manifests itself above all in the more performative dimension .
Convinced that «the beauty of electronic music is represented by the ghost in the machine», Nicolai is fascinated by the intrinsic performativity of the different devices he uses to generate sounds and compose, which, once certain parameters have been set, manifest their own independent vitality. The interest in the life of machines also characterizes his relationship with science and its history: at times skeptical towards the newest technologies, the artist often turns his gaze to inventions of the recent and distant past, tracing in them, and in the attitude of their inventors, a principle of poetic inspiration. This idea is part of the broader desire to establish a constant parallelism between artist and scientist, which often leads him to integrate multiple scientific paradigms into his thinking.
This is the case of HYbr:ID, a project started in 2021 and inspired in part by Hermann Minkowski's model of space-time. HYbr:ID is characterized by the co-presence of heterogeneous compositional methods that flow into a set of tracks in which Noto generates sonic cosmogonies that recombine geometries and dystopias in an oscillation between more stylized, dilated rhythms and dreamlike atmospheres made of low frequencies. The soundscape, filled with a combination of meditative and resonant tones, exudes an expansive vibration that evokes a cosmic expanse.
HYbr:ID Vol. 1 (2021) collects the music commissioned for Oval, a choreographic piece directed by Richard Siegal and performed by the Staatsballett Berlin. HYbr:ID Vol. 2 (2023) brings together the music commissioned for the ballet Ectopia, again directed by Richard Siegal and staged by the Tanztheater Pina Bausch.
On the occasion of the exhibition Alva Noto offers a preview of the third unpublished chapter of the HYbr:ID series.
Via Nizza, 138, Rome, Italy
Opening hours
opens - closes | last entry | |
monday | Closed now | |
tuesday | 12:00 - 19:00 | 18:30 |
wednesday | 12:00 - 19:00 | 18:30 |
thursday | 12:00 - 19:00 | 18:30 |
friday | 12:00 - 19:00 | 18:30 |
saturday | 10:00 - 19:00 | 18:30 |
sunday | 10:00 - 19:00 | 18:30 |
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With the card: museum + exhibitions 10.00 €
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With the card: museum + exhibitions 10.00 €