Carsten Nicolai

Moiré Tape, 2010, textile tape and aluminum brackets, 9’ 9-1/4 inches x 23’ x 7 inches, photograph courtesy of The Pace Gallery

interview by ALEX GARTENFELD

 

For years the german artist Carsten Nicolai dressed all in a single color and went by the name of Alva Noto. His international nightclub performances were a test of both his endurance and creativity: he simultaneously DJed and put on phenomenal laser light shows. Running parallel to this, Carsten mounted gallery installations involving sparklingly clean, inhabitable sculptures and dizzying digitally designed prints that investigated the limits of the use of technology in art. For the Grid Index, (2009) he ambitiously mapped out the artfulness of mathematics in graphic design, creating a catalogue of the many different kinds of grids possible. For Moiré Index, his latest exhibition at The Pace Gallery in New York, Carsten catalogued 580 distorted permutations in…