Carsten Nicolai – Atlas Borealis

Pinksummer is pleased to present

Carsten Nicolai – Atlas Borealis

23.04.26 – 15.09.2026

Opening 23.04.2026 | 6 pm

Pinksummer | Palazzo Ducale, Genoa

Visit the artist’s page

Pinksummer: Recently you said that you are trying to merge two personalities into one, to bring everything together into a single whole.

It made us think of the quantum paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, existing in a superposition of being both alive and dead at the same time.

In fact, we have always thought of the identities of Carsten Nicolai and Alva Noto as a superposition of possible states. After all, it seems that the first particle of matter emerged spontaneously from the void thanks to a vibrating energy: in some civilizations it is called the Word, in others “the songlines”, and if we were to extend our search through time as well as space, we would reach as far as the Tower of Babel.
It is said that what we perceive as solid is an illusion, and that the universe should instead be understood as a conglomerate of essential energy vibrating at different speeds—or rather, at different frequencies.

Does the solid and highly essential illusion of Carsten Nicolai not arise from the environments which we like to define as the “cymatic landscapes” of Alva Noto?

Carsten Nicolai: I’m not necessarily trying to merge my two personalities into one. Maybe it’s more about the perception of the outside world, because as we know, there’s still quite a big division between the world of music and the world of visual arts. And sometimes these worlds do collide—or at least in my terms they do a lot, of course, and they interact—but in the perception of the press, and the research, and the history of art as well, it is still a pretty much debated and probably unripe idea that these two worlds may naturally belong together. So I’m especially working on communicating that they do, and don’t necessarily need a division.

As for the parallel that you brought up with the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat… I think that’s a little bit too strong for me, because I hope neither of my personalities is dead. Just making a little note on this.

You’re also talking about solids, illusion, and the universe as a conglomerate of essential energy vibrating at different speeds, or frequencies. I think this is quite a beautiful metaphor. When talking about such deep topics, and the fact that we don’t completely understand what we are surrounded with, I think that if to this day we still don’t really know what this universe around us consists of, probably most of the stuff it consists of is not material, is not materia [“matter”, in Italian in the text]. So solids—what we are producing here—are actually pretty rare. And, of course, this way this ends up being more of a philosophical matter.

But I do like this metaphor about electromagnetic frequencies, because I think we can describe pretty much everything through electromagnetic frequencies, and energy levels. In this case, I would probably go as far as to say I actually prefer Rudolf Steiner’s idea, that Joseph Beuys also exploited—the idea of energetics, of the immaterial. And maybe we could work with this metaphor, while knowing that it stands for something that we cannot completely understand in a scientific way. Or maybe, we could have a different approach. Maybe we can see things from a religious point of view, or from a metaphoric, or poetic point of view. But I think approaching such topics on an artistic level is a very open and fruitful way of looking into this kind of fundamental questions.

PS:
We have read that Hans Jenny, in his cymatic experiments applied to words from ancient languages such as Sanskrit and Hebrew, found that the figures produced by the frequencies corresponded to the alphabetic symbols of those same languages. This brought to mind Cratylus, the dialogue by Plato in which Cratylus and Hermogenes discuss whether language is conventional or whether names reflect the nature of things. It seems that those ancient civilizations were already aware of the relationship between sound and visible form.

In this sense, technology reconnects us to the minimal and unadorned origins of language. In the case of your art, which symbolically rejects ornament and redundancy, do you truly believe that sound is a universal language not mediated by convention?

CN: In many ways, cymatics is a reference for my work.

But I’m actually no turning to cymatics in its classical sense, because Hans Jenny is a bit more parascientific in his way of explaining it, while I’m actually leaning much more towards a scientific approach here. My work refers more to Hermann von Helmholtz’s theories of frequencies and transmission, and doesn’t just look into sound, but into a wider range of electromagnetic frequencies from radio to light—including parts that are imperceptible to us. That’s maybe the main reason. And there’s a few moments where this kind of constellations manifests in a visual way. There are photographs, for example, of an installation I made using water, or milk, researching the way frequencies produce interference patterns on liquids.

I’m not a huge fan of the theory that language and words correspond directly to specific parts of cymatics. There are many reasons why I’m a little bit skeptical about that, but I don’t find that idea so convincing. Yeah. I’m taking a different path than Hans Jenny here, let’s put it like that.

“Do you truly believe that sound is a universal language, not mediated by convention?” Yes, I think that sound is a universal language because first of all, it’s accessible to everyone, since we all have the ability to hear. Perhaps we need to free ourselves from the understanding of language. And when I say language, I don’t mean spoken language—what I’m just now recording, for instance. I’m referring here to the effect of constellations of notes, or frequencies, to the way they can talk to us. I think this is an innate ability, culturally speaking.

There are, of course, different hearing patterns, connected to cultural context. A good explanation might be that in terms of harmonics, different scales or tonalities may be perceived differently. In that sense, it might be more of a social definition, if that’s what you’re referring to. But in general, I believe that sound is a universal language that can connect us very easily to each other—and maybe to the outside as well. A great example is when we tried to be seen by possible alien life forms; we basically expressed ourselves, our identity, and our existence, through a Golden Record that just contains sound, music, and some pictograms—the most fundamental communication forms. And we could say that if a pictographic alphabet is the fundamental visual form, then sound is the most basic form of communication in terms of hearing.

PS: Do you think the music of the Pythagorean spheres—what Boethius, a few centuries later, defined “musica mundana”—is comparable to cosmic microwave background radiation, the “fossil” echo of the Big Bang, discovered, incidentally, in 1965, the year of your birth?

CN: There has been a lot written about it, and a number of debates. I guess I’m a bit skeptical—or it might just be that the idea of there being a harmonious constellation of Nature, where everything goes in cycles, by perfect units… I think we all know by now that’s probably not the case. Things are much more complex than that. What instead may apply to all of our findings is the idea that Nature follows a sort of masterplan designed by God or, in this case, by some kind of force, if that makes sense.

I want to bring up a remark Einstein made about quantum mechanics, a beautiful phrase that probably relates strongly to the work I’m showing in Genoa. He said that “God does not play dice”—meaning He doesn’t make things arbitrarily or without reason. This is the common ground that drives scientists to believe in research, and is maybe also one of the reasons why I’m so interested in these kinds of constellations: what is randomness, actually? Does it “care” or does it not follow any kind of rule or order?

Which brings us to the Atlas Borealis drawings. I have introduced six circles on them—six, like the numbers you choose when you play the Lotto [“lottery”, in Italian in the text]—each enclosing a random constellation. These star constellations are so gigantic that how they sit together in terms of size and order can only be random—because we look at them from our microscopic point of view on Earth; and from Earth we look at this gigantic mass of nothing but a few Suns, this immense amount of space that is hard to process for us in terms of understanding—but I think I’m drifting away from your question here.

PS: Have you ever been in an anechoic chamber?

CN: Yes, I have been in quite a few and I have also been in the Quietest Room on Earth. That is also an anechoic chamber, at Orfield Laboratories, in Minneapolis. It was a great experience because what you understand there is that there is no “no-sound”. When you come into such a space what happens is, you start hearing yourself. You can hear your eyelashes, you can hear your bloodstream, you can hear your heart clearly. We are not silent. You get very deeply involved in your body’s activities there.

PS: We have read that low frequencies correspond to magmatic and, at least in appearance, chaotic forms, while high frequencies produce very precise rhythmic patterns. It seems to us that the morphogenetic outcomes of your sound architectures suggest a preference for high frequencies and the analytical vocation of Modernism.

If we were to simplify and assign frequencies to our time, would you say that ours is qualitatively a high-frequency or a low-frequency time?

CN: I don’t necessarily think that rhythmically architectural frequencies are high. I think they can be both low and high—I don’t make a division, I see them together. We have to understand that our “low” and “high” frequencies are such for us, and only apply to us, as humans. For different animals, or bugs, or insects, or whatever, the frequencies of low and high have a different definition. Maybe some of the frequencies we hear or see are out of their range, just like the frequencies we can hear only go up to a certain point. Take high frequencies. The limit of what we can hear or perceive is around 20,000 hertz. What I’m trying to say is that our “high” frequencies are definitely low compared to the full range of frequencies, and this concept of “high” and “low” only applies to humans. I actually see sound in a much wider range than our perceptive range. I hope this can answer your question a little bit better.

PS: How do you assign colors to your soundscapes?

What frequency does white have?

CN: This is a very simple question. By definition, white light contains the whole spectrum of frequencies in it—so more of less, all colors. The definition of white noise has been also created in relation to this—because with white noise, too, you basically have all the frequencies inside. And if you look at it, it is also a very beautiful metaphor—how a white light, which we tend to consider the purest and simplest form, is actually a maximum you can filter any color out of, because that color is already inside of it. And the same goes for white noise: any kind of music piece, any kind of noise, or sound, is already inside of it. White is like a huge piece of marble: you can create any kind of sculpture with it—and the same goes for the matter surrounding us. So, even though white always feels so pure and empty to us, it is actually the complete opposite. White is the absolute maximum.

PS: What will you be presenting at Pinksummer?

CN: I’m presenting 24 drawings of the Atlas Borealis at Pinksummer.

I have been collecting star atlases for many years, and I have a fascination with them. At the same time, I wanted to create something specifically for Pinksummer and Genoa in connection to lottery, where you “play the dice” with numbers, and randomness. This gave me a systemic base for the idea that we can’t predict randomness, or numbers; Genoa was the birthplace of modern lottery, so there is obviously a strong connection between the city and the concept of chance.

I took these drawings as a source for random constellations that are so gigantic—as I said earlier—they can only be described as random. Through the six circles I’ve drawn on them, I have more or less defined a random constellation of dots on each map—different sizes, different distances, different weights—making it a possible source for other works. These compositions could be later on a source of random data for writing a composition program, or new visual patterns. This is kind of a very fundamental source for me in the future.
But the drawing themselves are also beautiful, because they have their own logic. I made the circles without trying to follow any kind of rule as for how and where to place them—and that’s probably what we call “intuition”, or rather, “intuitive choices”. That is what I really believe in.

But the drawing themselves are also beautiful, because they have their own logic. I made the circles without trying to follow any kind of rule as for how and where to place them—and that’s probably what we call “intuition”, or rather, “intuitive choices”. That is what I really believe in.

I hope this answers everything and thank you very much.