Carsten Nicolai: unidisplay

unidisplay is an audiovisual installation by Carsten Nicolai, German artist, musician and leading player in contemporary research on the relation between electronic music and images.

Curated by Chiara Bertola and Andrea Lissoni, unidisplay consists of a single 50 metres long audiovisual wall display, marked at the ends by two reflecting walls, with running images that are multiplied ad infinitum, creating an effect of spatial disorientation in the spectator.

Nicolai has created a powerful work that interacts with the industrial dimensions of HangarBicocca and Anselm Kiefer‘s immense Seven Heavenly Palaces through the use of state-of-the art technologies and in-depth research into the relationship between human perception and spatiotemporal elements.

unidisplay is based on a series of modules with different visual effects, constantly changing abstract forms processed with software that can attribute signs and colors to the decomposition of sound. The images interfere with the spectator’s perception through optical illusion, the flicker effect, imperceptible movements and the complementariness of colors. The public, involved on a sensory level, is thus facing sequences, motifs and graphic forms with various units of time that are alternated and follow each other like an enormous abstract fresco in motion.

Nicolai‘s work shifts constantly between different areas of knowledge: scientific research, technological experimentation, studies on perception, architecture, visual arts.