Dumb Type / Carsten Nicolai

“The definition of beauty is very individual, but to me it is something very simple that can express something very complex. But it’s not stable, for sure.” —Carsten Nicolai

This season at Haus der Kunst is presented in the form of dialogues. Highlighting Fujiko Nakaya’s transnational and transgenerational relevance towards other territories and disciplines, the work of the Japanese media performative collective Dumb Type, and German musician and artist Carsten Nicolai are exhibited this summer.

“transmitter / receiver – the machine and the gardener” is a site-specific installation by Carsten Nicolai (b. 1965, Berlin, Germany) that takes inspiration from the Zen gardens of Japan. Originally trained as a landscape designer, the artist fuses the disciplines of music, art, and science to create a landscape of sounds that explores the otherwise inaudible and invisible phenomena of time, radiation, and tangible magnetism. Nicolai’s multimedia installation explores sound as an invisible but physical material and sets the scene for chance compositions to emerge.

Electromagnetic waves picked up by the historic antenna on the rooftop of Haus der Kunst and a sculptural instrument equipped with Geiger counters captures radiation and electric discharges in the air. The soundscape invites visitors to perceive their own bodies as a magnetic field within a space full of frequencies. 

Zen Gardens are said to resemble the universe in miniature and allow the gardener to observe patterns and abstract language in nature. “transmitter / receiver – the machine and the gardener” zooms in on the smallest particles to reveal both their complexity and beauty.

Nicolai takes inspiration from physicists like Ukichiro Nakaya. His daughter, the artist Fujiko Nakaya and Nicolai met in the late 1990s through his Japanese collaborators, among them the artist Ryoji Ikeda and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who also participated in Dumb Type projects.

Founded in 1984 by students from Kyoto City University of Arts, Dumb Type’s multifaceted installations and performances often deploy cyberpunk imagery to critique a highly “informatised” consumer society that is concurrently rendered passive via the unceasing deluge of data and technological development: individuals who are “overwhelmed with information yet unaware of anything.” At the centre of Dumb Type’s practice is a concern with the intersection of technological progress and the body. Dumb Type’s visionary performances and installations have been at the forefront of debates concerning identity and sexual politics.

The exhibition at Haus der Kunst critically interrogates the manner in which digital media and technology now constitutes a formative and irrevocable part of lived experience, conflating the past with the future, desire with despair. Comprising a multimedia reimagining of several past performances—an immersive, spectacular installation that probes the dizzying banality of AI-inflected speech formation, as well as an operatic sound sculpture of field recordings especially created by Ryuichi Sakamoto for Haus der Kunst—the exhibition compels viewers to engage in alternating acts of attentive listening, reading, and watching.

Dumb Type: Curated by Damian Lentini with Luisa Seipp
Carsten Nicolai: Curated by Sarah Johanna Theurer with Hanns Lennart Wiesner