Carsten Nicolai
«Snownoise»

In 1998 Nicolai came across an article on «Active Mutations of Self-Reproducing Networks, Machines and Tapes» in the journal «Artificial Life» (vol. 2 no. 3, 1998) and was inspired to create snownoise (2001). The work is an attempt to replicate the formation of snow crystals under laboratory conditions.

The constituent parts of the installation are in effect a sophisticated chemistry set: acrylic tubes, polystyrene boxes with cop-per pipes, dry ice, magnifying lamps, acrylic and steel tables, gloves, a wall drawing, random noise generators, instructions. The piece «snownoise» is as much about a documenting a process in the natural world as creating an image for thought itself. The classification system created by the Japanese researcher Ukichiro Nakaya, who documented six regular shapes of snow particles (as well as many irregular ones, each with many sub-groups), is analogous to Nicolai's own principle of organization. The varieties of dry ice are, like those of random noise, irreducible but not completely devoid of logic. As the title of the work indicates, the snowflakes react to the sounds in the room, taking on delicate forms. If you overlaid all the different shapes (which Nicolai documented photographically), the result wouldn't be a mathematical table, as in Nakaya's work, but a layer of monochrome white.


(Source: Bert Rebhandl, in »frieze«)

Dieter Daniels