San Francisco Art Institute
800 Chestnut St.
San Francisco, CA 94133
The third installment of LISTEN/VISION presented a very special evening with live performances by the three principal members of the German arts platform Raster-Noton: Carsten Nicolai, Frank Bretschneider, and Olaf Bender. Each artist performed individually, and collectively as Signal. These artists are considered by many to be some of the most important and influential individuals working within the field of experimental electronic audiovisual performance today.
Carsten Nicolai is an artist who works intensively in the transitional area between art and science. For several years now he has also experimented with sound under the pseudonym Noto to create his own code of signs, acoustic and visual symbols. As Alva Noto he leads those experiments into the field of electronic music.
Among others, Nicolai already performed as Alva Noto at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, at Centre Pompidou in Paris, at Kunsthaus Graz and at Tate Modern in London. Additionally he has projects with diverse artists such as Ryoji Ikeda (cyclo), Mika Vainio or Thomas Knak (opto); recently he toured with Ryuichi Sakamoto through Europe, Australia and Asia.
Germany-based Olaf Bender is one of three founders of the Raster-Noton imprint. Beside the management of Raster-Noton, Olaf Bender is responsible for the graphic design and public appearance of the label and its products. He often records under such aliases as Byetone and Lumen for solo projects, and together with Komet and Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) forms the laptop microsound trio Signal. His output is extremely sparse, with his sole full-length contributions being a disc in the prize-winning 20′ to 2000 series and 2003′s Feld, released on Raster-affiliated label Binemusic.
Frank Bretschneider works as a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin. His work is known for precise sound placement, complex, interwoven rhythm structures and its minimal, flowing approach. Bretschneider‘s subtle and detailed music is echoed by his visuals: perfect translated realizations of the qualities found in music within visual phenomena.
After the fall of the wall, he and Olaf Bender founded the record label Rastermusic which finally merged with Carsten Nicolai‘s Noton to form Raster-Noton in 1999. He has performed at music and new media festivals such as Ars Electronica, Cut & Splice, Mutek, Offf, Sonar, Steirischer Herbst, Transmediale, Ultima, etc. In addition to his solo work he has collaborated with artists such as with Taylor Deupree, Olafur Eliasson, Steve Roden, and Ralph Steinbrüchel.
This program was generously sponsored by the Goethe Institute, San Francisco.
