Alva Noto's UNIEQAV (beta) Live Premiere at Nextech Festival in Florence

Alva Noto, also known as visual artist Carsten Nicolai, premiered his latest work UNIEQAV (beta) at the Nextech Festival in Florence on October 2017. The event took place at La Compagnia, the new venue for the festival's 2017 edition. The evening opened with a DJ set by Florentine sound artist Gea Brown, who blended sampled voices asking 'who are you?' into an intimate performance. Alva Noto's set featured a marked beat and tribal rhythms, moving away from minimalism, with intense visual flashes that reset the audience's perception. The work explores the boundary between audible and inaudible, organic and inorganic. Nicolai, trained as a landscape architect, founded the label Noton in Berlin in the mid-1990s (later Raster-Noton). His artistic career includes participation in documenta (1997), the 49th and 50th Venice Biennales, and exhibitions at the Guggenheim New York and Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin. In Italy, he had a solo show at MAGA Gallarate (2010) and presented Unidisplay at HangarBicocca (2012). The performance lasted one and a half hours, leaving the audience in ecstasy.