Editorial

In a cavernous gallery, monochromatic light pulses with mathematical precision. A bass frequency hums beneath the skin, felt before heard. The room vibrates—not just with sound, but with the sensation of perception itself shifting. This is unicolor (2014), one of Carsten Nicolai’s many experiments in sensory thresholds, where cognition collides with the unseen forces that shape it. The work is not simply light and sound; it’s an exercise in the fragility of perception, exposing the invisible architectures of data, frequency, and order that structure contemporary experience. In the digital age, it’s easy to forget that light is a waveform, sound a sculpted frequency, both governed by physical laws indifferent to human interpretation. Nicolai makes us remember. His works transform these imperceptible forces—those typically measured by scientific instruments, operating beyond sensory reach—into something visceral, undeniable. The flicker of unicolor is more than an image; it is a coded message from a realm just beyond conscious grasp. Why does this matter? Because Nicolai forces us to reconsider perception itself. In a world where digital interfaces mediate nearly every experience—compressing sound, sharpening images, fragmenting attention—his work demands that we pause and re-engage with the fundamental forces shaping reality. He reveals the hidden infrastructures

It begins as a joke. A voice, clipped and didactic, instructs: “How not to be seen? Become invisible.” The image shudders—low-resolution, a ghost of a file, a degraded pixel smear. Then: a military testing site in California’s Mojave Desert. The camera hovers over numbered targets, relics from an era when satellites learned to identify bodies from the sky. A green-screened figure materializes and promptly vanishes, replaced by a JPEG of the landscape. The voice resumes: “Or, be female and over 50.” Laughter—or is it static?—crackles through the compression artifacts. This is Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), an absurdist survival guide for life under algorithmic surveillance. But the work is more than satire; it is an invitation to consider who gets to disappear, and who is forcibly seen. To step into Steyerl’s world is to enter a digital war zone where images are weapons, surveillance is omnipresent, and the battle for visibility is both waged and lost before it begins. To ignore Hito Steyerl is to ignore the wiring behind the walls—the networks of power that shape what we see, what we click, what we believe. Her work doesn’t just expose the

A Voice That Follows You You hear her before you see her. A voice, close enough to brush your ear, but with a disorienting absence of breath, an uncanny lack of weight. You turn, but she isn’t there. The crowd moves past in the half-light of Central Park, and you realize that the woman speaking is both beside you and nowhere at all. She describes a black-haired figure up ahead, walking the same path you’re on, yet you don’t see her. You check over your shoulder. Nothing. The voice in your headphones continues. A cello plays. A memory unfolds, but whose? This is Her Long Black Hair (2004), Janet Cardiff’s disarming audio walk through New York’s Central Park, an artwork that doesn’t just demand participation but reconfigures your relationship to reality. Like most of Cardiff’s work, it isn’t a passive experience—it’s an event that unravels across your body, space, and time, making you question whether your senses are trustworthy or conspiring against you. Who is Janet Cardiff? Janet Cardiff, born in 1957 in Canada, isn’t a sound artist in any reductive sense—she is a manipulator of perception, a conjurer of ghosts, an architect of fleeting, phantom realities. Working with her

Who is Zimoun? Picture this: The sound comes first, before the room or the work itself—an inhalation and exhalation of wood, wire, and cardboard, as if the space were breathing. Not metaphorically. The sound doesn’t resemble breathing; it forces the realization that the act of respiration is an industrial process, a mechanism of repetition. As one steps closer, the room asserts its scale: an array of motorized elements—cardboard panels trembling against walls, wires whipping the air, wooden rods drumming against their confines. Each unit behaves predictably in isolation, yet together they generate something vast, unknowable, somewhere between a rainstorm and a malfunctioning assembly line. The chaos is structured; the structure, chaotic. This is the world of Zimoun, an artist who doesn’t so much sculpt with sound as engineer collisions between material and motion, allowing the sonic to emerge as the byproduct of things touching, vibrating, resisting. To step into one of his installations is to experience a room as an instrument—not played by a musician, but activated by its own internal physics. Zimoun’s work matters because it dismantles the invisible assumptions governing how we experience sound, space, and material. In a world where music is increasingly compressed into digital files

The Static Screams: Experiencing Ikeda’s Data Scapes Who is Ryoji Ikeda? Imagine standing at the event horizon of information itself. In a darkened gallery, you are swallowed by an onslaught of binary snowfall, the walls shivering with the rhythmic convulsions of data flipping from one state to another. It is both too much and not enough—patterns emerge, dissolve, reassemble at seizure-inducing speed. The sound, a ruthless precision of sine waves, oscillates between the limits of hearing and a pressure you feel inside your skull. This is Test Pattern, one of Ryoji Ikeda’s signature works—an experience less like watching art and more like standing in the crossfire of a high-frequency arms race between machine intelligence and human fragility. If aesthetics had a DARPA, Ikeda would be its chief engineer. Where did Ryoji Ikeda come from? Ryoji Ikeda: Architect of the Sublime in the Age of Data Ikeda, born in 1966 in Gifu Prefecture, Japan, has spent the last three decades converting the invisible architectures of the digital age into something we can feel in our bones. A pioneer of post-digital minimalism, he operates in a space between sound, mathematics, and quantum physics, treating raw data as both medium and metaphor. His