Text by CLOT Magazine
Poet and performer Anne-James Chaton and electronic musician Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto, perform their new multimedia project, ALPHABET, an exploration for decoding the spaces between signs and signals, at Trauma Bar und Kino in Berlin on 30th October 2019.
The performance is inspired by the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville – a gargantuan encyclopaedia from the seventh century and the most widely-used textbook of the Middle Ages. Taking etymologies as its starting point, ALPHABET explores the strategies man devised to represent the world and applies them to the digital age. It’s a piece that invites the spectator to immerse themselves in the multiple relationships between language, its digital translations and our understanding of the world. Seemingly, a semiotics play for the digital era, an approach to materialise how code, language and signs intertwine and shift between significant or signifiers on stage.
This work is the latest of many collaborations between the pair. Their various projects blend machinery and language, creating a dense electronic sound structure. With ALPHABET, which is also being released as a record, they speak a new language generated by the fusion of objective poetry and minimal music.
ALPHABET will also be at Barbican Centre London on November 17, 2019.
