NONOTAK: Taking the Dadaist credo of shock and agitation and updating it according to the technological potential

Artist duo NONOTAK
 

By RACHEL BENHAM, Photos by David Parry, courtesy Lumen Studios - September, 2024

Hidden inside an industrial warehouse in London’s Bermondsey, one discovers artist-duo NONOTAK’s expansive project of light and sound by the bodies that linger on the side street awaiting admission to this dark space. Taking the shape of three installations across three interconnected rooms, ECLIPSE, presented by Lumen Studios, begins comfortably, with sofas and a bar, offering an elegant environment from which to admire the first production, HIGHWAY, where lights ripple and stream across the expansive back wall, and the soothing ambient soundscape coaxes visitors into their adjustment to the darkness.

The project intensifies when reaching NONOTAK’s second dimension, DUAL, where beams of light swing aggressively against the kind of brittle gunshot beats that recall the work of another experimental duo, Warp Records heroes, Autechre. To walk through this installation to be assaulted, both by the relentless sound and the slicing beams, and to remain in this environment is, eventually, to surrender. In this sense, one does not so much immerse oneself in this experience as submit to it.

Immersive exhibits dominate London right now, as they do in cities across the world, with many riffing off the digital expansion of existing artworks, such as in the ongoing Van Gogh London Exhibit. Otherwise, the nature of optical illusion often plays a starring role, and in many cases, the construction of the exhibit relies on the illuminated walls of the space within which they take place in order to produce the otherworldly experience.

Standing apart from these, of course, is Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, which recently closed after an extensive run at the Tate Modern and relied on the artist’s originality and spatial conception to produce something greater than a backdrop and larger than an experience. NONOTAK’s work, too, particularly in their second installation, DUAL, is also able to make this claim. 

When I meet NONOTAK, known separately as Noemi Schipfer and Takami Nakamoto, they highlight the abstract nature of their installations, explaining how this offers the interpretive space for visitors to gain a sense of ownership of the experience during immersion and engagement in the exhibition. This abstraction is produced, in part, through the unpredictability of the work, and in DUAL, the nakedness, the unconcealed mechanisms of the structure, the bare brutality of light and sound, and the battery of the experiences gives little to hold on to, forcing a kind of letting go in which sensation and pleasure are no longer synonyms.

Visitors begin their experience with HIGHWAY

What is notable and attractive about immersive art exhibits is the scope for audience authorship or composition, which Schipfer and Nakamoto also identify as valuable in their own work. Taking a look at the images shared on social media from these kinds of events, we see how much is gained through the presence of the human figure: silhouetted, backlit by vast walls of light. In this sense, the ownership of the experience does not spring simply from one’s freedom to interpret, but from one’s very existence contributing to the aesthetic qualities of the installation. With human bodies moving to their own patterns and desires, the installation itself mutates, evolves.

In Miles Greenburg’s own immersive experience that ran this spring for Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Manifestation #23: TRUTH, he appears to both recognize this and challenge it through the size and scale of his own projected bodies dwarfing those of the installation’s participants, reasserting his own authority onto the experience in a way that ensures his ownership is ultimate, but this is unusual. In most cases, one could make the claim that the immersive exhibit is simply a dynamic, luminous upgrade to the kind of painted photography backdrops that began to appear in the 1800’s and eventually mutated into the walls of flowers and cardboard frames that so captivated social media users not too long ago, but to make this argument is to ignore the creative value of body as outline, as shadow, as anonymous, when set against the glow of the artist’s creation.

NONOTAK capitalize on this potential, particularly in DUAL, where what is remarkable is its sheer depth. Immersive experiences tend to produce this aesthetic potential through screens, but DUAL invites its participants to step inside of the projection and become it, multiplying the dimensions, operating in numerous directions, visible both from within and from the perspectives at the thresholds of the portals that bring us in and out of it. In this sense, to walk through DUAL is to be deprived of the ability to be bystander or witness. To immerse oneself here is to abandon the position of audience and to meld with the scene.

Complex and mesmerizing

Constructing an installation in this way places NONOTAK’s work closer to participatory art than immersive, taking the Dadaist credo of shock and agitation and updating it according to the technological potential now available to us. With ECLIPSE utilizing every last drop of power available to the studio, this is art operating at capacity, and it is work that seeks to act on more than the wow factor, producing something beyond the aesthetic through its attempts to guide the participants through a series of responses the artists term “radical mood changes”.

In an era where nearly every visitor’s gallery or museum trip is recorded with pictures, even Madrid’s Reina Sofia has reversed its previous ban on photography, allowing Picasso’s Guernica to legitimately crop up on all our socials at last, and showing recognition of the modern expectation to do more than simply passively see. This urge to record is important, and immersive experiences capitalize on this contemporary human need in a way that static art cannot.

When we take a photo of Guernica, verisimilitude to the original production is generally our priority, but when we enter an immersive exhibition, the ever-changing bodies both feed the aesthetic and promise the potential for individualized images belonging to the visitor-as-photographer to a greater degree than is the case when we reproduce a Picasso. Arguably, the movement and shapes produced by the bodies in relation to the projections place creativity into the hands of the visitors, and when few of us have the luxury of sustained expressiveness in our daily lives, this invitation to engage with art ensures that culture is to at least some degree both democratized and validated.

NONOTAK’s installations are skillful for their balance between the availability for audience composition and creation and their sophisticated use of sound, light, and space. While visiting ECLIPSE will certainly provide the viewer with a stunning environment within which to participate in the image-making process, it will, too, challenge visitors through the disruption and hyper-stimulation the work induces. WM