Light, Sound and Space: NONOTAK’s immersive experience at the Videocity Awards
by Alessandro Mancini
Attending a NONOTAK performance is an emotion that is hard to forget. The combination of different elements (light, sound and space) creates a unique, immersive and enveloping visual and sensory experience for spectators.
The secret of the success of the Japanese creative duo, founded in 2011, lies in the complementary skills of its two artists: visual artist Noemi Schipfer and light and sound artist Takami Nakamoto. The two do everything in-house: both sound and visual content are original, including documentary content that is available online as a visual preview of their work. An incredibly solid artistic partnership that has never broken down over the past thirteen years.
NONOTAK generally works with light and sound installations and performances to create ethereal, immersive and dreamlike environments built to envelop, challenge and unsettle viewers, bringing together Nakamoto’s approach to space, light and sound and Schipfer’s expertise with visual and geometric kinetic designs. The duo’s aesthetic is inspired by minimalist architecture and optical art. The result is an unrepeatable and immersive experience.
On Saturday 14 December in Rome, there is an unmissable opportunity to witness the creative duo live. NONOTAK will in fact be present at the Videocittà Visual Digital Culture Awards, an event dedicated to excellence in the world of digital and audiovisual art, with the AV live performance SHIRO. This year five prizes will be awarded to the most innovative companies and the most talented professionals in the sector, represented in five categories: Creators, Immersive Experience, AV Performance, Videoart and Next. For the occasion, we had a chat with the duo to learn more about their journey and the creative process behind their work.
‘Light, space and sound come together quite naturally in our installations,’ explains Noemi. ’Our backgrounds are architecture and music for Tak and visual art for me. The initial idea of our collaboration was to fuse the three notions together to make one. Light has become our main medium because of its immaterial aspect, and the core of our work is to experiment with this material from different aspects. Space, on the other hand, is the starting point for us to understand how best to develop the idea within a given context. Sound, finally, allows us to give emotions to the movement of light’.
For Takami, working together on all elements allows him to ‘be multi-disciplinary and to easily switch from setting up installations to live performances. While working on the installations,‘ he adds, “we still maintain the ”live’ aspect of the set-up so that we can watch and hear the installation in real time as we programme it’. Throughout their career, NONOTAK have experimented in many different fields, including architecture, music, digital arts, set design, theatre, cinema, dance and fashion, always managing to maintain a stylistic coherence between the various projects. How?
‘I have always clear in my mind the visual aesthetic I want to develop,’ says Noemi, ‘The challenge is to adapt it to different contexts, grasping its advantages and limitations to maximise the impact of the work. Also, it is fun to be able to explore and learn from different areas’. What binds Noemi and Takami is a common vision: ‘We are fortunate to have the same aesthetic goals and the will to develop them over the years. Our aesthetic adapts to different fields and is playful enough to give room for experimentation’.
NONOTAK is an artistic duo that brings together different skills and paths. Noemi is in fact a visual artist, while Takami is a sound and light artist and an architect. Bringing together two such different worlds must not have been easy.
‘We started working together at the end of 2011,’ says Noemi. ’When we started, we did not think or plan that NONOTAK would become our main work, we were just obsessed with making our first audiovisual installation. We yearned to create our first work and to achieve this we worked hard, learning new software, creating scaled-down models, etc. Once we were able to present our first installation at the Mapping Festival and see it in full scale,’ he continues, ’we also started working on a performance project. Here was the real leap forward: ‘The creation of a human silhouette and Takami’s background applied to music added something really interesting to our work. I think it was quite rare at the time to see artists doing installations and performances at the same time. This helped us to become known and be included in a number of festivals, exhibitions and events. However, one of the keys to our success could also be the fact that we have always maintained our identity.’
'While ten years ago, when we started, technology was often the very subject of the artwork, I think that in the future technology will become more and more just a medium and people will focus on the quality of the art itself'
The geometries and minimalism that characterise the aesthetics of NONOTAK seem to reflect an almost scientific rigour, on which the emotions and feelings released by the music and the composition as a whole are grafted. ‘When we create a work of art, we like to find complexity in simplicity,’ says Noemi. ’The simpler the set-up, the more freedom we seem to have with the possibility of programming. I naturally feel more attracted to simple, primary forms and I think this is reflected in our work’. Takami confirms that the inspiration for their work comes from geometry ‘for both fully visual and kinetic projects’.
The performance SHIRO, which they will bring to the Videocity Awards 2024, uses shadows, light and techno music through four semi-transparent screens, also involving the bodies of the two artists. A true manifesto of the creative duo.
‘The main idea of our performance project is to incorporate our silhouettes into the installation and make them part of the visual effect,’ explains Noemi. ’The specific positioning of the projectors, both in front of and behind the stage, allows our silhouettes to appear and disappear from the screens. In our first performance, LATE SPECULATION, we were both inside the same structure, while in SHIRO we decided to be in separate areas so that we could appear and disappear separately’.
It is one of the biggest set-ups they have ever done for a live touring show. ‘The possibilities are endless for us, which is why we keep updating the show over the years,’ Takami adds. The duo has made use of digital technologies from the very beginning, but does not believe that these can replace the human and creative aspect of the artwork.
‘While ten years ago, when we started, technology was often the very subject of the artwork, I think that in the future technology will become more and more just a medium and people will focus on the quality of the art itself,’ Noemi says. ’When we create a work of art, one of our priorities is to hide the technology, so the possibility of having more and more compact gears and tools will help us to achieve this more easily.
Takami agrees: ‘I like the fact that technology is increasingly becoming a medium instead of the subject: a tool that realises your ideas and allows you to focus on the creation and execution of the work. I think the fact that people don’t focus on the tools we use, but on the idea we tried to express through technology, is good for the whole artistic culture’.
Alessandro Mancini
Graduates in Publishing and Writing from La Sapienza University in Rome, he is a freelance journalist, content creator and social media manager. Between 2018 and 2020, he was editorial director of the online magazine he founded in 2016, Artwave.it, specialising in contemporary art and culture. He writes and speaks mainly about contemporary art, labour, inequality and social rights.
