Grid Index is the first comprehensive visual lexicon of patterns and grid systems. Based upon years of research, artist and musician Carsten Nicolai has discovered and unlocked the visual code for visual systems into a systematic equation of grids and patterns. The accompanying CD contains all of the grids and patterns featured in the publication from the simplest grids made up entirely of squares to the most complex irregular ones with infinitely unpredictable patterns of growth, as editable vector graphic data files. Grid Index can be used to map out the underlying grids of any single image or form and to create recurring geometrical grids in graphic design. It is an essential reference book for designers, visual artists, architects, res...

Product Description
Berlin-based artist and musician Carsten Nicolai, born in 1965, is one of very few contemporary artists who convincingly work in the conflict zone between art, science and sound. Equally respected in the art world and the electronic music community, his works lay open the functional principles of codification, self-organization and perception so that the hand of the artist recedes and the classical notion of an oeuvre is put into question. Drawing on sounds available in our everyday environment, Nicolai creates soundscapes and installations redolent with clicks and blips from telephones, faxes and other technological detritus: he creates an elementary, universal language that eludes rationality, requesting instead to simply be perceived by the individual. This survey spans from Nicolai's well-known 1997 Documenta X project, "Infinity"--in which 72 short audio works were discretely embedded throughout Kassel's public spaces--to new pieces produced for a recent solo exhibition at Zurich's Haus Konstruktiv.
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The visualization of sound presented in book form and accompanied by a CD-ROM by Carsten Nicolai, the creator of our successful Grid Index and Moiré Index titles. Ryoji Ikeda and Carsten Nicolai both work at the cutting-edge of contemporary electronic music and sound art. In 1999, the two artists initiated the joint project cyclo., which is devoted to the visualization of sound. In their shared work, they generate new hybrid forms of audiovisual art and expand the possibilities of digital technology. The project’s first publication is cylco. id, a book and included CD-ROM that offer a multimedia and interactive documentation of the audiovisual material that Nicolai and Ikeda have collected, researched, and created since they began working together. The featured images are formed by the metering of sound bits that have been selected by the artists with meticulous care according to their acoustic and illustrative potential. The material collected in cyclo. id is pure elegance, and its rich structural complexity is inspiring for anyone working with sounds and forms. Visually fascinating, the examples also invite the viewer to play and experiment with them. The open-source format of the digital files makes it easy for creatives to further develop the data and use them in their own work. Carsten Nicolai, the renowned German contemporary artist who successfully documented fundamental visual structures in Grid Index and Moiré Index, has been working at the intersection of art and science since the early 1990s. The work of Ryoji Ikeda, one of Japan’s leading electronic composers, explores the physical properties of sound.

In this book, Carsten Nicolai explores the moiré effect—a phenomenon that can be created by the overlay of lines. Although such interference patterns are mostly considered to be unwanted side effects, they are actually extremely interesting from an aesthetic perspective. This first extensive visual compendium of these patterns is accompanied by a CD that contains not only the featured moirés as digital files, but also individual elements that can be used to create an almost endless amount of new overlays. By analyzing and systematically unlocking these fundamental structures of crucial importance to the visualization of data, Nicolai has again produced not only a work of art, but also a practical tool for anyone working creatively.