Nimrod Astarhan
Nimrod Astarhan is an artist, technologist, and educator. Their practice is based on a post-conceptual approach toward sculpture, installation, and media art, utilizing collaborations, digital technology, and electronic mechanisms. Their research-creation is re-earthing computational media and speculative history. It involves activating non-visible portions of the electromagnetic spectrum contextualized through material, diasporical, historical, and philosophical lenses. Recent showings include the Gwangju Biennial Pavilion Project, Ars Electronica, ISEA, The Ammerman Center Biennial Symposium on Arts & Technology, Die Digitale Düsseldorf, and xCoAx in Graz, Austria. They received grants and awards from the Municipal Arts League of Chicago, the Arts, Science + Culture Initiative at the University of Chicago, and the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines, and were a finalist for the Lumen Prize. They taught digital art, code, hardware, and critical theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, China Academy of Art, and Shenkar College of Engineering, Art, and Design.
During the last three years, Nimrod Astarhan’s practice has developed two prominent strands of research. One involves energy and the artistic articulation, manipulation, and interaction thereof. The other includes personal, historical and speculative research into their Khazar ancestry.
These two swimlanes are in a polyphonic conversation, but one that curves around particular themes, such as relations to energy and existence beyond perception. In Lighting The Same Fire, Khazar sky-worship practices inspire the development of a technology of hope. The engineering behind this technology stems from scientific principles, namely the so-called “memory effect” in electromagnetic radiation.
At once one of the largest Jewish kingdoms in history and an unprecedented multi-religious and multi-ethnic society with no trace of conflict, the Khazars, though long gone, might still have something to teach us. Teachings might be embedded in the energy they cultivated through practices interacting with the same skies from which Lighting The Same Fire draws its energy.
CNC modelling, operation and assistance: Jules Döring
