War Machines Transformed Into Music

Nik Nowak ditches digestible art and goes straight for the jugular by confronting the war machines that have coiled around our everyday life. A member of SHAPE, the platform for innovative music and audiovisual art from Europe, Nowak’s art embodies the structures of drones, panzer tanks and surveillance bots and turns them into sonic instruments. Drones follow and spy on gallery visitors and replay their recorded voices back to them, and armored tanks that batter their visitors with hardcore sonic warfare, as in his 2012 CTM performance.

We Make Money Not Art has an extensive interview with Nik up now, with plenty of insight into his haunting machines, what inspired them, and details into his new artistic practices which deal with  “frequency spectrums that are not in the focus of our perception and more a subtle side effect although with a massive influence on our psychology and body functions.”

Read Sejla Kameric discuss the traumas of war here and how Belgrade’s music scene grapples with its wartime roots here.