… There, the situation is very complex. I don’t know what I would have done. It’s how he reacted to the oil spill. You know why? Because he played this legal, moralistic game, as if the—you know, like, I will kick—we know where—BP, they will make—sorry, but in a tragedy of these proportions, you cannot play this legalistic game who is guilty and so on. You should start asking more general questions. BP is evil, but are we aware that it may have happened also to another company? So the problem is not BP. The problems are much more general—the structure of our economy, why are we living like this, our way of life, and so on and so on. I think that this is the problem today. I’m saying this ironically as a leftist. We have maybe even too much anti-capitalism, but in this overload of anti-capitalism, but always in this legal, moralistic sense: ooh, that company is using child slave labor; ooh, that company is polluting; ooh, that company is—that company, whatever, is exploiting our universities. No, no, the problem is more fundamental. It’s about how the whole system works to make the companies do this. Don’t moralize the problem, because if you moralize it, you can say in the States whatever you want. Already in the movies like Pelican Brief, you remember, no problem, big company, even the president of the United States, can be corrupted. No, this excess of anti-capitalism is a false excess. We should start asking more fundamental questions.

Carsten Nicolai, anti (2004)

Regular geometric forms represent systematic thinking and the interrelationship between mathematics, optics, art and philosophy. anti is a geometrical form, a distorted cube, truncated on top and bottom to obtain rhombic and triangular faces. It reacts to the magnetic field of bodies, enabling an interaction with the visitor while its mechanism remains hidden. anti refuses instant recognition. Its black, light-absorbent surface and monolith-like crystalline shape, that derives from Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melancholia I (1514), confronts the viewer, trying both to mask its form and to disguise its function and thereby absorbing information.