Japan's leading electronic composer/artist, Ryoji Ikeda, focuses on the minutiae of ultrasonics, frequencies and the essential characteristics of sound itself. Ryoji Ikeda featured in Forma's launch season with his audiovisual concert formula [ver.1.0] and in concerts with Carsten Nicolai and Mika Vainio. For the past five years, Forma has produced and toured all of Ikeda's exhibition and performance projects worldwide.
Since 1995, Ikeda has been intensely active through concerts, installations, and recordings, integrating sound, acoustics and sublime imagery. In the artist’s works, music, time and space are shaped by mathematical methods as Ikeda explores sound as sensation, pulling apart its physical properties to reveal its relationship with human perception.
Ikeda has gained a reputation as one of the few international artists working convincingly across both visual and sonic media. Using computer and digital technologies to the utmost limit, his audiovisual concerts datamatics (2006 – present), C4I (2004 – 2007) and formula (2000 – 2006) suggest a unique orientation for our future multimedia environment and culture. His acclaimed installations data.tron [prototype] (2007), data.film nº1-a (2007), data.spectra (2005), spectra [for terminal 5, jfk] (2004), spectra II (2002) and db (2002) continue to diffuse Ikeda’s aesthetic of ‘ultra minimalism’ to the art world.
Ikeda’s latest body of work, datamatics, is a long-term programme of moving image, sculptural, sound and new media works that use data as their theme and material to explore the ways in which abstracted views of reality – data – are used to encode, understand and control the world.
He has been hailed by critics as one of the most radical and innovative contemporary composers for his live performances, sound installations and recordings. His albums +/- (Touch, 1996), 0°C (Touch, 1998) and matrix (Touch, 2000) pioneered a new minimal world of electronic music, employing sine waves, electronic "glitch" sounds, and white noise. Ikeda's critically acclaimed, seventh solo album, dataplex (raster-noton, 2005), and the new release, test pattern (raster-noton, 25 February 2008) are part of the datamatics series.
The versatile range of Ikeda's research is demonstrated by his collaborations with Carsten Nicolai on the project cyclo. and with choreographer William Forsythe/Frankfurt Ballett, artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, architect Toyo Ito and artist collective Dumb Type, among others.
The first complete catalogue of Ikeda’s seminal work, formula [book + dvd] (Forma) was published in 2005.
Ikeda has exhibited and performed at many of the world's leading festivals and venues including: the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 2005 (Melbourne); MIT, 2006 (Massachusetts); Centre Pompidou 2004, 2007 and La Villette 2002 (all Paris); Sónar 2006 (Barcelona); Architectural Association 2002, Barbican 2006, Tate Modern Turbine Hall 2006 (all London); Irish Museum of Modern Art 2007 (Dublin); Auditorium Parco della Musica 2003 (Rome); ICC 2005, Tokyo International Forum 2006 (Tokyo); Art Beijing 2007 (Beijing); Göteborg Biennial 2003 (Göteborg); Mutek Festival 2007 (Mexico City); Le Fresnoy 2007 (Tourcoing).
In 2001, Ikeda was awarded the Ars Electronica Golden Nica prize in the digital music category and he was short-listed for a World Technology Award in 2003.
