Japan’s leading electronic composer and /visual artist, Ryoji Ikeda, focuses on the minutiae of ultrasonics, frequencies and the essential characteristics of sound itself. Fascinated by data, light and sound, he shapes music, time and space by mathematical methods and explores these phenomena as sensation, pulling apart their physical properties to reveal their relationships with human perception.
Ikeda has gained a reputation as one of the few international artists working convincingly across both visual and sonic media. Since 1995, Ikeda he has been intensely active through concerts, installations, and recordings, integrating sound, acoustics and sublime imagery.
He has been hailed by critics as one of the most radical and innovative contemporary composers for his live performances, sound installations and album releases. His albums +/- (Touch, 1996), 0°C (Touch, 1998) and matrix (Touch, 2000) pioneered a new minimal world of electronic music, employing sine waves, electronic sounds, and white noise. 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 ongoing 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 its abstracted views of reality – data – are is used to encode, understand and control the world. In spectra II (2002), a narrow, ceiling-covered corridor fitted with strobe lights and coursed by high frequency sounds, continuously altersed the visitors’ sensory experience of the space. In a later adaptation, spectra [for Terminal 5, JFK], the installation emanatesed an aura of almost total invisibility and inaudibility due to its intense brightness and ultra-frequencies.
In Spring 2008, Ikeda’s presented his first solo exhibition in Japan at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts & Media, featuring a number of works in the datamatics series including data.film, a sculptural wall installation consisting of a series of 35mm film mounted in a light box, and data.tron, an audiovisual installation where each single pixel of visual image is strictly calculated by mathematical principle and projected onto a large screen. The exhibition premiered test pattern, annother installation comprising visual patterns converted and generated from sound waveforms in real–time. Ikeda released his eighth solo album test pattern (raster-noton) in April 2008 to coincide with the exhibition.
In June Summer 2008, Ikeda produced a series of large-scale public realm works for DREAM AMSTERDAM, lighting four cultural and civic spaces with intensely bright white light. In OctoberAutumn, this concept - spectra - was adapted for Nuit Blanche, Paris’ all night arts festival. In this most recent version, Ikeda shot powerful beams of bright white light from a grid shot with and pure sine sound waves from and within a grid next to Tour Montparnasse, the city’s tallest skyscraper.
At the same time, a solo exhibition of his work was presented at Le Laboratoire in Paris (October 2008 – January 2009). The exhibition was inspired by discussions with Harvard number theorist Benedict Gross about mathematical definitions of infinity, and took for its title the mathematical and philosophical concept V≠L. The exhibition featured new works including a prime number / a natural number, line and spectra III.
In April 2009, Ikeda presented his largest solo show to date combining works from the datamatics series and versions of a prime number / a natural number at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. +/- [the infinite between 0 and 1] included three adaptations of a prime number / a natural number, in a series entitled the transcendental; data.film; data.matrix [no1-10], a multi- screen installation featuring video sequences from datamatics [ver.2.0]; matrix [5ch version], a pure sound installation formed by a grid of speakers through which visitors walk, similar to the sound design behind spectra [paris]; and data.tron [3 SXGA+ version], a three screen version of data.tron.
data.tron [8K enhanced version] is being exhibited at Ars Electronica Center until December 2010. Visitors encounter a room filled with data, in this eight-screen version of the original.
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. In 2009, a catalogue of +/- [the infinite between 0 and 1] was published alongside the exhibition at MOT, and provides a history of Ikeda’s work to date.
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.
