Japan’s leading electronic composer/artist, Ryoji Ikeda, focuses on the minutiae of ultrasonics, frequencies and the essential characteristics of sound itself. For the past six 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’s 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 abstracted views of reality – data – are used to encode, understand and control the world.
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.
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.
Ikeda released his critically acclaimed, eighth solo album test pattern (raster-noton), as part of the datamatics series in April 2008. His acclaimed installations data.tron [prototype] (2007), spectra II (2002) and his large-scale, public arena works spectra [amsterdam] and spectra [paris] (both 2008), continue to diffuse Ikeda’s aesthetic of ‘ultra minimalism’ to the art world.
A solo exhibition by Ikeda was presented at Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media in Japan (March - May 2008) and he is currently exhibiting new works at Le Laboratoire in Paris. The exhibition was inspired by discussions with Harvard number theorist Benedict Gross about mathematical definitions of infinity, and takes for its title the philosophically challenging concept V≠L.
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) and Nam June Paik Center 2008 (Seoul).
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.
