Ryoji Ikeda 27.9.2023–25.2.2024
exhibition map
The artworks feature rapidly flickering images, the first artwork of the exhibition contains flashing strobe light.
There are loud and high-pitched sounds in the exhibition.
It is dark in the exhibition.
mass
Ryoji Ikeda: mass (2023). Kuva: Stella Ojala / Amos Rex
mass
2023, audiovisual installation
materials: projector, computer, speakers
dimensions: variable
concept, composition: Ryoji Ikeda
programming: Tomonaga Tokuyama
The immersive new work mass dominates the floor of the first domed exhibition space with a stroboscopic video image. As one of the basic quantities of physics, mass can experimentally be defined as a measure of the body's inertia. It can also mean a large number of people or objects crowded together. The audiovisual installation is based on the polarity of oscillating whiteness and slow movement of black entities that hover amid the pulsating light. The heavy-looking round-shaped black bodies seem to swallow tremendous amounts of information like black holes. When the "information overload” reaches a critical point, the entities collapse and new ones appear.
Ikeda’s works are often black-and-white and feature strong contrasts. Colour and light are relevant to their content. Humans perceive different wavelengths of light as colours; white light, on the other hand, contains all possible wavelengths. In a physical sense, white light therefore contains all colours, and from a philosophical point of view, it may be seen as containing all information. The colour black, on the other hand, is created by a lack of light. In physics, the term black body is used to describe an ideal body that absorbs all radiation directed at it and does not reflect any light.
In this abstract and metaphysical work, the combination of the calm movement of the black elements and the strong vibration of the white light reinforces the contradiction. The wave motion of the sound’s frequencies and rhythm spread through the space like an invisible organism that can be both heard and felt. The two works in the space, mass and spin, are interlaced and when visitors stand in a certain point, they can see both of them simultaneously.
spin
Ryoji Ikeda: spin (2023). Photo: Tuomas Uusheimo / Amos Rex
spin
2023, laserkinetic sculpture
materials: laser projector, computer, speakers
dimensions: variable
concept, composition: Ryoji Ikeda
programming: Tomonaga Tokuyama
The site-specific work, spin, uses a laser beam to outline a shimmering geometric shape high above the viewer’s head. A moving, apparently three-dimensional orbit, is repeatedly inscribed into the darkness, onto the surface of the museum’s round window. Without beginning, direction or end, it floats weightlessly near the ceiling and constantly spins inside out like the Möbius loop. Our perception captures the pattern as a continuous elliptical form, but it is actually constructed through multiple dots.
Due to laser light’s unique properties, monochromatic light, consisting of only one wavelength and colour, is used in medicine, industry and other fields. Such beams can be used to measure, burn or cut and are associated with laboratory research. The formal language of spin is part of Ikeda’s continued work with repeated geometric shapes and analytical line drawings, which dates back to as early as 2000.
data-verse 1
Ryoji Ikeda: data-verse 1 (2019). Photo: Tuomas Uusheimo / Amos Rex
data-verse 1
2019, audiovisual installation
materials: DCI-4K DLP projector, computer, speakers
dimensions: variable
duration: 11min 40s continuous loop
concept, composition: Ryoji Ikeda
computer graphics, programming:
Norimichi Hirakawa, Tomonaga Tokuyama, Satoshi Hama, Ryo Shiraki
commissioned by: Audemars Piguet Contemporary
with special thanks to: The Vinyl Factory
The large-scale audiovisual installation data-verse divides the museum’s largest domed space in half. The work consists of three independent parts, two of which are on display at Amos Rex. To begin with, the viewer encounters the first part of the trilogy, which premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2019.
data-verse 1 is a linear cosmic journey through a world of scientific imagery and data analytics. It weaves a nested network of perspectives and matters about the universe. The starting point is on the micro level, invisible to the eye, but the journey progresses through the human body and environment, continuing all the way to the galaxy, to the macro level. The viewer is small in the face of the cascading volume of data, and physically in front of the projection surface.
The edits in the work are sharp and the duration of each scene is precisely planned. Like a concert composition, the work contains a crescendo as the mood grows, expands, explodes and finally subsides. Mathematics and music are closely akin, and in this piece too, each timing is calculated down to the second to fit into the overall score.
data-verse 2
Ryoji Ikeda: data-verse 2 (2019). Photo: Tuomas Uusheimo / Amos Rex
data-verse 2
2019, audiovisual installation
materials: DCI-4K DLP projector, computer, speakers
dimensions: variable
duration: 11min 40s continuous loop
concept, composition: Ryoji Ikeda
computer graphics, programming:
Norimichi Hirakawa, Tomonaga Tokuyama, Satoshi Hama, Ryo Shiraki
commissioned by: Audemars Piguet Contemporary
with special thanks to: The Vinyl Factory
The second part of the data-verse trilogy is projected on the other side of the wall that divides the large domed hall. This part of the trilogy is also a fascinating combination of quantum physics, genetics and imagery of the universe and based on the same material as the first part. The linear dramatic arc is similar, but the work is formed from different data. Ikeda chose to present the parts of the trilogy in the space in such a way that the viewer can focus on one data composition at a time, but the parts and their audio are synchronised together.
The piece begins with proton collision experiments, rushes the viewer through a detailed DNA sequence and a scan of various body parts, and continues via actions of global network traffic, the climate and the earth’s magnetic field to a cavalcade procession of supernovas, in other words a chain of images of star explosions. The visual data dive continues through billions of galaxies before the journey ends with the structure of the universe observed so far.
The space is dominated by a soundscape based on sine waves, white noise and various frequencies, which, in tandem with the images, cuts accurately through the dark room. The information and data presented in the work is scientifically factual, but for Ikeda the work is a mathematically precise musical and visual composition created from data and sound.
data.gram [n°5]
Ryoji Ikeda: data.gram [n°5] (2023). Photo: Tuomas Uusheimo / Amos Rex
data.gram [n°5]
2023, audiovisual installation
materials: LED displays, computers
dimensions: 71,7cm x 41,6cm (each)
duration: 48 seconds continuous loop
concept, composition: Ryoji Ikeda
computer graphics, programming:
Norimichi Hirakawa, Ryo Shiraki, Tomonaga Tokuyama
data.gram [n°5] consists of nine independent pieces on separate screens that are synchronised to play together. A datagram is a data packet travelling through a network. The work’s material is extracted from the artist’s research for the data-verse series and is based on the third part of the trilogy but reinterprets its themes. data.gram is a collection of 41 works based on material drawn from an extensive data set. For the current exhibition, the artist has selected nine thematic perspectives which are shown together for the first time.
The dark space surrounding the data windows has been muted, drawing attention to the orderly row of display screens. The individual parts deal with the world on three different levels. The microscopic world on the first level contains data about hadron collisions, the molecular structure of viruses, DNA sequences: mutation and slime mold. The second level consists of data of the human brain, human body and satellite traffic. The third level comprises the macroscopic world of nature and involves data of Mars and the Milky Way galaxy.
The screens in the work are comparable to the polyphonic composition of an ensemble. Each data screen acts as one “voice”. The viewer can focus on one screen and perspective at a time or observe several screens simultaneously. Dividing the data onto parallel screens causes the eye to move from screen to screen, reminding us of the simultaneous, fragmented structure of the data that we constantly encounter in today’s information society.
data.gram is a new series that is part of Ikeda’s long-term datamatics project, which he began in 2006, based on observing the diversity of data. The ongoing project includes audiovisual concerts, installations, publications and CDs. Through various experiments in the series, the artist has sought to materialise pure data.
essay: Mika Yoshitake
Ryoji Ikeda’s Subterranean Visions of Perceptual Renewal
Mika Yoshitake
On September 4, 2001, a few days before I returned to New York, I sat down to witness Ryoji Ikeda’s formula (prototype) at the Brucknerhaus at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. Inside a pitch-black space, at once a grid of lights flashed in perfect synchrony with pulsating, high- pitched sound frequencies. The oscillation between blinding light and absolute darkness amplified my disoriented perception, producing an eclipse- like effect to the steady beats of sine waves, white noise, and piercing tones intercut with geometric forms with thin horizontal and vertical lines wiping across the screen. Highly distinct from the science lab-like installations presented at the rest of the festival, the work existed somewhere between a performance, a concert, and a sound installation. The audience waited for the artist, but Ikeda never appeared. This anticipation produced a strange, subliminal temporality that engaged all of my senses through the synchronized score. Numbing flashes of everyday life, which would eventually include a streaming matrix of the front pages of the New York Times alongside pulsating sounds produced a very physical, existential awareness that brilliantly foreshadowed the total reversal that the world would experience exactly one week later on September 11.
Trained as an electronic composer, Ikeda’s experiential work over the last two decades has engaged the intersections of experimental sound, multimedia performance, and Minimalist practices that activate the thresholds of conscious perception. This moment of vulnerability, fragility and uncertainty of human experience in 2001 resonates deeply with Ikeda’s early work as an engineer and producer for the Kyoto-based multi-media collective Dumb Type from the mid 90’s through the early 2000s. Comprised of dancers, choreographers, musicians, composers, etc., Dumb Type (formed in 1984) probed the dichotomies between life and death and the role of technology in our comprehension of this existential border, which stemmed from the untimely death of the collective’s leader, Teiji Furuhashi, from AIDS in 1995. In S/N, Ikeda’s first project as a sound engineer with the group, they applied the signal to noise ratio used in science and engineering (to measure the level of desired signal power to the level of background noise) as a structure to address the politics of sexuality, gender, minority rights, and the AIDS crisis where the performers’ bodies took the form of noise distortion and surveillance targets. Through sharp humor, the work profoundly reconfigured the problem of discrimination toward an empathic language of love through multi-media communications that integrated body language with computer networks. Methodologically, the group’s close affiliation with philosopher Akira Asada (author of the 1983 national bestseller, Kōzō to chikara: kigōron o koete [Structure and power: beyond semiotics], which generated the advent of a “new academism”) reflected their visual interpretation of the postmodern, which was seen as the ideal limit of history and knowledge and where the “rhizomatic, the disseminated, the dispersed, and the multiple”(1) defined Japan as an amalgam of signs, a hyperreal space of TV and ads. This period of the post- Showa era also marked a pivotal historical turn with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the dissolution of Communism which aligned Dumb Type’s international practices that engaged the politics of identity, borders, boundaries, and everyday life.
Following his time working with Dumb Type while living and working in New York and eventually residing between Paris and Kyoto, Ikeda gradually refined his technical work for Dumb Type into a singular solo practice that increasingly focused on the raw materiality of sound and light and their universal properties as physical and mathematical phenomena. formula combined Ikeda’s investigations in sound and light into a series of synchronized audio-visual compositions that incorporated both a diversity of data and a sequence of variations. This would eventually progress into an interest in transposing data related to the scientific fields of quantum mechanics, genetics, proteomics, particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. Ikeda’s mode of presenting pure empirical data on equal ground denotes an ethical stance that critiques anthropocentrism, the philosophy that privileges the human being as the most significant among other entities. Instead, the explicit focus on the relationality of data and unhierarchical presentation of matter through various scales of time and space, reflects a speculative realist philosophy that values the constant regeneration of perception through multispecies interdependence and shared agencies of co-existence. Especially in our COVID-era, his practice increasingly urges us tocontemplate the vulnerability of our bodies tothe inanimate phenomena of the world, in which all entities from the microscopic to the macroscopic are exactly on the same ontological footing.
Ryoji Ikeda: data-verse 1 (2019). Photo: Stella Ojala / Amos Rex
Art historically, the refined simplicity of Ikeda’s multi-media practice has been described as “neo-modern.”(2) As opposed to the rhizomatic dispersal and spatio-temporal collapse of postmodernist practices, neo-modernism follows the lineage of form and abstraction especially of Constructivism, Minimalism opto-kinetic, and light and space art. Ranging from the austere paintings of Joseph Albers, Brice Marden and Agnes Martin to the luminous installations of Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, Robert Irwin and James Turrell, Ikeda’s practice is “kindred in sensibility to these predecessors” as part of a generation of “neo-modernist sound artists [who] undertake an investigation, at once spiritual and scientific, into the basic forms of aesthetic matter and the fundamental conditions of perception.”(3) Engaging with the “continuation and reinterpretation of Modernism,”(4) the materiality, physicality and the more intangible, phenomenological aspects of these practices raise intriguing questions about one’s awareness of the potential and limits of the perception of objects and the larger world.
At the Amos Rex, Ikeda features three discrete sections that adapt to the subterranean architectural space by perceiving the world through audio-visual translation of data. The exhibition opens with a new work mass, based on light and sound in the form of a square as well as a round ellipse that emerges as a planet with stars floating in white light. The section is complemented by the new kinetic laser sculpture spin.
The second section presents Ikedas climactic data-verse 1 & 2, part of his data-verse trilogy first presented at the 2019 Venice Biennale, that gathers data from many scientific institutions including NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), Human Genome Project to those in the public domain and constructs visual expressions through algorithmic scores, processing, and conversion. The series draws on fifteen years of research that uses open-source data sets to progressively chart the physical world from subatomic phenomena and human anatomy to a mapping of the universe, including explosive solar imagery. The synchronization of image and sound is orchestrated as a whole symphony that also keeps us aware of the entropy of the universe. The final section presents data.gram [n°5], which is projected across nine screens and brings together scientific data on an intimate human scale that incorporates extremely microscopic sonic and visual effects. Methodologically, each section encompasses unique aspects of Ikeda’s practice—sound visualizations based on light, an entropic mapping of the universe, and the intimate scale of anatomic data—through audio-visualizations of various dimensions of existence.
Ikeda's highly abstracted works are intellectually suggestive, but at the same time bring to the viewer an extremely physical experience. A nod to Marcel Duchamp’s creative act, the works are deliberately open to a variety of interpretations and rely on each viewer’s subjective experiences to complete the work(5). This serves as an opportunity for the constant renewal of perception through pure phenomena – a core condition at the root of Ikeda’s practice.
* This text is adapted from my essay, “Ryoji Ikeda’s Visions of Perceptual Renewal” Ryoji Ikeda: solo exhibition (The text first appeared in the official booklet of the Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art 2022 Spring/Summer Exhibition Program Ryoji Ikeda.)
Citations
1. Marilyn Ivy, “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan,” Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and M.D. Harootunian (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 29.
2. This term first was used by Akira Asada to describe Ikeda’s subtractive gesture, the inverse of postmodernism’s additive, unlimited sampling of
references. Cited in Marcella Lista, “Labyrinth of the Continuum,” Ryoji Ikeda / continuum. eds. Ryoji Ikeda and Marcella Lista (Paris: Éditions Xavier Barral, 2020), p. 8.
3. Christoph Cox, “Return to Form: Neo-Modernist Sound Art,” Artforum (November 2003): p. 67.
4. Peter Weibel, ”The Physics of Art,” Ryoji Ikeda: micro l macro, (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2015), p. 16.
5. According to Duchamp, “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” (lecture, Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, TX, April 1957). The lecture was published in Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” Art News 56. no. 4 (Summer 1957): pp.28–29.
Mika Yoshitake is a US based independent curator with expertise in postwar and contemporary Japanese art. She has been following Ikeda’s career since 2001.
podcast
A conversation between Ryoji Ikeda and Mika Yoshitake
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interview: Ryoji Ikeda, Terhi Tuomi
Interview between artist Ryoji Ikeda and Amos Rex’s curator Terhi Tuomi
TT: Sonic and visual realms are strongly intertwined in your artistic practice, but your roots are in the music scene. How did your unique practice come about? Is there a difference between the art forms or do you see them as one?
RI: Visual arts and music are different, of course. But they are in the same family called ART. I tend to take a more macroscopic viewpoint towards ART instead of taking ART as the sum of segmented categories such as painting, sculpture, music, dance etc. If I take ART as ART, it simply expands and becomes so broad and diverse to me. Thus, I don’t stay in the music scene or visual art scene as it restricts creative possibility and artistic freedom. I prefer to traverse both fields and beyond, which I have been doing for many years.
TT: You have described music as something that no one can see but can be felt by all, I found this description fitting. Your music can be experienced through the body, and it truly pushes the boundaries of music. Would you prefer visual art to be experienced in a similar way – as a direct experience without verbal articulation?
RI: It’s not that simple. Any work of mine could trigger visitors physically and intellectually, but always reflecting the visitors’ own particular backgrounds, how they have lived their lives etc. I have no desire to navigate visitors through my activity. I mean, I don’t set the goal for how visitors should experience the artwork. Rather, visitors create and complete the work through their own experiences. Without their experiences, my works don’t make sense.
TT: Can you describe your creative process? What comes first, the idea for the artwork, or the research? Do you see the visual outcome in your mind beforehand or does the data and the information flow that you often use as material control, or effect the actual result?
RI: For the artistic process, the key is always “composition". I love to compose all sorts of materials in my work. However, the approach can’t be generalized, it’s viewed sometimes as a "top-down” or “bottom-up” or something "in-between" approach. Also, for me the result is more important than the process. Because the result (the work) is the starting point for the visitor to have their experience while it’s the ending point for the artist. In that sense, the process of the artist is secondary or simply redundant for the visitor’s pure experience.
Ryoji Ikeda: data-verse 2 (2019). Photo: Stella Ojala / Amos Rex
TT: Who or what has influenced you and your artistic practice the most?
RI: Nature is the biggest source of inspiration for me. Sometimes through a scientific viewpoint, sometimes through an actual activity like travelling, and always through everyday life. Physical phenomena including human activities are constantly giving me lots of information and influences.
TT: The audience encounters your newest, site-sensitive works, mass, and spin at Amos Rex as they enter the first domed exhibition hall. Amos Rex’s architecture has a strong character which for some artists might pose a challenge but in terms of your work it seems that the walls and the ceiling are part of your composition. Do you always work like this, or can your artwork be seen independently without the “interference” of the space?
RI: Some works are self-contained, some are site-specific. My basic standpoint is to respect given spaces first, and to optimize my works site-specifically. I respectfully follow this line of thinking in my exhibition at Amos Rex. Two new works are site-specifically dedicated to the space. It will be hard to show them in any other space.
TT: Your approach is highly multidisciplinary. Is there something you have not yet tried, that you would like to try your hand at? Or is there a specific theme that still waits for the right moment to be explored in more detail?
RI: I don’t know, I just follow my instinct and expect to have good opportunities to challenge something new.
TT: Data plays a key role in your practice as a material of sorts. You have collected all kinds of data, for example from NASA, CERN and the Human Genome project. You have also had a chance to talk with numerous experts and scientists from across different fields. What is your biggest takeaway from working with Big Data? Has your perception of the universe changed through your work?
RI: Yes, I have learned that humans are tiny like dust particles in the universe, but at the same time we are miraculously precious. We humans should be more modest, because Nature made us, and we are part of Nature.
TT: Lastly, what does the future hold for Ryoji Ikeda?
RI: My vision of the future was very bright and optimistic when I was child. In this difficult era, it is very hard to paint a positive vision of the future. I am contemplating what a single artist can contribute with in our society.
for kids, Studio Rex
Meet Ou, who lives in the museum. Ou likes children, for they often get it better than grown-ups.
Ou is fascinated by the play of darkness and flashing, pulsating lights in Ryoji Ikedas exhibition - it's as if all of outer space has fallen down into the exhibition halls. And listen to all the sounds! When it all gets too exciting, Ou looks for a safe person to hold hands with - or hug. At other times Ou feels the whole museum moving, as if we're all on our way somewhere. What do you feel like?
When you want to take a break or just need a little more light, it's a good idea to head to the museum's art workshop space, Studio Rex.
In Studio Rex, you can explore the human, perhaps even endearing side of data. We are constantly busy trying to organize and structure our environment in different ways. What does that say about us? As we decipher and reconstruct, chaos or order emerges – it's up to you!
Check out Amos Rex for Kids: https://amosrex.fi/en/ou/