The dehumanising nature of this post-phenomenological world — a frenzy of electrical signals, subatomic waves and quantum particles; of bleeps, blips and drones — has left many reduced to the anxieties and paranoia of a fully-fledged 21st century technological alienation. It is in this context that one of Japan’s leading electronic-music composers and visual artists, Ryoji Ikeda, is demonstrating his unique conceptual and aesthetic drive, executed with a high-tech and mathematical precision.
Ikeda’s oeuvre has weaved between science, art, mathematics, music and more. Back in 1993 he became involved with Dump Type, an experimental Japanese theatre collective. Coming from a rather more pragmatist background in Microeconomics, this association radically accelerated Ikeda’s artistic sensibility as he produced mesmerising sound work for their provocative performances, a series of projects which became embryonic of what he would later pursue in his solo work.
After immersing himself further as a DJ in the Japanese techno scene of the 90s and fully acquainting himself with the new affects and aesthetic states that advances in technology were engendering, Ikeda went on to create album after album of daring, complex and challenging music: his 2001 release Matrix, a fragile and elegant ambient work which vacillates from the intensities of zero to infinity, was composed entirely of singular, pure sinewaves. At the same time producing large-scale artworks such as Spectra(2000), an immense declaration of the sublimity of light and sound that has toured the world, morphing and recontextualising itself in every site-specific location. It’s installation at Terminal 5, JFK International was as if it had been snake-charmed from Kubrick’s hypnotic unconscious itself.
“The installation offers visitors a special phenomenon. It is nearly invisible due to its intense brightness and inaudible due to its ultra-frequencies. Visitors can barely recognise the dimensions of the space, as if they were blind in a whiteout state. As they pass through the corridor, subtle oscillation patterns occur around their ears, caused by their own movements interfering with the sounds. The sound is subtle and minimal, yet the experience of the sound in the installation is active and dynamic.”
Ryoji Ikeda’s Spectra installed at Terminal 5, JFK International (2004)
This September Ikeda will be performing a live rendering of his 2008 album Test Pattern – from which this disclaimer is taken:
“Caution! This CD contains specific waveform, impulse and burst data that perform a response test for loudspeakers and headphones. High volume listening of the last track may cause damage to equipment and eardrums.”
– at the Old Selfridges Hotel in London. In association with the Barbican Ikeda will perform one of his notorious audiovisual experiments into the materiality and aesthetics of data, information and contemporary technology; an alien composition of machinic pulses and sonic modulations, at times barely audible, punctuated by electronic resonances and bursts of white noise, encased within a ceaseless black and white strobe of gltiching data. The deeply synchronised work is a pyscho-aural investigation into the larger effects of information-technologies and Big Data in our contemporary understanding of both reality and subjectivity, and is best avoided if your sensory-receptor threshold is located anywhere beneath the absolute human maxim.
Ikeda performing is album Test Pattern in 2008.
Created through an intricate and complex process, Ikeda uses a ‘cross platform conversion system’ to transform various media sources — textual, auditory, visual — into a raw barcode, which is then further deconstructed into mathematical data and computer binary-code, to be reappropriated back into dataphonic audio content; a catalogue of disparate frequencies and intensities, emptied of their original content and meaning, reconstituted in a sublime sonic mosaic. Works like Test Pattern explore a spectrum of extreme affective states, from the muted and deft loneliness of a single sinewave traversing our neurosomatic registers, to the nauseating artillery of piercing white noise, occasionally gliding into the faintest lacings of sculpted techno melodies.
The music, or ‘non-music’, is simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic. It transports us into the eerie, imperceptible substratum of the contemporary infosphere. One populated by “frozen embryos, expert systems, digital machines, sensor-equipped robots, hybrid corn, data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales fitted with radar sounding devices, gene synthesizers [and] audience analysers”, and brings it to life with the same fierce energy that propels the cataclysmic world of protons, electrons and neurons that is subsides in. Ikeda reconfigures the work’s own hyper-decontextualisation, repurposing the void of raw data into a daring articulation of life beyond human perception. It is a manifesto for survival in a world slowly drowning itself in anti-mnemonic ecstasy.
