Ryoji Ikeda — early data-driven music and image practice

1995

Artists: Ryoji Ikeda · Year: 1995 · Medium: Sound art and installation — mathematically-structured imagery and audio derived from data sources and algorithmic generation · Substrate: Custom software for audio-visual generation; high-resolution displays; large-scale projection installations; mathematical-data sources transformed into perceptual media · Place: Tokyo, Japan / Paris, France · Institution: Independent; extensive international exhibition Ryoji Ikeda released +/- (Plus-Minus) in 1995 on the label CCI Recordings: his first solo album, forty-six minutes of extreme sine-tone composition at the edge of human hearing, in which single frequencies — 100 Hz, 200 Hz, 10,000 Hz, 18,500 Hz — were sequenced into phase-shifting minimalist structures so spare that, on first listening, most listeners assumed their speakers or their ears were damaged. The album's cover was plain black with white text. The track titles were bare numbers. The music was mathematics made audible at a threshold most music deliberately avoids. Ikeda had come from the Tokyo Dumb Type collective, where he had been the sound designer for the group's large-scale multimedia performances since 1990, and +/- was the first full-length distillation of his solo aesthetic. Over the subsequent three decades Ikeda has produced roughly a dozen albums (0°C, Matrix, Dataplex, Test Pattern, the Supercodex series), dozens of large-scale audiovisual installations (data.tron, data.matrix, test pattern n°12, supersymmetry, the point of no return), and a body of performance work that has placed him in the company of the post-war minimalist composers while also locating him specifically as an artist of data — of raw numerical signal presented as aesthetic substance. What Ikeda argues, and has argued continuously since +/-, is that data is not a thing that must be translated into human-legible forms in order to be encountered; data can be encountered as itself — as pure rhythm, pure frequency, pure spatial distribution — without being made into charts or images. The installations make this explicit: test pattern projects monochrome bar-code patterns at 60 frames per second while driving synchronous percussive audio at the same rate, such that the viewer is standing inside the raw signal rather than watching a representation of it. Every subsequent data-aesthetic practice in this archive — the minimalist sound installations of Carsten Nicolai, the computational visual poetics of Casey Reas and Ben Fry, the neural-data installations of Refik Anadol — is in conversation with the argument Ikeda first articulated on +/-. Ikeda divides his time between Paris and Kyoto. He shows with Centre Pompidou (retrospective 2018) and at Elektra Festival in Montreal. His installations require significant calibration and are rarely reproduced. Lore Ikeda has cultivated a famously private persona — he gives almost no interviews, releases almost no biographical material, and requires that his installations be presented without press access during installation. The 1995 +/- release was distributed initially through Dumb Type's small Tokyo network and a handful of Paris record stores; the first European reissue came through Raster-Noton in the late 1990s, which is how most Western listeners encountered it. He is notorious among installation technicians for his demands: specific model numbers of projectors, exact calibration of audio systems, and refusal to compromise on any technical parameter. Curators have learned that an Ikeda show is either installed exactly to specification or it does not open. He has refused several major commissions over this specification. He remains, on his own terms, one of the least compromising artists in this archive. Sources • Ikeda, Ryoji — +/- (CCI Recordings, 1995). • Centre Pompidou, Paris — Ryoji Ikeda: continuum (exh. cat. 2018). • Raster-Noton — Ryoji Ikeda discography.