One of the most exciting artists active today, cyberpunk and beyond, is France-based Japanese visual artist and musician Ryoji Ikeda (born 1966 in Gifu, Japan).
In 2014, Ikeda was commissioned for the First World War memorial in London, for which he presented his visual installation Spectra, which consists of biblical-proportion beams of light pointed toward the sky. As the piece was shown earlier in Barcelona, Spectra triggered “alien first contact/rapture” panicked calls to the authorities. The events surrounding those presentations of Spectra show that although Ikeda has attained institutional recognition and reached cult status in both art and music, his work is still largely unknown by the general public.
Although Spectra has definitive sci-fi undertones, the more cyberpunk elements of Ikeda’s art are to be found in music and audio-related art installations. As a musician, he is signed to the well-regarded German minimal electro label Noton (formerly Raster-Noton), and most of his releases, though independently enjoyable, are companions to exhibitions. Ikeda’s music is both glitchy and hypnotic, noisy and ambient. Despite the fact that in no way it can be described as “loud music”, it can make you run for the volume control as he often makes use of frequencies that are difficult to bear. The specificity of his sound art, though, is that he uses big data as source material, and processes them through a framework based on hard science theories and formulas. Listening to Ikeda is listening to the actual flow of data being processed, just as the visual part of his audio/video installations shows.
Cybernetics, at its core, is a theory of information flow, more or less following the circuitry of “input-output-feedback and start over again”. Most of Ikeda’s works, both visual and musical, tend to input visual in order to output audio, or the other way around, or both.
In 2008’s Test Pattern, what appears to be black or white rectangles moves up or down on screens. Those rectangles are in fact barcodes, which are read and fed into an algorithm as they scroll, triggering various audio effects. In a very Blade-Runner-esque fashion, Test Pattern has been presented in New York City, using the whole Time Square as a canvas.
Conversely, Ikeda paid tribute to John Cage’s masterpiece, 4’33’’, a “piano” work in which the pianist does absolutely nothing for the duration of the piece, indicated in the title. Part of his Time and Space exhibit, Ikeda’s version consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of blank, time-coded audio tape fixed in a frame. Therefore, one can actually see silence, and grasp the timescape in one look.
In the same way, the odd sounds in an almost silent concert hall become the actual music in Cage’s work, the juxtaposed blank tape creates a figure of sorts, an almost perfect square with the exception of the half-line left blank, in the bottom right corner. So blankness is feeding back on blankness. Furthermore, the sounds in the museum, as people stroll by the artwork, act as a substitute for the music that is not on the displayed tape.
Ikeda’s art often includes the spectator in some way. As is the case in the Time Square presentation of Test Pattern, his various installations usually display very large screens, floor projections, and painful frequency audio glitches that immerse the museum-goers in an undefined, abstract virtual reality, where one is surrounded by computer code or coordinates from the mapping of some unidentified slice of the universe.
The reason why we can’t really grasp the “source code” is that our senses are not appropriately acute. Sometimes, however, they are just acute enough to let us feel that something is happening. This is the case in Ikeda’s 2000 double album Matrix. While the second disc is more textured, the first disc consists of simple sine waves that are modulated so slowly, so smoothly, that the listener doesn’t really notice the modulations. By the end of each piece you have noticed a change, but not the changes.
On the opposite side of the question of time, most of the visual content in Ikeda’s body of work moves way too fast for the eyes to see. Words appear on a screen and flicker away as fast as they came, and if the scrolling freezes to let us catch a sentence it’s never for long enough. One of the characteristics that differentiate cyberpunk from classic science-fiction is that there is no single premises, no single “What if?” that defines the fictional universe. There is no great leap toward a brighter Tomorrow, no close encounter, no time traveler messing with History. In cyberpunk changes happen all at once, the future unravels as a chaotic continuity of the present, impossible to grasp in one snapshot. The very same complexity, the very same dynamic between the instantaneous and continuity is at work in Ikeda’s art.
The “Street finding its own use for things” also applies here. 2012’s Systematics presents old computer punch cards, framed and backlit. By pulling the punch cards out of the context of their use in computing, the exhibit does not expose nostalgia for retro tech, but rather a celebration of the purity of the patterns they display. Superposition, also created in 2012, mixes old newspapers as a way of exposing the entropy of nature itself, a hint at the ever evasive “source code” mentioned earlier. Indeed, Ikeda has said that his art was an attempt to explore the gap between science and the “esoteric codes that will stay secrets and external to human comprehension, maybe forever” [quote freely translated from the French leaflet for the presentation of Superposition, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2014].
Ikeda’s art may appear dry and remote from reality, but his artistic process has a human side, most notably in his collaborations with the controversial Japanese artistic collective Dumb Type, as shown in this moving video from 1998’s Or performance.
Here we have the striking images of dancers climbing up and down mortuary slabs, and a final curtain closing on a lone figure, submerged by chaotic video projections. Those images can be understood as a tribute to Dumb Type founding member, Teiji Furuhashi, who died of AIDS in 1995.
Furthermore, Ikeda’s recent works offer a more prominent place to humans. Superposition requires “operators”, while 2016’s Body Music is a fully “analog” composition for two clapping performers, who impressively reproduce faithfully Ikeda’s unique, minimalistic rhythm patterns. In all respects, Body Music is a human output from a machine input, as the performers imitate the crispy staccato of a drum machine. But then again, the tightness of drum machine is nothing more than a slightly tweaked reproduction of the performance of a human drummer. So which is the original, which the copy? In the end, it’s all processing and feedback.
There would be much more to say about Ryoji Ikeda’s body of work, not the least being his use of the relation between mathematics and art, and about his various collaborations with scientists. His work V≠L has been motivated by discussions about the infinite with Harvard number theorist Benedict Gross in 2008. Supersymmetry was realized in 2014 as Ikeda was the official “artist in residence” at CERN, Europe’s nuclear physics research organization based in Switzerland. Therefore, Ikeda’s work could be qualified as “science fiction”, as art is always fiction. I wouldn’t dare to try to explain the science in Ikeda’s artistic process, but then again, the data in his work is ultimately being crunched for no other purpose than creating an immediate sensory experience, one could even say a sensory overload. And for those, like us cyberpunks, who revel in the aesthetics of technique, it is a work of pure beauty.
Check out Ryoji Ikeda’s official website (with extensive audiovisual documentation) here.
You can find Ryoji Ikeda’s discography here.