The Brooklyn Rail

Between the infinite and nothingness lies the “data-verse.” This dialectic is at the center of Ryoji Ikeda’s first museum exhibition in the United States at the High Museum of Art. Ryoji Ikeda: data-verse builds on the artist’s growing critical acclaim and affirms his reputation for complex technological work.

Organized into seven distinct chapters, the exhibition begins with a loosely connected series of installations which explore the poetic and phenomenological effects of Ikeda’s attempts to materialize light and sound. The show opens with point of no return (2018), an immense pulsing white screen with a slowly dilating black hole at its center. The work’s visual economy of means masks its complex relational effects and symbolic overtones. As the viewer walks closer and contemplates the piece, the black hole at the center appears to be reconfigured from a flat, two-dimensional image into an immersive field. The frenzied, pulsing energy of the white screen disappears amidst the stilled, vast emptiness of the black hole. An illusory optical effect, this transformation mimics the notion that the viewer has been pulled inside the black hole’s magnetic field. Stepping back from the screen, the viewer is visually re-grounded within the space of the gallery as the pulsing light returns and the black hole once again becomes a flattened two-dimensional image. Point of no return is both an invitation to the viewer and a philosophical query which prefaces the remaining works in the exhibition. The black hole at its center is suggestive of the moment in the universe before the Big Bang, before there was light, before the universe would begin to expand.

The remaining installations of this initial series—mass (2023) and line (2008)—explore that expansion, the moment after the Big Bang, when light emerged from darkness and yielded matter. Mass features similar black-and-white circular forms which ripple across a large screen placed directly on the floor. Installed in a darkened, low-lit gallery whose black walls absorb light, the images on the massive screen seem to take on three-dimensional form, appearing to open into a swirling abyss below. Ikeda’s play with optical illusion transforms the continuously decentering circular form on screen into a three-dimensional sphere. As we stand at the work’s edge, teetering above its seemingly limitless depth, mass’s vertiginous effect is deeply humbling, a reminder of humanity’s infinitesimal place within the universe.

The final installation in this series, line, plays with optical illusion through an economy of visual means while cheekily laying bare its own making. Similarly installed in a darkened gallery, the work appears at the end of a long hallway as a single, thin line of light bursting from the darkness. Its totemic elegance beckons viewers to draw near, evocatively playing with the potential transcendence manifested in walking towards the light. Doing so, however, reveals the optical illusion of line, as it becomes apparent that the light does not emanate from a bulb or screen, but rather, from a slit cut into the gallery wall which allows for the light of the window behind the wall to shine through. The work's simplicity conceals its metaphysical complexity. Like Barnett Newman’s “zip,” Ikeda’s line upends figure-ground relations but does so while sculpting light, as Ikeda corrals the immateriality of light into geometric form.

Line leads viewers to the exhibition’s eponymous work, data-verse 1/2/3 (2019–20). It is composed of three monumental screens, each of which features distinct yet interrelated chapters of large-scale, open-source datasets. Masterfully transformed into lush imagery and synchronized to an electronic score, data-verse 1/2/3 eschews the visual restraint of Ikeda’s earlier installations in favor of operatic form. If line evokes the “zip,” data-verse 1/2/3 is the sublime. The screen’s dense, pulsing images weave together datasets at the thresholds of both micro and macroscopic perception; from subatomic particles and protein structures to solar irradiance and maps of galaxies, the piece transforms mathematical planes into a dazzling, hypnotic display of the universe’s wonders.

At the center of Ikeda’s explorations is an ethics of scalar relationality. The viewer first encounters these questions in relation to a singular body of knowledge whose various datasets are simultaneously displayed across the three screens. Ikeda’s biological data cycle, for instance, shifts from cellular splices to musculoskeletal scans. The connection between these datasets is punctuated by Ikeda’s electronic score as a sharp, high-pitched, metallic chime visually runs across the screens, creating a horizontal plane. This tripartite visualization is echoed in the expanding scale of the datasets themselves, which map increasingly larger fields of relationality. From biological interactions within the body to the social engagements revealed in traffic grids and stock market charts, to the interplanetary and intragalactic, the screens display steadily larger points of relation. Ultimately, the heat maps of the sun’s radiation burn across the screens, and the image cycle begins anew.

The ethical query at the center of the sublime and the question of the figure-ground relation which Ikeda explores in his work resurfaces in data-verse. However, instead of exploring the visual phenomenologies of light as geometric form, the data itself becomes the surround, the black hole, the abyss of white light, the universe, as the viewer is enveloped within it.