The Brooklyn Rail

Neo-modern–club-disc-jockey–turned–multimedia-artist Ryoji Ikeda frames his work as a meditation on “the relationship between critical points of device performance and the threshold of human perception,” or an exploration of how much overwhelming stimuli a viewer can consciously experience.¹ Ikeda’s “data-verse” series, which consists of three large adjacent screens running concurrently, acts directly on this challenge, beginning with sheaves of numbered data swiftly unfurling vertically from top to bottom like streamers. Each screen then bursts into a frenetic flicker of information, from shuffling monochromatic CCTV footage to maps studded with numbersets. Ikeda’s sea of data, however, cascades past the audience in the blink of an eye. Numbers no longer communicate quantities or anything material at all—just infinite, unrelenting stimulation, not unlike endless push notifications, simultaneous conversational threads, and seemingly years-long doomscrolling sessions. A visitor to Ikeda’s current installation at the High Museum in Atlanta feels despondent, disempowered, aware of their position seated in a gallery as numbers blaze past but drained of any agency, or even the desire to intervene.

In data-verse 1 (2019), 2 (2019), and 3 (2020), the data’s source, subject matter, and meaning are indiscernible, as the information manifests only as white blocks of varying width against a black background—thermal maps and planetarium images of distant galaxies. The only elements suggesting that the abstract forms we see are data are the typewriter sound effects that accompany the work and Ikeda’s hollow, celestial score composed of cluttered white noise and pure sinusoidal waves. Ikeda might be defined as an exponent of Minimalism, a contemporary compositional movement imbued with mathematical subtext. Theorist Rebecca Leydon defines Minimalism as operating through a tension between two forms of repetition: musematic (an “unvaried repetition” of basic musical units) and discursive (a repetition of “longer, syntactically more complex units” of music). Leydon argues that tensions between musematic and discursive repetition give rise to a variety of “tropes” that assign the listener different personas, ranging from a spiritual shaman to a tyrannical dictator.

In his “data-verse” series, Ikeda produces multiple conflicting tropes. The score’s moderate, calming musematic and discursive repetitions signify, as Leydon writes, “access to mystical or spiritual transcendence,” forming the “mantric trope,” while its more brisk, percussive musematic repetitions create an oppressive “totalitarian trope” wherein the listener, with diminishing or nonexistent discursive repetition, feels an “inability … to break free of an obstinate musematic strategy.”² In a 2008 interview with Akira Asada, the artist explains that while “companies who use big data” effectively form detailed portraits of their surveilled subjects, they “don’t seem to have any imagination about it.”³ His work collectively visualizes and makes audible data’s overwhelming, hopelessly infinite presence. At the High, the exhibition’s floor plan adheres more closely to the conventions of a haunted house than an art gallery, with each room leaving the attendee increasingly estranged from themselves in a tacitly defensive state of hypoarousal, only compelled forward by curiosity. Each spectacle is connected by a narrow hallway, the visitor’s awe at what they have just seen settling in even as the dread of what they may next encounter mounts.

Ryoji Ikeda: data-verse does not introduce Ikeda’s audience to his abrasively immersive work gently, instead flinging them into a turbulent orgy of sight and sound without a second to spare. The first gallery’s coffered ceilings emit enough light for the viewer to see the floor and thus cling to a shred of spatial stability. Before the visitor has any time to take note of their surroundings, however, they are confronted by the exhibition’s first work, point of no return (2018), a centered panel upon which Ikeda projects a hysterically pulsating halo encircling a sleek black orb, a hypnotic target for the attendee’s gaze. Ikeda reimagines the poetic, transient span of a solar eclipse as sensory bombardment, a terrifying mandala manipulating the viewer’s perception of scale—an individual with a lifetime of experiences, perspectives, and feelings dwarfed by the universe’s vastness. The other side of point of no return’s panel is inverted: a still, white circle of identical size, made brighter by a blinding spotlight illuminating it from just a few feet away, superimposed on a solid black background, calling attention to “the universe as macrocosm and the individual as microcosm.”⁴ Its simplicity is a welcome respite, a chance for the viewer to soak in a rare moment of calm and an antidote to the visual and auditory disturbance they have just experienced.

Ikeda immediately disrupts this newfound equilibrium with his floor sculpture, mass (2023), a series of halos rippling from a center point like a whirlpool. Here, he heightens the visitor’s discomfort, as mass’s ripples seem to emanate beyond the exhibition’s walls and overtake the room itself. Ikeda unsettles his viewers again by introducing another vaguely threatening visual and cognitive palate cleanser in the form of line (2008), a vertical fluorescent light at the end of a darkened, narrow hallway. Ikeda’s imagery balances positive and foreboding subtexts, as his works suggest everything from an ordinary room to an interdimensional portal whose glow gradually burns into the audience’s eyes. The works that follow then split into their own cosmologies, spilling into the next hallway in the diminutive form of “data.grams”, more detailed, individualistic portraits as compared to data-verse’s sweeping mosaics.

Ikeda’s work recalls the thesis of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982), for which Philip Glass provided a Minimalist score. This film portrays hyperactive industrialization as a superficial, unfulfilling model of reality. In a montage commonly referred to as the “Grid” sequence, Reggio shows us time-lapse footage of human assembly lines speeding along at the same tempo as the throngs of commuters engulfing the escalators of Grand Central Station and wolfing down their power lunches. Reggio and editor/cinematographer Ron Fricke intersperse these sequences with footage of people bowling, playing video games, and watching movies, forcing even communal and recreational experiences into the same unremarkable, standardized, and commodified conveyor-belt structure.

The music accompanying Koyaanisqatsi’s “Grid” sequence does not vary, consisting of fluttering ostinato arpeggios of synthesizers so relentlessly carnivalesque they border on demented, to the point that Glass’s score, when paired with Fricke’s cinematography, becomes “indifferent to whether the image is human or technological.”⁵ The works featured in Ryoji Ikeda: data-verse display a similar indifference, expanding upon the totalitarian motifs and Glassian mechanical connotations of Minimalism by assaulting the senses at every turn with a visual and aural tug of war between musematic and discursive repetition. Ikeda’s work also materializes statistical deindividuation—Carl Jung’s notion that statistical analysis abstracts and diminishes the “archetype of the Self”—for the age of pervasive biometric surveillance.⁶ Ikeda musically and visually translates this experience of deindividuation and dehumanization by pairing the abrasive tonality of his instrumentation with a rush of never-ending repetitive imagery, aesthetically beating the listener into a submissive stupor.