Exhibitions
Marcella Lista, chief curator of the MNAM Center Pompidou and curator of the exhibition Continuum by Ryoji Ikeda, launched in 2018, as part of Mutations / Creations 2, within the museum.
How does the artist operate to compose a musical work through computer coding?
Ikeda didn’t have a musical education; it is first thanks to radio programs and through his ear that he started sampling. In the eighties he joined a group that brought together artists from the performing arts, architecture, video and computers, called Dumb Type, a name mocking liberalism and its normative systems of the era, promoting individual competition. Since his beginnings, he has been moulding sound like plastic. After experimenting with collage, with the album 1000 Fragments (1995), he proceeded on a complete analysis of sound’s material. The texture is created by a mathematical sum of frequencies. On the one hand, the sine wave, the purest sound, smooth and without harmonics. On the other, white noise, its opposite, as the sum of all frequencies delivered in a formless buzzing. In his album, +/- (1996), considered as the matrix of his writing, Ikeda constructs a musical composition by the simple juxtaposition of these two types of sounds in unpredictable alternations. In such a way he radically redefines the auditory experience, starting from a work which relates sound to a quantity of information. It foreshadows an approach that is similar to digital technologies without using electronic tools.
What makes his work innovative?
His approach to light and video, which became more precise at the start of the 2000s, corresponds to a desire to fully explore a language based on the boneless elements of a medium. When he undertakes to collect computer data and to submit it to progressively refined parades, Ikeda really succeeds in materializing the invisible dimensions of big data. His work proceeds from a gesture of composition that explores mass, density and extreme speed, all of which describe this new reality. In his installations and in his performances of the “data.matics” or “data.tron” series … sound and image compress an incredible amount of data, giving a sometimes brutal and anxiety-provoking feeling, a sensorium re-orchestrated by the digital environment.
What are his most advanced experiments?
Ryoji Ikeda is constantly experimenting with new concepts, new formats and new spaces, including outdoors. He is reluctant to define himself as an artist. Close to the world of research, he has a strong interest in the leading questions and debates in the fields of mathematics and physics. Recently, in a conversation, he defined himself as a craftsman, paying tribute to the carpenters of Shinto temples who have built for centuries by the exact assembly of elements, without mortar, nails or screws. A distinct attitude, far from the codes of contemporary art.