The Mathematical Sublime

Photo by Nick Cobbing. Courtesy Dream Amsterdam Foundation and Forma, Amsterdam

Installation view of "spectra (amsterdam)," Vondel Park, Dream Amsterdam 2008, Amsterdam

Jarre Yrjo Saarinen

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One balmy summer night this year, I saw Amsterdam utterly transfigured by light. Pure white light shot 600 feet into the black sky, like a landing beacon for extraterrestrials, from a grid of 25 projectors in the docklands area of Java Island. It poured upward from five two-kilowatt floodlights on the floor of a 19th-century metal Music Pavilion in the city’s tranquil Vondelpark, bathing the circular canopy’s underside with unearthly luminance. It flowed onto the angled protruding box of the Van Gogh Museum’s new exhibition room, the five-by-five stonework grid glowing like a massive swatch of magnified pixels. It beamed from 68 projectors arrayed around a rain-filled brick gasholder in Westergasfabriek, a park and cultural center that on this still night suggested a desolate set from a lost Tarkovsky movie.

This mesmerizing spectacle, collectively titled spectra (amsterdam) (2008) and parlaying atmospheric abundance from simple means, was masterminded by Ryoji Ikeda, a 42-year-old Japanese artist and electronic musician. Though entirely untrained in visual art or musical composition, Ikeda moved in the early ’90s from free-form DJing, to providing soundtracks for the Japanese performance troupe Dumb Type, to making his own recordings (beginning with 1995’s 1,000 Fragments). He eventually went on to design light installations—first as accompaniments to his music, now separately—and ultimately arrived at a unique standing of dual credibility in the worlds of art and music on the basis of his unfolding of a kind of overwhelming technological sublime.

The multimedia datamatics project he’s worked on since 2006, for instance, is an exploration of the compositional potential of pure electronic data. It encompasses musical compositions whose jittery, rapid-fire rhythmic collages of sine waves and white noise push the auditory faculties to their limit and—accompanying live recitals of these compositions in which the reticent Ikeda almost never appears on stage—massive computerized backdrops of staggering complexity. Here, quicksilver matrices of number streams, parallel lines, and blips of light flash up at frame rates that brutally test the capabilities of both human cognition and, frequently, of the computers themselves. “They start crying, but if you push more and more, patterns emerge,” Ikeda explains when we meet the morning after the Amsterdam light show. Meanwhile, there’s the parallel spectra project, of which the Amsterdam work was a part. This has been rehearsed in galleries and public spaces since 2001, in the form of vividly white-lit walkways— one installed in 2004 in Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal at JFK airport—and laser-strafed rooms and corridors, all pumping out more illumination than the eyes can easily accommodate.

Indeed, one can regard all of Ikeda’s art as being concerned with the point where human faculties declare themselves defeated. Not, however, for sadistic reasons. Ikeda says that he lit upon his materialist approach to music—using just pure sine tones and white noise—out of pragmatism: “I’d heard so much music, it’s a really rich history and almost everything’s been done, and I needed to do something of my own. So I went back to really basic physics, reducing everything.” What Ikeda did was bring music as close as possible to the status of data, an impulse that recently reached its apex on the audiovisual installation test pattern (2008). “More than half the tracks are just pure transformation,” says the artist. “I converted texts, like, say, my emails or the Macintosh operating system, into binary language: zeroes and ones.” Binary (which, given Ikeda’s nationality, one is tempted to equate with the Zen concept of ma, or the structuring of emptiness by form) is, of course, an on/off process: Ikeda used it to generate readymade scores, instructing his computer to play a burst of sine tone or white noise whenever it arrived at a 1. Sometimes the results would be random, but surprisingly often they would settle into something approaching musicality. What you’re hearing—or at least beginning to audit, given the boggling articulation of test pattern’s moiré of itchy beats—are the densely cubistic, though often unexpectedly funky, syncopations of information itself.