The last thing I thought in the final minutes of Ryoji Ikeda's intense audio/visual presentation was, "This must be how it feels if you start to go crazy." Earplugs were handed out and there was a noise warning, but it is the precise quality of the sound and the frequencies used which made me feel shaky. And then there is the constant rolling of the data which is literally producing the video projections - a vast collection of binary, of graphs, codes and equations which seemed to pull me inside of them. Ikeda himself was there, controlling various aspects of the show, though I'm not sure which.
A glimpse of this show was on last year at the Surrey Art Gallery, so I knew that in one of the sequences the data is all derived from the mapping and co-ordinates of stars. I can't imagine the meaning of all the visual arrangements, but you don't need to know to appreciate them as compelling art. I enjoy Ikeda's abstract music and found great beauty in the black and white (with a dash of red) sea of mathematical images. Datamatics is a visceral, physical experience and a thing of beauty.
The show was Feb 3rd in one performance only.
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Datamatics was indeed loud,
Posted by Alana February 05, 2011 05:44:59