Come Together: Ryoji Ikeda Traverses the Transfinite (Extended)

Walter Paters famous claim that all art constantly aspires towards the condition of
music still reverberates within certain fusty circles, like some lost entry out of
Flauberts Dictionary of Received Ideas. Middlebrow absurdity for sure, but
nonetheless a useful argument-starter for visitors to New Yorks Park Avenue Armory
this spring, where electronic composer and multimedia wizard Ryoji Ikeda
commandeered the darkened, cavernous Drill Halls 55,000-square-foot space with
the transfinite, his most accomplished work to date. I say commandeered as theres
a military precision to Ikedas tightly synched audio-visual elements.
Though starting out as a composer, Ikedas curiosity has long extended beyond music,
traversing disciplinary boundaries in his early collaborations with the Kyoto-based
performance troupe Dumb Type and his ongoing work with Carsten Nicolai. In recent
years he has created a series of increasingly bold multimedia concerts and installations
that explore the possibilities of binary code functioning as a bridge between sound and
image.
In its quest for total cinematic immersionbeyond that of VistaVision and todays 3-D
the transfinite shares something of the spirit of Stan Vanderbeeks Movie-drome and
other pioneering examples of expanded cinema, here carried out in digital form. Ikedas
constellation of three preexisting pieces, reorchestrated as a single work, centered
around a 40-foot-tall, 54-foot-wide double-sided screen bisecting the Drill Hall. The
first section seen upon entry, test pattern, consisted of horizontal bands projected
onto both the screen and the floor in front of it. The image as such was divided
vertically down the center, with each half moving in opposite directions.

Once visitors removed their shoes, they could step onto that clean white surface as a
separate projection washed over them from above. Dont-touch-the-art inhibitions
disappeared, and people spread out and lay prone as though viewing a meteor shower.
For some it seemed the next best thing to a trip to Sedona, as they positioned
themselves along the centerline in the works most turbulent zones. From certain
perspectives, the sweeping striations of light fused the two planes of screen and floor
as one moving surface; from other angles, the juncture evoked the moment when a ball
bounces and changes its trajectory.
On the reverse side were the transfinites two other components, data.tron and
data.scan. The formers rapidly changing projection of vertical data columns (graphs,
numbers, words) scrolled in contrary speeds and directions, giving the effect of a slot
machine before its reels come to rest. The latter was a series of small-screen echoes
of data.tron, with nine evenly spaced monitors facing up like old Pac-Man tabletop
game consoles, aligned perpendicular to the screen and displaying synchronized
variants of the larger projected image.
Ikedas music is replete with contradictions: uncompromising in its sonic austerity, but
at the same time amazingly rich; machine-like in its rhythms, yet beckoning us to
invent new dances. Often lumped together with other artist-cultivators of the glitch
aesthetic who first found prominence in the mid-Nineties, Ikeda stood apart from the
Cagean indeterminacies of peers such as Farmers Manual and Pita, displaying instead
a greater affinity with Conlon Nancarrow and his proto-programmed studies for the
player piano. Like Nancarrow, Ikeda purges all traces of human touch, aspiring to
crystalline perfection. The outcome, however, holds the paradox that, as critic Kodwo
Eshun has written, machines dont distance you from your emotions, in fact quite the
opposite. Sound machines make you feel more intensely, along a broader band of
emotional spectra than ever before However absolute Eshuns statement may seem,
its nevertheless a useful corrective to a certain sort of lazy humanist thinking.
One might assume the aforementioned military precision would violate that longheld cinematic taboo against Mickey Mousing. Originally an animators term coined
to describe a superfluous lock-step relationship between music and image, its
disparaging overtones belie a complex tangle of aesthetic and technological concerns
that deserve an essay all their own. The short version is that filmmakers such as
Eisenstein, Clair, and Grierson viewed its early practice as a sad failure of imagination,
against which they argued for an asynchronous approach. Following the achievements
of silent cinema at the time of sounds arrival, they regarded this audio/visual
redundancy as a giant step backward, with speech and music relegating the primacy
of the image to a diminished, secondary role.
Today the issue reappears as a perennial problem with live electronic music (and as a

sub-factor in the unaccountable popularity of air guitar competitions): the paltry

spectacle of a performer obscured by synthesizer or laptop-pointing, clicking, sliding
sliders and twisting knobs, fully engaged with instruments and oblivious to their
audience. One common solutionespecially among laptoppers running Max/MSP or
Processing softwarehas been to design patches that generate some sort of visual
corollary thats driven along in real time with the music. While ingenious on a technical
level, the results rarely transcend the innocuous, resembling nothing so much as a
lousy screensaver.
The radical abstraction of Ikedas imagery, along with the musics non-idiomatic
shapes and dot-matrix printer polyrhythms, shift the attention to purely visceral
sensations; were inclined to perceive this sound/image synchronicity organically as we
would a moving object and the noise it produces. His imagerybeyond sharing the
musics icy perfectionseems bent on provoking questions: where do these streams
of data originate? Do they visualize some other aspect of what were seeing (or
hearing), or perhaps something external to the work? Is it part of the works metadata,
or only intended to appear that way?
And then theres the question of speed; were taken well beyond that threshold where
reading becomes looking. Numbers and abbreviations fly by fast, like a transcript for
some cyborg auctioneer; it takes real effort to comprehend these encrypted
text/graphic hybrids, even when the image briefly pauses.
Moving among the nine monitors of data.scan, you could find partial answers. Those
versed in astronomical star-naming protocol may recognize terms like Epsilon Indi
and Wolf-294, hints suggesting something beyond a closed system of selfreference. The sky and stars have long been of interest for experimental filmmakers
such as Joseph Cornell, Stan Brakhage, and Jeanne Liotta. Lets not forget, too, that
expanded cinema trailblazer Jordan Belson went so far as to screen site-specific work
long before Laser Floydwithin a planetarium itself.
Less apparent within the rapid graphic motion of data.tron are terms like Lys, Val, and
Arg, abbreviations for various amino acids; it may seem that Ikeda is drawing a simple
and rather reductive analogy between binary code and the Human Genome Project
until we consider that the sheer amount of data outstrips any real possibility of its
comprehension.
By deriving material from astronomy and genetic mapping, the transfinite acts as a
kind of conceptual zoom lens, fulfilling cinemas dreamed-of union of inner and outer
space, an aspiration shared by contemporaries Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson, and
Bruce McClure. Celebrating extremities of scale and the instruments that act as
sensory extensions to allow their perception and measurement, the work also pays

homage to a not-so-obvious ancestor: Charles and Ray Eamess 1977 short Powers of
Ten.
2011 by Jim Supanick