Infinitesimal to Infinity: Ryoji Ikeda's Data Composition and Space of Sensing

Abstract

This dissertation examines the audiovisual work of Paris-based Japanese-born composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda (born 1966 in Gifu, Japan). It provides a detailed overview of Ikeda's work at the intersection of sound, art, digital computation and data that has evolved last three decades since the 1990s, crossing the boundaries of electronic music, contemporary art and media culture. This analysis describes a wide spectrum of Ikeda's work---sonic albums, publication, audiovisual installations and performances, and public art. The dissertation begins by examining the evolution of Ikeda's art in the ""aesthetic revolution in the 1990s,"" particularly from his association with laptop music and the glitch culture and with Japanese experimental intermedia performance collective dumb type. It also illuminates its art historical and media aesthetic links from the sound practice and visual art from the 1960s and '70s to position Ikeda's art in the historical trajectory of contemporary art and media culture, while discussing the specificities that Ikeda's art opened up a new domain of the audiovisual practices and data art. Then, challenging the discussion of Ikeda's work as the resurrection of Modernist formalism in digital media art, I argue that Ikeda created a unique minimalism that encompasses specific cultural context and social critique of data culture, stimulating the viewer's experience of unfathomable data. This dissertation further examines the ways in which Ikeda's data composition---certainly evolved from his music composition---articulates sonic, visual, and numeric data from the infinitesimal to the infinite to make the microactivity of digital computation and data's inherent ""sonicity"" into the sensate experience in real time and space. The matrix of data, however, is not meant to be decoded nor interpreted in the linguistic sense. I contend that, unveiling the temporal processuality of data processing at the threshold of the viewer's perception and cognition, Ikeda's work manifests the aesthetics of nothingness, which ensures the viewer's highly sensible experience of data. Finally, this dissertation account for the viewers' shared experience in Ikeda's work as space of sensing that brings a new sensibility to our world of data.