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Ryoji Ikeda: test pattern
TIMES SQUARE
NEW YORK CITY
OCTOBER 1-31,2014
Ryoji Ikeda: superposition
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
NEW YORK CITY
OCTOBER 17-18,2014
Ryoji Ikeda at Salon 94
SALON 94
NEW YORK CITY
OCTOBER 20-31, 2014
Three years after his first major exhibition (the transfinite, at the Park Avenue Armory in 2011), Ryoji Ikeda, a Paris-based Japanese artist working across both sound and visual elements, returned to New York this fall to present a series of works at the invitation of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) for its Crossing the Line festival. Considering Ikeda's comparatively recent introduction to North America, it was a rare chance to experience a body of his work in different formats and in very different venues across New York City: an audiovisual performance, superposition (2012-ongoing), which premiered in the United States in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; a solo exhibition at Salon 94; late-night screenings of test pattern (2008-ongoing) on digital billboards in Times Square throughout the month of October; and a one-time special sound event complementing the screenings.1
Conceiving data as material that composes our world, Ikeda explores the interfaces between our reality and its unexplored dimensions based on in-depth mathematical and scientific research. Data, as visible and invisible substance permeating our world, is a recurring theme in several series of Ikeda's works including test pattern; superposition; db and spectra (both 2000ongoing); datamatics (2006-ongoing); WffL (2008-ongoing); and systematics (2012-ongoing) that have evolved over a long span of time. Ikeda transforms such explorations of data into media productions-including installations, audiovisual performances, and sonic albums-that address the philosophical question of the ontology of our media environment and our world. In this respect, superposition is Ikeda's most recent performance production in which audiovisual elements and constantly streaming information and data constitute a rematerialized space that engages viewers' sensory perception.
Ikeda's performance superposition was inspired by the artist's exploration of quantum mechanics and quantum computation, and offers a new understanding of the information that comprises our world, shaping our environment and economic and political systems as well as social and interpersonal relationships. Based on his research into substances at an extremely small subatomic scale in mathematics and physics, Ikeda postulates the logics that could explain the fundamentals...