Nothing: a blank black screen and a wall of silence. Slowly, imperceptibly, a distant high-pitched hum emerges from the sonic void, like the sound of a moist finger running around a half-filled wine glass. Simultaneously, slowly, the screen flickers into life: white lines bisecting the black background. The hum disintegrates into blips and bleeps. Flashes of beauty flicker on the screen: cloud formations skitter across a blue sky, then fragment into a never-ending series of numbers. The visual aesthetic vanishes, to be replaced by pure data, yet at the same time the very essence of the image transformed into an abstract but utterly precise mathematical code. The volume of the music is suddenly unbearable, almost a physical presence. The numbers whirl ever faster as the electronic score reaches a deafening crescendo, erasing the image of the natural world and replacing it with a technological future where everything of beauty is reduced, refined, reordered into numerical code. As the visual image dissembles and disappears, so the sound simultaneously replaces it as the dominant sensory experience, colliding, mingling, merging in an almost hallucinatory fusion for the eyes and ears.
Welcome to the world of Ryoji Ikeda, a man
for whom sound and vision comprise not two separate senses but a single
stimulus to the senses. The Japanese sound artist, who works in New York, is
not so much a minimalist as an ultra-minimalist; his work is a quest to
deconstruct what we see and what we hear, to reduce it to its essence as a
single, multi-faceted ‘heightened sensory experience’.
A new work by Ikeda, spectra [for Terminal 5, JFK] (2004), throws another
ingredient into the formula of sound+vision–space. Sadly, it can only be
enjoyed by visitors to New York: those who fly into TWA’s terminal at John F
Kennedy Airport. A site-specific interactive installation for the luminal
tunnel in Eero Saarinen’s landmark Terminal 5 building, spectra appeals to
ideals similar to the Finnish architect’s own. Built in the late 1950s and
early ’60s (it was completed a year after Saarinen’s death), the terminal
building, all sleek white curves and marine motifs, is a monument to
Modernism. Today, in our high-tech present, it seems retro-futurist: a grand
vision of the space age from an era when the idea of a man on the moon still
seemed like pie in the sky. Combining utopian ideals of transcendence and
transportation in travel with America’s post-war optimism for a brave new
technological future, it’s the perfect fantasy environment for Ikeda to
inhabit.
Just as Ikeda enjoys playing with ephemera, exploring the limits of subliminal sound and peripheral vision, so the experience of spectra is not only subliminal but, contradictorily, interactive. Passengers might easily pass through the tunnel oblivious not only to the ever-changing visual and audio experience around them, but also to the fact that they are actively influencing it by their movements. Only through the public’s physical engagement in the sound space, therefore, can the real character of the work be perceived.
Describing spectra, Ikeda says: ‘This
installation offers visitors a special phenomenon which is nearly invisible
due to its intense brightness – and inaudible due to its ultra-frequences.
Visitors can barely recognise the dimensions of the space, as if they were
blind in a white-out state. As they pass through the corridor, subtle
oscillation patterns occur around their ears, caused by their own movements
interfering with the sounds.’ In the catalogue essay, the artist and writer
Hesse McGraw offers his own interpretation: ‘Ikeda’s work activates a
process that liquefies architecture, as sound is materialised by its
container. This uniform figure of sound and space accordingly traces and
alters all bodies moving through it.’
The forthcoming publication formula (2004), consisting of a book and DVD,
offers the most complete Ikeda catalogue yet, and the first complete
monograph about his work. An intimately-scaled minimalist artwork in itself,
every aspect of the package – right down to its look and feel – has been
considered by the artist’s critical eye. The book contains photographs,
schematics and technical data, as well as a comprehensive list of
performances, exhibitions, publications and record releases. The DVD
features a 35-minute film of the formula concert in Tokyo, a constantly
evolving work updated with each presentation, and a perfect synchronisation
between Ikeda’s sound frequencies and the images projected onto the screen
on an otherwise empty white stage, which exploits the darkness to amplify
our perceptions.
C4I (2004), which has its North American premiere at Eyebeam, New York, on 20th November 2004, is both a concert and a film that takes the process further by using nothing but pure data as both its material and theme. Video images of landscapes are progressively abstracted into a language of data, while fragments of text punctuate the onscreen projections, blurring the lines between nature, science and philosophy. This is both image and anti-image, abstraction and absolute representation, the transformation of the image into pure maths, yet at the same time creating a new aesthetic. Rendered starkly in black and white, in numbers from one to ten (or, strictly speaking, zero to nine), this impenetrable, ever-shifting mathematical equation is our entire experience represented in code. It is an apocalyptic artistic vision of a future where everything has been reduced to nothing (and vice versa), where there will be no distinction between sound and silence, between the image and the blank screen/canvas, between function and design, beauty and ugliness, between virtual reality and reality itself.
Tim Cooper is Music Editor for contemporary