Datamatics [ver 2.0]
Centre Pompidou, Paris
October 29th 2007
Datamatics [ver 2.0] is the latest
electronic audio/visual creation of Japanese composer Ryoji Ikeda where he
mines data mania for both the material and the theme of his work. The intention
is a meditation on the
wild relationship between the sound of data and the data of sound today. The effect, however, is a furious formalism that effectively
entices, but flattens and thins out the longer it goes on. That said, the
macabre grandeur of Datamatics2, with its repetitive super-coded/anti-coded
rigor, is stunningly beautiful on dŽbut. A furious rhythm of inscrutable data
discord is established from the beginning, necessarily entailing a process of
attraction/repulsion that intimidated me while spawning some sublime ideas.
Ikeda makes speed manifest here,
including the various speeds and slownesses that extend the retinal limit in a
way that would be previously regarded as outside of phenomenological thought.
The complex installation work of Tatsuo Miyajima came to mind at points.
Specifically MiyajimaÕs 1996 installation
at La Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, where he made two large
installations which dealt with the abstract constitution of time in the digital
age. Both installations consisted of abundant LED signal-lights which flashed a
countless bevy of over-excited digital numbers in what appeared to be a random
order. One installation, "Time Go Round", had twenty green and red
digital modules spinning in various circular orbits against an imposing dark
wall. One discerned there a mystifying data constellation in transit,
reminiscent of passages from Mona Lisa Overdrive.
Time
Go Round was an attempt to delineate the crisis
of time in relationship to the dispersed ontological self in the information
age (where digital time as the only time has become non-problematic in
computational work environments). MiyajimaÕs artistic sense of time in crisis
served to encourage me to value the freedom of my own interior sense of time.
By contrast,
IkedaÕs evocation of data time is riding high on speed, and tempo here took on
the implication of a dark temporal pop-cultural product pit into which my
accurate perceptions were poured - even as I resisted fragmentation and
remained fixed in the logocentric seat of Renaissance three-point-perspective.
This principle of hyper speed coupled to visual overload makes inoperable the
usefulness of the term ÔminimalÕ in association with Ikeda; as Datamatics2
animates a crumbling of the normal monuments to human difference we construct
daily. IkedaÕs mixture of technical precision with perceptual overload
presented a significant challenge to experiencing interior time. Perhaps it
would have been possible had I been able to divorce the musical experience from
the visual torrent.
IkedaÕs rapid techno music is created
from slight electronic hums and pops that build into gargantuan sonic textures,
sometimes reaching the noise intensity of Merzbow. Given his cornucopiastic
range, Ikeda, quite scrupulously, defies melodious categorization. This range
allows for virtuoso moments that provide the opportunity of exploring the
intricacy of his hard-edged myriad-colored dexterity as he plays back-and-forth
with elaborate but lucid musical aggregates that facilitated mild waves of
aural imbrication. In piercing clouds of cacophony I heard traces of Xenakis,
La Monte Young, Boulez, and Aphex Twin.
But IkedaÕs
primary tool of coherence is what in acoustics is called ÔdurationÕ, the
steady-state of a sound at its maximum intensity. My supposition here is that Ryoji Ikeda takes this musical phenomena of duration and
extends it into a general spatial intelligence based on petite bursts of sound.
The attraction to such an adjoining structure is strong, but it wanes quickly.
I suppose it must be like doing business with a rather spectacular whore.
Conceptually, IkedaÕs
music reminds me that our once basic Euclidean conception of space has been
expanded to include the formation of many-dimensional space. In IkedaÕs music
the Euclidean concept of space is modified via excess by enlarging the number
of vectors which may be constructed within it from three to some much larger
number (designated as n). Such n space implies the existence of a
higher-dimensional geometry that mimics Euclidean geometry. Inevitably this
approach shaped me as the viewer/listener into an inert subject. The audio is
both clean, noisy and hardheaded in such a way that the individual's personal
extension into the virtual tends to be blunted.
There also, however, is another
proposed spatial reality relevant to Ikeda, most notably the topological space
model of fuzzy space where there exists only a concept of nearness. In this
respect he reminds us that hearing and seeing is not an activity divorced from
consciousness. But really, any account of IkedaÕs sonic dexterity as related to
consciousness is inadequate to the facts of our actual experience of it. Yes,
his music is conceptual in that his sound deprives us of our habitual perceptive
boundaries by surpassing them. Through the excessive, Ikeda makes us remember
that throughout time there have been consensual realities that have proven to
be nothing but vast daydreams. But IkedaÕs music spectacularly fails to be in
opposition to what Donald Lowe in his History of Bourgeois Perception identifies as the
"bourgeois perceptual field"; a mode which he characterizes as
fundamentally linear, non-reflexive and overtly objective.
So, to conclude, IkedaÕs initially
mesmerizing presentation was an experience always about to come. I say Ôabout
to comeÕ as Datamatics2 contains much manic machinic stuttering (full of
Nietzschean multiple affirmations and shattered teleological
art-historical/art-hysterical continuums) that never resolve. The stuttering I
am addressing here rests, of course, in the spectral repetitions of his
mental-machinic procedures: we see and hear a digital/mechanical shifting again
and again and again and again and again and again, but with slight variations
full of dazzling Žlan. So it is a vigorous abstract stuttering I sensed in the
work that took me down into a deadening sensation of unfathomable data: the
data of anytime-anywhere. Given that implication of mythic indifference,
IkedaÕs a/v stuttering could be properly aligned with the dada artistic legacy
of Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara. It is a form of digital-dada post-conceptual
art-music in its absurd machinic indifference.
How does Datamatics2 achieve this
meticulous indifferent stuttering? Ikeda uses the precision of digital
technology to fracture data into tangled networks of beeps and lines -
initially delightful and exquisite nihilistic manipulations that tease our mind
with their multiple syntactical/semantic gestures of sadism, strenuously
massacring the social source material along the way. But like Op Art (which it
resembles) on crack, this stuttering stuttering stuttering turns tedious and
cold, shutting down feeling, reflection and contemplation and hence imagination
in my mind. In that sense Ikeda only created pictographic and aural
excavational moments that cannot be sustained, but are instead mental acts
worthy of short but frequent revitalizations: again and again and again and
again Ð a visual/audio whiplash that slashes into the burnt annals of symbolist
romanticism. To follow Ikeda there is to evaporate into the puzzling archives
of some geek heretical doctrine and pop out again into a dead excess vis-ˆ-vis
ideology writ large as system. In that sense he pictures/sounds as an obscene
thrashing of, and ongoing onslaught against, innocence.
Alors? So are these subsequent
revelations an abiding labyrinthian form of abject nothingness? Yes,
Datamatics2 is a blustering, bursting, blatant banality, but even so I
saw/heard in Datamatics2 the melancholy monstrous traces and dissimilative
Dionysian mannerisms of Novalis, Chateaubriand, Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
Aragon, Bataille, LautrŽamont, and Roussel. That is hardly farcical nothing
(albeit by way of negation folded upon negation / instrumentalization upon
instrumentalization). But what is missing in Datamatics2 for me is vague imagery
and sound that does not depend on induction or deduction, and exists prior to
these forms of controlling cognitions. In that sense, Datamatics2 cries out for
access to the libraries of other peopleÕs subconscious experiences and hard
drives.
So Ryoji IkedaÕs Datamatics2 is a stuttering
in a hygienic but deranged tongue within the vernacular of shattered techno
signs and computer music clichŽs. In that way Datamatics2 is anti-automatismic.
We are forced to think creatively and distinctively if we hope to un-pack and
self-interpret itÕs quintessentially dancing chaotic vision par excellence. And when we
do: we finally do come - enigmatic-lithe jouissance. But the jolt as been sadly
self-inflicted, lacking, as it does, the tragic/emphatic psychic dimensions of
artificial life (I saw or felt no field of intensities invoking the inchoate
and the savage) and the open multiple model of atmospheric free associations. Thus the event went a bit lacking, for
me, in what Deleuze suggested to us via Proust: something "real without
being actual, ideal without being abstract."
Joseph Nechvatal
Fall 2007 Paris
Computer Graphics, Programming:
Shohei Matsukawa
Daisuke Tsunoda
Tomonaga Tokuyama