Thresholding | TABlog | Tokyo Art Beat

Ryoji Ikeda is a contemporary electronic musician, releasing seven solo albums of minimalist music since 1995 (eleven if you count his collaborations). He began his career with Dumb Type, the media art group from Kyoto, in the early nineties, and since then his work has increasingly begun to cross over into mathematics and perceptual psychology as much as it has into contemporary art. Following on from the large scale “spectra” light installations in Paris, Amsterdam and JFK Airport, the current show at MOT is a more complete look at Ikeda’s oeuvre.

The show is presented across two floors, which seem to act as mirrored opposites. Inside the setting of the show is minimal, but graphically the work is almost infinitely complex. Data is everywhere with numbers, and codes, permeating almost all of Ikeda’s graphical work (even his sounds are created by mathematical principles). With such an endless and massive amount of data on display, it appears that Ikeda’s purpose is to give expression to the infinite through his projections, sound art, and installations. When asked about this in the exhibition catalog he said that any such attempt would be ridiculous. He is right. Then perhaps he is attempting to “illustrate complexity”? His response to that: “staring at clouds would be more beautiful than illustrations of complexity”. The fact that the show is not about expressions of the infinite or illustrations of complexity stumps expectations and makes it seem that much more difficult.

As you enter the dimly lit first room you see ‘the transcendental (π) [nº1-a]’. A cube, lit from above, it seems to show a small set of waves frozen in undulation. As you get closer you realize the surface is not only an abstract texture but a mass of microscopic digits forming an enormous number beginning with “3.1592…” that seems never to end. At the moment of identifying the numbers there is not so much wonder as curiosity or fascination at the perceptual ‘trick’.

Where there is wonder is in Ikeda’s two projection works: ‘data.matrix [n°1-10]’ and ‘data.tron [3 SXGA+ version]’. These two works show a messy mass of information, a kind of static, accompanied by drones, clicks, and whines. But then individual digits become recognizable, and the screens seem to become meaningful. The data resembles massive amounts of data, all being processed, digested, and interpreted by machines: star coordinates, digits, codes, and 3D trajectories.

It’s strangely reassuring to watch the data multiplying upon itself. This was the one piece which people just sat and watched, sometimes moving closer to see what was really going on, at other times sitting against a wall, bathed in white reflection, watching the loop play over and over. There was a sense that this unknown data is mapping something monumental and significant. But what we are seeing is merely the sound of progress, the texture of information, without any of the baggage or context we would normally give it, a kind of ‘mechanical glossolalia’: a machine speaking fluently in a language we do not understand.

The stark white basement is a stranger compared to the first floor. Fields of noise, barely perceptible tones, mix and coalesce as you walk through the fluorescent space. This is a space of more perceptual thresholds. Standing here, there is only a whine, stand elsewhere and pitch and timbre shifts. Then you enter the final piece, ‘matrix [5ch version]’, five speakers, which look like military satellite dishes. As you move into direct line with the speakers the ethereal humming and whining intensifies until, as you stand precisely between them, the sound becomes enormous, icy, and skull-shattering. It seems unreal, a tone almost unheard, with huge intensity. But it is only audible at a precise location; a threshold of perception made explicit and painful.

Rather than attempts at illustrating complexity or the infinite, Ikeda’s praxis seems to revolve around “thresholding”: the perceptual reduction of information to absolutes. Thresholding is a practice used in image processing, a process by which grayscale images are reduced to total black and total white, without shading. All Ikeda’s works at MOT, from ‘the transcendental (π) [nº1-a]’ at the beginning, to ‘matrix [5ch version]’ in the basement, contain a threshold. There is a point at which your perceptions about the work change, a sea of static turns into a impossibly large number, a mass of lines and dots evokes the digital mapping of star coordinates, or standing over there makes my head hurt with high pitched frequencies. This is what makes Ikeda’s work unique and powerful. He creates thresholds to test perceptions, to provoke moments of wonder, and many times he succeeds.

The show is an intriguing exploration of visual and aural minimalism, a fascinating attempt to make visible the indivisible, not the invisible. Ikeda follows minimalism’s reductionist approach, but he has attempted to get closer to that which perceptually can be divided no more. Through his mechanical glossolalia Ikeda has engaged in a thresholding between total presence (1) and total absence (0), leaving you as the switch.