Ikeda and The Intermedial

I first came across Ryoji Ikeda when in Berlin at the beginning of last year. He had been commissioned to create the 'db' twin installation, situated in the East and West wings of the museum, choosing an aesthetic reminiscent of Minimalist sensibilities in some respects, with an entirely white, acoustically treated room containing a military-grade, omni-directional sound emitter opposing in the other wing, a completely black room whose main feature was an intensely powerful spotlight 'boring' a hole through the back wall into an alcove space beyond. Around the edges of this room and stationed on plinths throughout were screens displaying vast amounts of meaningless data 'noise' on high definition monitors, lending the resultant static a super-sharp, crisp quality.

The video clip below will do far more justice than my feeble attempts to describe the effect, though suffice to say it was pretty profound. Dealing with sound, light and data is Ikeda's main remit - data that produces visual and auditory feedback which is at the very fringes of human perception, calling our attention to the vast soup of invisible data flying around our heads at any given moment in any given location.

I have labelled his work intermedial as it seems to sit fairly comfortably between various media, creating a situation and a collection of messages otherwise impossible to realise with a single execution. The use of dual spaces at the museum and the juxtaposition of light and sound effects places the viewer in an 'ultra-modern' experience, verging on the sci-fi with existing or more secretive technologies providing the more visceral aspects of bearing witness and being immersed in such an experience.

To extend this idea further, below is another video, this time of Ikeda himself in a more performative context at Sonar in 2010 - this time, he himself has extended his work into a situation with other intermedial connotations; that being the club environment, playing minimalist electronic compositions alongside a form of visual display based on the same kind of principles he utilises for his installation work, that being data - vast amounts of it, yet this time music and image are connected via computer technology, one laptop presumably running the visuals, one laptop he presumably controls for the musical composition. You could say that Ikeda himself is intermedial in respect of the way he seems to effortlessly walk the boundaries between these various forms of cultural production, using technology as his main mediator. Fascinating and incredibly compelling stuff...

As a footnote, I have it on good authority from a very good friend of mine that Ikeda uses Max MSP and Jitter to achieve these kinds of effects, something which is also transferrable across contexts. I'm sure I kind find numerous means to assert Ikeda's further intermediality, though I think I will leave it there for now.