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asked him what he studied his face grew stern and he said, I studied nothing. He
could not remember what the program he went to school for was called (economics
or something). He claims the only reason he graduated was because he gave a
professor a large bottle of sake. After this small miracle, he spent most nights D.J.ing
in clubs in Tokyo.
I learned everything in the clubs, he said. Nothing intellectual, just, boom boom
boom. Twenty years ago the club scene was completely different from now. It was all
like this scale, he gestured to his work in progress, really extreme. I dont see me as
having really progressed from clubs to here. He threw his gaze around the room. I
mean, Im 44 years old. I cant play clubs anymore. Im a middle-aged man and I do
installations but it feels the same as when I was a 25-year-old D.J. Technically, my
artistic method has become really sophisticated, but I think at the core, its the same
as it always was.
He became warm and friendly as we talked about music, something he said art critics
rarely want to discuss. This is understandable. Like the incomprehensibly vast
numbers Mr. Ikeda displays in his work, his music is remarkably abstract. He disregards
rhythm, melody, tone and scale in favor of mapping out the limitations of the
equipment he uses, as well as how these extremes register physiologically with the
listener. Test Pattern, for instance, a work from 2008 that lays some of the
groundwork for the transfinite, converts data into binary code and projects it onto a
large screen while a composition made up of the lowest and highest perceptible
frequencies plays, the code responding to the audio cues. It is, according to Mr. Ikeda,
as much a test for the electronic devices as it is for the audiences senses.
His most accessible work, the ethereal album Op. (the abbreviation for opus),
provides the easiest entry point into his styleor really his absolute lack of one. The
work is the exception in Mr. Ikedas oeuvre: as the liner notes state with daunting
bluntness, there are no electronic sounds used. Instead, Mr. Ikeda first recorded
each part for piano, flute, violin and viola onto a computer, a formless kind of
symphony that was written, more or less, spontaneously. He then hired copyists to
transcribe the piece onto sheet music, then guided an acoustic orchestra in playing it,
creating a kind of translation, twice removed, of the music in Mr. Ikedas head. It is the
closest thing listeners have to an Ikeda manifestoa strange combination of organic
sounds playing toneless music, sounding pretty in spite of themselves, constructing
order out of Mr. Ikedas chaos and droning with such tension that it seems like the
notes, each fighting against the context of any conventional theoretical understanding
of music, are calling out in pain.
Theres no message to what I do, he said. Its very pure. Its like a Lego. He locked
together his fingers. Lights and sound, the music and the visual, they melt together.
You see, tomorrow Ill do the soundcheck, but until then, I dont even know how it will
fit.
A few days later I returned to the Armory to see the nearly finished work. At the
entrance, the 40-foot-tall, 60-foot-wide screen projected binary code in quick, fluid
patterns, a collage of black and white flashes that looked something like white lines
moving dizzyingly past a car speeding down the highway. On the other side of the
screen, the room was comparably dark and even a bit frightening. The floor was
painted black. On view was the equally hypnotic movement of numbers and data,
racing just as fast along the screen, with literally millions of tiny digits arising and then
disappearing in fast motions, looking from a distance like television static or a swell of
gnats buzzing against a white wall. The glow from the screens reflected onto the steel
trusses of the Armorys mammoth shell. Mr. Ikeda, adorned in all black now, sat at a
table, silent and stonelike, both illuminated and obscured by his work, the shadows of
numbers falling across his face. He was back to not talking as he stared at the endless
data whizzing by on the screen. I remembered his parting words to me in our interview
in the conference room.
Compared to our planet or our universe, Mr. Ikeda said, I can maybe contribute
some interesting thing for a New York audience, and absolutely I try my best each time,
but its very little. And thats nice, especially as a Japanese, because thats part of my
philosophy of no interviews or no portraits. I want to disappear. Myself is not
important. The thing, I made it, but it is everything. So this feeling, maybe you can see
that in the experience of the work. The installation speaks better than me. Im
inconsistent. Tomorrow, Ill say something completely different.
Artists, he sighed. Its better to not say anything.
mmiller@observer.com