Datamatics [ver 2.0] - Ryoji Ikeda - 18th April 2011 - Review

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 formalism.

Ikeda’s 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.

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.

his music is conceptual in that his sound deprives us of our habitual perceptive boundaries by surpassing them. Through the excessive, Ikeda makes me remember that throughout time there have been consensual realities that have proven to be nothing but daydreams.

A visual/audio that slashes into symbolist romanticism.