[Image: dataplex by Ryoji Ikeda] Ryoji Ikeda’s datamatics 2.0 :: October 29, 2007; 8:30 p.m. :: Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR :: Tickets are sold one month in advance.

Ryoji Ikeda is a Japanese sound artist who lives and works in New York City. His work focuses on the minutiae of ultrasonics, frequencies and the essential characteristics of sound itself. It exploits sound’s physical property, its causality with human perception and mathematical dianoia as music, time and space. Using computer and digital technology to the utmost limit, he has been developing particular “microscopic” methods for sound engineering and composition.

Ikeda’s datamatics is a long-term programme of moving image, sculptural, sound and new media works that use data as their theme and material to explore the ways in which abstracted views of reality – data – are used to encode, understand and control the world.

Here is a RealAudio sample.

datamatics [ver 2.0], the new, full–length version of Ryoji Ikeda’s acclaimed audiovisual concert that premiered in March 2006 (ver 1.0), has been developed significantly to include a newly commissioned 20–minute sequence. Driven by the primary principles of datamatics, but objectively deconstructing its original elements – sound, visuals and even source codes – this new work creates a kind of meta–datamatics. Ikeda employs real–time programme computations and data scanning to create a sequence that is a further abstraction of the original work. The technical dynamics of the piece, such as its extremely fast frame rates and variable bit depths, continue to challenge and explore the thresholds of our perceptions.

Ikeda began his activity as a sound artist and DJ in 1990. In 1994 he began to work as the composer for the multimedia art group Dumb Type. Since 1995 he has been intensely active in sound art through concerts (including a recent performance at Centre Pompidou in Paris), sound installations and recordings; the albums +/- (1996), 0? (1998) and the recent Matrix(2001) have been hailed by critics as the most radical and innovative examples of contemporary electronic music. With Carsten Nicolai he works on the recording project Cyclo, for which a new CD has recently been released.

In 2000 Ikeda created the sound installation Matrix for the Millennium Dome in London and Matrix (for and anechoic room) for the exhibition Sound Art- Sound as Media at the ICC in Tokyo. He has participated in the important group show of sound art Sonic Boom, curated by David Toop at the Hayward Gallery in London. The versatile range of his research is demonstrated by his collaboration with the Japanese architect Toyo Ito, presented at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, in the exhibition Vision and Reality (2000).