Ryoji Ikeda

One of Japan’s leading electronic composers, Ryoji Ikeda (born 1966) manipulates sound in various “raw” states, often using frequencies at the very limits of human hearing. Occupying a unique soundworld between ambient electronica, sinewave noise and glitch beats, Ikeda’s music has expanded into art contexts more extensively than any of his contemporaries. Datamatics is a long-term art project that explores our reception of miniscule audio and visual data. Developed between 2006–2012, it consists of an audiovisual concert, installations, publications, a radio program and a CD. This book documents most of the works from the series, emphasizing three major datamatics exhibitions presented in Yamaguchi (Japan 2008), Bogota (Columbia 2011) and Gijon (Spain 2012). Alongside graphic material relating to the production processes such as data sources, graphic scores and technical diagrams, the book also includes texts by curators Kazunao Abe, Maria Belen Sez de Ibarra and Benjamin Weil.

A star of minimalist electronica and sound art, Ryoji Ikeda (born 1966) focuses on the building blocks of sound and aural minutiae, often deploying frequencies at the very edges of human hearing—sound that, as he puts it, “the listener becomes aware of only upon its disappearance.” His albums +/- (1997) and Matrix (2001) spread this soundworld of sine waves and ambient glitchery to a wider audience; since then, he has exhibited and collaborated (notably with Carsten Nicolai) across the world. A homage to Musique Concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer's Solfege de l'objet sonore, Dataphonics began as a monthly broadcast on France culture's Atelier de Création Radiophonique, in which Ikeda created a highly physical auditory experience based on the idea of binary-logic data made audible, “to materialize the invisible domain of ‘totally pure digital data.'” This book and CD includes spreads of graphic scores, codes, symbols and the composition itself, recomposed from the ten segments in which it was originally conceived.