30 | New Scientist | 1 June 2019
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data-verse 1
Ryoji Ikeda
Venice Biennale, ItalyBETWEEN now and 24 November,
half a million people will visit May
You Live in Interesting Times, the
main art exhibition of the Venice
Biennale. More than 120 years old,
the Biennale is the world’s biggest
and most venerable art fair.
This year’s offering overflows
its historical venue in the gardens
on Venice’s eastern edge and
sprawls across the city.
In a 300-metre-long former
rope-making factory in Venice’s
Arsenale, a complex of former
shipyards and armouries, it is
hard to miss data-verse 1 by
Japanese DJ and data artist
Ryoji Ikeda: the first instalment
of a year-long project to realise
an entire universe on a gigantic,
wall-sized high-definition screen.
Back in Paris, in a studio that
consists of hardly more than a few
tables and laptops, Ikeda and his
programmers have been peeling
open huge data sets, using
software they have written
themselves. From the flood of
numbers issuing from CERN,
NASA, the Human Genome
Project and other open sources,
they have fashioned highly
detailed abstract animations.
Ikeda is self-taught. He
came to visual art from making
animations to accompany
DJ sets in the squats, clubs and
underground parties of Kyoto,
Japan. While his own musical taste
was eclectic in the extreme, “from
classical to voodoo”, Ikeda wasVenice sees the beautiful art of data
Ryoji Ikeda’s data-verse 1 is hard to miss at the Venice Biennale: it is par t of an ambitious project
to communicate the sheer quantity of data needed to understand our world, says Simon Ingsdrawn to house and dub: forms
in which he says “the sound
system is the real subject, not the
music being played”.
His own “music” reduces sound
to sine waves and impulses – and
the animations to accompany
his sets are equally minimal.
“If the sine wave is the simplest
expression of sound, what’s the
simplest expression of light?
For the scientist, that’s a
complicated question, but for
the artist, the answer is simple:
it’s the pixel,” he says.
Ikeda’s project to reduce the
world to its essentials continues:
“I wondered what would happen
if matter were reduced the same
way.” Now Ikeda has turned
himself into one of art’s curious
beasts, the pure “data artist”.
Each of data-verse 1’s 15-minute-
long abstract “dances” explores
the universe at a different scale,Views Culture
Each abstract “dance” of
data-verse 1 explores the
world at different scales AUDE
MARS
PIGUET^ VEN
ICEBI
EN
NALE,
ARTIST^ RYO
JI^ IKED
A“ Ikeda used to
make animations to
accompany DJ sets
in squats, clubs
and underground
parties in Kyoto,
Japan”from the way proteins fold to the
pattern of ripples in the cosmic
background radiation. However,
Ikeda’s aim is not to illustrate
or visualise the universe, but to
convey the sheer quantity of data
we are now gathering in our effort
to understand the world.
In the Arsenale, there are
glimpses of this new nature. The
Milky Way, reduced to wheelinglabels. The human body, taken
apart and presented as a sequence
of what look like archaeological
finds. A brain, colour-coded,
turned over and over, as if for the
inspection of a hyperactive child.
A furious blizzard of solar images.
And other less-easily identified
sequences, where the information
has peeled away entirely from
the thing it represents, and takes
on a life of its own: red pixels
move upstream through flowing
numbers like so many salmon.
Ikeda differs from his fellow
data artists. While a generation
has embraced and made art
from “big data” – the kind
of dynamic information flow
that derives from recording a
constantly changing world – Ikeda
remains wedded to an earlier,
more philosophical definition
of data as the record of observed
facts. Chaos and complexity for