Sound Portraits Radio {EP12} Ryoji Ikeda

RYOJI IKEDA

EPISODE 12

Composer and artist Ryoji Ikeda is one of the most important international representatives of media art and experimental electronic music. He creates synaesthetic installations that focus on the essential characteristics of sound itself and that of visuals as light by means of both mathematical precision and mathematical aesthetics. A pioneer in the world of minimal electronic music, his work is defined by its razor-sharp digital techniques and the purity of his sounds – often using only sine tones and noise, with frequencies at the edges of the range of human hearing. Comparable to a hacker, he enters the world of data and makes its hidden essentials – its code – visible: unfolding data streams and abstract computational processes to envelop the viewer in both sound and light. Often working on an incredibly large scale (such as NYC’s 55,000 sq ft Park Avenue Armory), Ryoji Ikeda elaborately orchestrates sound, visuals, materials, physical phenomena and mathematical notions into live performances and installations that are as unique as they are immersive. This episode of Sound Portraits Radio is hosted by Doron Sadja.

“I am a composer. I compose visual elements, sounds, colours, intensities, and data. I love to compose; I love to orchestrate all these things into one single art form – sometimes as a concert, sometimes as an installation, sometimes as public art, sometimes as film. I’m just playing, cooking with many different materials.”
Ryoji Ikeda
“When you make music, in the extreme sense, you don’t need sound, because it is a mathematical structure. When you listen to the music of Mozart, the composition is the relationship between the notes – and of course it will have a score, but you don’t need the sound. Sound is a property of the physical world, the vibration of air, and you have to know the characteristic of that sound itself. So physics is that part, and mathematics is very much the composition.”
Ryoji Ikeda
“Compared to our planet or our universe, I can maybe contribute some interesting thing for a New York audience, and absolutely I try my best each time, but it’s very little. And that’s nice, especially as a Japanese, because that’s 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. I’m inconsistent. Tomorrow, I’ll say something completely different.”
Ryoji Ikeda
“I learned everything in the clubs. Nothing intellectual, just, ‘boom boom boom.’ Twenty years ago the club scene was completely different from now. It was all like this scale, really extreme. I don’t see me as having really progressed from clubs to here. I mean, I’m 44 years old. I can’t play clubs anymore. I’m 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, it’s the same as it always was.”
Ryoji Ikeda
“The emotion is something else. I dont want to think about emotion for the audience. Because if you think about the emotion, you try to control, or you try to give up. Anyway, we have always emotion, so through the artworks I dont want to force the direction of the emotion. Sad, or joy, or no. Just I do my job and thats it. But I’m very confident about what I’m doing. It’s a little bit beyond personal, emotional, mine. I want people to feel a little bit of the sublime. I make half of the piece, and the people complete the other half. If I dont have any audience, this is nothing.”
Ryoji Ikeda
“There is no message to what I do, it’s very pure. It’s like Lego.”
Ryoji Ikeda
“I dont want to emphasize the computer or mathematics. No. It’s just experience. The expression is a little bit abstract. You need some mystery. Youre watching something but your brain cannot handle. This is interesting. I like this state of mind, and theres no real answer. Questioning something to the people, this is more important than giving any answer.”
Ryoji Ikeda

SOUND PORTRAITS RYOJI IKEDA