Most of the installations and live performances by the leading Japanese composer and artist Ryoji Ikeda are known to overwhelm and saturate viewers\u2019 visual and aural senses. In C^{4<\/sup>I<\/em>, first an audiovisual live concert (2004) and then an audiovisual installation (2006), Ikeda aims at revealing the omnipresence of data and its interference with our reading of the world. Starting off slow, with peaceful moonlit landscapes and the gently hand-flicked pages of a nondescript book, the video rapidly shifts to code, data abstraction, market indicators, and statistics. The result is an unresolvable tension between real images and computer-generated graphics. C4<\/sup>I<\/em> offers a demonstration of how we\u2019ve become both reliant on and immersed in data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n}

In 2021, Ikeda created a diptych\u200a\u2014\u200aThe Universe within the Universe<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200ato accompany the blockbuster immersive experience co-produced by Felix & Paul Studios and PHI Studio, THE INFINITE<\/em>, in which participants move through the International Space Station via virtual reality headsets. Ikeda\u2019s work consists of a very large circular screen displayed on the ceiling and a mirror, of the same shape and size, laid on the floor, so visitors find themselves caught between the projection above and its reflection below. Set against a minimal soundtrack with alternating low- and high-pitched sounds, the projection oscillates between contemplative images of a temperature map of Earth, layered with radar imagery, and two planes of fast-moving distorted images, giving an almost unbearable sense of acceleration, as if simulating absorption by a black hole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Critical Paths <\/em>(2024) uses a similar display: the screen is set on the ceiling of a narrow corridor and the mirrors cover the entirety of the walls\u2019 surface. The video and the viewers\u2019 own reflections are endlessly multiplied in a seemingly borderless space. Drawing inspiration from research done at the University of Tartu\u2019s Institute of Genomics, The Critical Paths <\/em>visualizes a flow of genetic data that retrace the history of human genomic evolution, through which people are invited to progress. Here, too, the data generated by the research envelop visitors to the point of inescapability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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