The Vinyl Factory x Fact in collaboration with Audemars Piguet Contemporary presented ‘RYOJI IKEDA’, the largest exhibition of works by the audio-visual artist to date in Europe at 180 Studios, 180 e Strand, London. e solo exhibition, which will be on show within the vast 180 Studios space will feature world premieres of several never-beforeseen works and invited viewers to immerse themselves in Ikeda’s thought-provoking and highlycharged dynamic digital universe. Ryoji Ikeda’s innovative work explores the essential characteristics of sound and light by means of mathematical precision and aesthetics. e artist engages with frequencies and scales difficult for the human ear and mind to comprehend, visualising sounds, and rendering the imperceptible through numerical systems and computer aesthetics. By orchestrating sounds, visuals, materials, physics and mathematics, Ikeda goes beyond the conceptual to delve into extremes and infinites, testing the limits of human senses and digital technology.
His long-term projects have taken a multiplicity of forms, from live performances and immersive audiovisual installations to books and CDs, and have evolved over the years to encompass the latest iterations of his data-driven research. is exhibition, produced and curated by The Vinyl Factory x Fact, follows five years of collaboration between Ryoji Ikeda and e Vinyl Factory, which includes the UK premieres of Ikeda’s supersymmetry in 2015 and test pa ern [n 12] in 2017, as well as several vinyl albums and new commissions. eir latest venture presented twelve largescale, multi-media works of which six premiered on the global stage, and five appeared for the first time in the UK. e exhibition is also the first show by a solo artist to take over multiple floors at 180 Studios, a space which has been adapted specifically for Ikeda’s work.
Over the last 20 years, Fact magazine has operated at the intersection between electronic music and cu ing-edge contemporary art. Now, launching with this Ryoji Ikeda exhibition, Fact will produce its own exhibitions, hosting a dizzying rotation of large-scale art shows open to the public with a focus on the new wave of artists creating immersive experiences, with the Fact Space opening in the basement of 180 The Strand in 2021. Imagined by Ikeda as a subterranean exploration of sound and light, the exhibition took viewers on a sensory journey of 180 Studios’ labyrinth-like spaces which seem to defy the building’s scale. e exhibition has shown how Ikeda has transformed the way we experience art and pioneered a global movement with immersive works that push our senses to new sonic and visual extremes, challenging our understanding of the universe and our place within it.
“ The entire exhibition is based very much on physical experience, not only intellectual content. It begins with works that give intense, very simple experiences, and then the works get more complicated, like the dataoriented digital projections such as data-verse.” —Ryoji Ikeda
Among those artworks premiering is the data-verse trilogy, a large-scale immersive project commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary in 2015. The installation features all three variations, shown for the first time together at 180 Studios, creating a rare opportunity for audiences to see the works in harmony in a new environment which is uniquely able to take on and maximise the trilogy’s’ scale, where most spaces can’t. Since 2012, Audemars Piguet Contemporary has commissioned contemporary artists to create new artworks that reflect the world we cohabit today. dataverse marks the conclusive chapter in Ikeda’s data-driven audio-visual research and aesthetics that first began in the early 2000s.
It visualises and sonifies the different dimensions co-existing in our world, from the microscopic to the human, to the macroscopic. data-verse 1 premiered at the 58th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale de Venezia, in 2019. data-verse 2 was unveiled in Tokyo Midtown in October 2019. data-verse 3 premiered in London in a mesmerised showing of the three chapters. e trilogy’s sublime medley of bright lights, visceral pa erns charging at high frequencies, and constant yet calming acoustics were positioned at the centre of the exhibition and to allow viewers an impactful moment of reflection on the vast data universe in which we live. A new, site-specific version of test pa ern also made its global debut. test pattern is a system that converts any type of data (text, sounds, photos and movies) into barcode patterns and binary patterns of 0s and 1s. rough its application, the project aims to examine the relationship between critical points of device performance and the threshold of human perception. The exhibition also included UK premieres of other hypnotic Ikeda artworks including point of no return, an intense audio-visualisation that creates a virtual experience akin to entering a black hole, spectra III, a tunnel of strobe lighting that made its premiere at the 2019 Venice Biennale which has been readapted to reflect the scale of the 180 Studios show, and A [continuum], a sound installation comprising six colossal Meyer SB-1 speakers that act as minimalist sculptures.
