Supersymmetry by Ryoji Ikeda
Last Thursday we took ourselves down to The Vinyl Factory’s exhibition space in Soho to check out Ikeda’s first large scale solo exhibition in London. The installation provides an immersive, yet slightly disorientating experience using computers and projectors to display a series of dynamic representations of words and visual data.
Ryoji Ikeda is a leading electronic composer and visual artist and is perhaps best known by us for his work on the Spectra project in August 2014, when he illuminated the capital’s skyline with a single beam of white light to commemorate the outbreak of the first World War.
Ikeda has also spent time as the artist in residence at Centre For Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, drawing inspiration from ongoing research into the theory of Supersymmetry, which we’ll go into later and of which his latest piece is named.
The pitch black show room is located on the third floor of Brewer Street car park and is split down the middle into two halves, keeping with the theme of symmetry. We walked past the warning sign for strobe lighting and straight into the first half, making our way over to what appeared to be a set of three light boxes arranged in line in the middle of the room. Rolling about the illuminated surface of each platform was an assemblage of small ball-bearings which danced and formed patterns as the platform oscillated. A scanner would occasionally pass over the surface recording the positions of balls. Speakers where hidden around the room and filled one’s ears with a collection of sounds that emphasised what we were looking at. Occasionally the lights would strobe distorting our vision and drawing us further in.
To enter into the second half of the room we had to pass through a blind entrance, having the choice to go left or right. We chose left, for no apparent reason other than the fact that it felt right, and entered into the second half of the installation. The room was again split down the middle with a row of computers and projectors facing inwards on both sides. The screens displayed a series of changing patterns and visual data which mapped the trajectories of the ball-bearings in the previous room. The animations cycled through and the accompanying sounds really made you feel like you had entered into a digital realm.
The installation provided an in depth exploration into the interactions between music and visual art through mathematics and logic. The piece reflects two fundamentals of scientific research: experimentation and observation, and by doing this achieves a fully immersive auditory and visual experience. So immersive in fact that we sat on the floor there for a good half an hour.
The exhibition is running until the 31st of May and we would recommend if you have time to spare to try and make it down. Entry is free and you can spend as long inside as you’d like. Details can be found at TimeOut.
If you want to find out more about the scientific theory of Supersymmetry that inspired Ikeda then check out what Wikepedia and CERN have to say on it.
Finally if you are interested in Ryoji Ikeda and his work you should swing by his website and Facebook page for more.
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