Speculative-sensible Experience in Ryoji Ikeda’s Audiovisual Installation and Performance Inside and Outside of the White Cube

Abstract

Since the 1990s, audiovisual installation and performance have been pervasive not only in art museums and alternative gallery spaces but also in media art festivals and urban spaces, crossing the split between mainstream contemporary art world and so-called new media art scene. Especially, the surge of audiovisual experimentation in large screen-centric installation and performance has emerged under the influence of laptop music and DJ/VJ cultures as well as intermedia theatre that utilize large screen as performance site and that integrates moving image and sound into physical environment involving live performances. In this respect, this paper discusses viewer’s speculative-sensible experience in Paris-based Japanese electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda (born in 1966)’s datamatics (1996-) series in which the layers of sonic and visual elements, the spatial and architectural structures, and the constantly streaming dada comprise a viewers’ unique spatio-temporal situatedness irreducibly contingent to the presence of viewers, invoking cultural imagination on the entity of data and its system. Especially, tracing the evolution of Ikeda’s work oriented from laptop music and the glitch culture and nurtured by his experience as a collaborator of Japanese experimental intermedia performance collective dumb type (1984-), it underscores the ways in which Ikeda conjures up palpating datascape, interfacing the visual and sound with the digital computation and its embodied experience. It further discusses Ikeda’s work that forges a new mode of experience of datascape which is rapidly forging new patterns and dynamics of everyday life and its social effects in specific social, institutional and cultural settings.