This year’s Biennale di Venezia saw the participation of Ryoji Ikeda, a visual artist and composer from Japan, who works mainly with sounds and images, re-elaborating and mixing them with physics, mathematics, data sources, and other composers’ works to create multimedia installations.
Data-Verse is a hypnotic installation in which the audience is surrounded by a kaleidoscopic universe, a continuous flow of data transformed in audiovisual experience. To realize its works, the artist uses frequencies and scales difficult to perceive for human ears and minds and he represents sounds by means of Big Data, numeric systems and computer graphics.
Data-Verse was created using data sets from scientific institutions such as the CERN, the NASA and the Human Genome Project.
Ikeda’s research allows us to see the world differently and to understand the many layers that make up the universe, particularly the intersections between arts and technology, processing, transcribing, converting, transforming, des/re/meta-constructing and organizing massive scientific data sets to visualize and sonify the different dimensions that coexist in our world, from elementary particles to the universe.
