Most of the installations and live performances by the leading Japanese composer and artist Ryoji Ikeda are known to overwhelm and saturate viewers’ visual and aural senses. In C4I, 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. C4I offers a demonstration of how we’ve become both reliant on and immersed in data.
Dubé, Joëlle. “Ryoji Ikeda.” Esse: Immersion n°116 (01 2026).