What would it feel like to be stuck inside a particle accelerator? That’s the scenario posed by Japanese sound artist Ryoji Ikeda in his hyper-sensory new solo exhibition supersymmetry.
The installation, a UK premiere in collaboration with The Vinyl Factory, sees the artist draw on inspiration from his 2014 residency at Cern, the world’s biggest particle physics research centre. Based in Geneva, the institute is home to the Large Hadron Collider, the titanic experiment in which two high-energy particle beams are made to collide at almost the speed of light.
supersymmetryattempts to transform the complexity of quantum information theory into an immersive aesthetic experience, meshing sound, visual data and high-speed light displays. The show pairs two inter-related installations. As you step into the cavernous, pitch-black space at the top of Brewer Street Car Park in Soho, you’re confronted by *[experiment].*Three 1m x 1m light boxes, glowing white, skitter and whoosh with tiny ball bearings, forming unique and unpredictable patterns. It's a disorientating experience, leaving you feeling adrift in such a frenetic space, with red lasers constantly scanning the surface movements.
As you step through the curtain into the next space, [experience], you’re plunged into the middle of two 20m-long screens, blinking with forty monitors, all displaying how the previous room's data has been analysed and translated. The synchronized monitors pulse with high-speed analyses and typed text, while the electronic soundscape -- a symphony of bleeps, buzzes and droning hums -- adds to the charged atmosphere. The overall effect, as you glance at the mutating text and the rapid-fire bombardment of data, is both hypnotic and hallucinatory, and yet there’s also something strangely oppressive about being caught in this endless loop of sound and information.
In a 2014 interview, Paris-based Ikeda told Kazunao Abe, curator at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media: "During the period I’m staying at CERN, there are experiments being carried out with the aim to prove the existence of as-yet undiscovered "supersymmetry particles" that form pairs with the particles that make up the so-called "Standard Model" catalogue of physical substances. Data and technologies of these experiments are not directly incorporated in the work, but I’m going to discuss a variety of things with the physicists at CERN, and the results of these discussions will certainly be reflected."
supersymmetryisn’t the first time Ikeda has explored such territory. Earlier work such as datamatics(2008) and superposition(2012) have also used a synthesis of sound and visual art to bring mathematics, quantum mechanics and logic to hyper-realised life.
supersymmetry runs at Brewer Street Car Park until 31 May 2015
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
