http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/arts/music/ryoji-ikedas-superposition-at-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art.html 2014-10-20 01:08:49 Ryoji Ikeda’s ‘superposition’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Ryoji Ikeda’s “superposition” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art used images from computer processing to suggest the beauty and the limitations of technology. === In “superposition,” The viewer sat in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium facing a stage, as if to experience a movie or a musical performance; “superposition” was both of those, sort of. In between bracketing columns of speakers, 10 small digital screens were arranged across the lip of the stage, 10 larger ones across the middle, and one floor-to-ceiling screen across the back. In front of the large screen two performers — unusual for Mr. Ikeda’s work — sat at ends of a long table. They appeared to be demonstrating the uses and limits of data processing. They tapped out a script in a kind of Morse code, at nearly the same speed but, of course, not quite. (The script contained statements like “Logic is not a body of doctrine but a mirror image of the world.”) They jammed the computations of old IBM key-punch cards by imposing a crossword-puzzle-like graph over them. They rolled marbles on a flat surface: The marbles moved around randomly, and then a computer program captured their positions, fixing them as points in relation to a central axis. The sound and visuals, for the most part, were representations of digital data: sine waves, visualizations of code in black and white, or sometimes primary colors. It was high-contrast, high-resolution, pointedly loud or carefully soft, rhythmic, with intermittent puffs of white noise. If you weren’t inclined to it, you might have thought it antiseptic, nearly inhuman. But there is, always, a human stink in Mr. Ikeda’s work. “Superposition,” if I understood it right, is about the tension between what can be graphed, plotted and perfectly represented, and what can’t. He’s interested in cold data — “superposition” is a concept from quantum mechanics — but more interested in how we can use it as a language, how we can make it talk or sing. He’s a kind of translator, converting principles into words, numbers into code, code into sound and image. Translation is an imperfect job, never finished. And so when Mr. Ikeda’s artistic will assumes the right proportions to his sets of data, producing the right tension, his work can feel much greater than the feat of digital programming you see or hear. Mr. Ikeda, born in Japan, lives in Paris. (The first performance of “superposition” happened in Paris two years ago, and its United States premiere at the Met — I saw it on Friday — was presented in collaboration with the French Institute Alliance Française’s His 2011 installation at the Park Avenue Armory, “Test Pattern,” experienced a few weeks ago, didn’t shake me. In the right state of concentration, the viewer supplies his own meaning to the “datamatics” works, and in Times Square the smell of hot dogs and other things that don’t reduce to code are too distracting. “Superposition,” on the other hand, plunges you into messy meaning, moving toward an undergraduate cosmic mind-blow, a kind of all-digital