As mentioned last week, I went to see the opening of The Laboratory at Harvard’s Grand Opening . This included an exhibition of student work exploring the intersection between art and science and a showing of “datamatics 2.0″ by Ryoji Ikeda. I arrived too late to see much of the exhibition, but from what I could tell it was a little froofy and light on the science side. Interesting ideas, sure, but art+science? Hm.
Much more interesting was the video and audio composition (I hesitate to call it music) designed and composed by Ryoji Ikeda. It is very hard to describe the experience in words, but it was an interesting and stunning look at ways to visualize different sorts of mind-bogglingly huge data sets and was all tied together with audio motifs. The aesthetic was very harsh and mostly black and white, but when combined with the sound and precise on-screen movements, the stellar quality of the production was almost tangible. Included in the production was computer-generated imagery of hard drive errors, genes, protein structure, star positions, and likely other data sets that were completely abstract. Below are some stills of the video taken from the website. They probably don’t look that impressive when viewed out of context, but imagine them moving with strange digital sounds and also flashing.
