LAYER 13: DATA

Ryoji Ikeda

• Ryoji Ikeda

• JUL 19 - AUG 26, 2018

• Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, RU

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• code-verse

 Sounds whir constantly through the networks of leaves in the Interforest. Even when silent, unheard, they pass in streams of signals. When, walking through the Interforest, a sound meets your ear, it is but one strand of a halo of spinning stars, whose brightness and deepness together is too much for the human ear to take, so the ear leans away from the higher and lower frequencies, the most holy and profane circles of the halo, so as not to perish by the power of infinity. 

When I put my own lips to the mouthpiece of my staff, constructed from the throats of those who couldn't keep their contracts, and I blow air, and it produces sounds, the same familiar screams, could I really call those sounds new and original? After all, my own breath comes from the halo of perpetual motion, propelled by the energy of a sun plummeting constantly toward death, and the frequencies it excites, the oscillations that it causes to resonate in the chambers of the Interforest, have existed always in nature. Before they existed as sounds, they existed as data, numbers stretched between the branches of trees.

Your two ears structure the data of sound, the numbers that oscillate the bone of your head, to tell you where you hear the sounds about you. As you think to yourself you hear, not with your ears, but with phantom ears that fabricate sound data within your head. This is possible because not only do you hear sound, but sound touches you. It imprints itself onto the surfaces of the inside of your head until your blood picks it up and incorporates it into its language streams, like a seed carried in the wind it will propagate and change, not because the sound was created but because it was heard and interpreted, processed, compiled. The screams that emanate from my staff may point to my lips, but what they mean lies within the ears that hear them, for data created means nothing, does nothing, until it meets the machine that interprets it. Within the data is code, but the code itself hides no meaning, only awakening existing meaning from within the machine.