Ryoji ikeda biography template

Born in in Gifu Japan , Ryoji Ikeda is a visual artist and composer of minimalist electronic music. At the age of thirteen, he began playing guitar in a rock band, but showed little aptitude or any particular appetite for practising instrumental music. At eighteen, he left his hometown to study at the University of Tokyo, although today he insists he has no memory of the name of his university program or what he studied there.

With other alumni of the university, he founded the multidisciplinary collective Dumb Type, which included dancers, architects, visual artists, performers, and musicians. Thanks to Dumb Type, he made it a habit to work with programmers, designers, computer engineers, and architects. Ikeda has no mentor or model that he follows: he has only collaborators.

The music critic Atsushi Sasaki, who is close to Ikeda, recalls that for a long time he had no idea that his friend was a musician. Before the turn of the century, the Y2K Bug, the spread of personal computers, and the rise of the internet, Ikeda knew full well that his aesthetic was intrinsically and definitively linked to sounds and to machines.

There are a few exceptions to this, however. The first is the series [Op. The series, which appears on an eponymous album, is the most accessible in his catalogue as it stands. His album covers which he creates himself are exclusively black and white.

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The numbers 0 and 1 run through the titles of his pieces, as well as their content. At times, Ikeda creates with no sound at all, working on paper and aluminium. His fascination with the sciences extends to quantum mechanics, which was the inspiration behind superposition, although he points out that his works can never be interpreted as one-dimensional, and that they are inspired by scientific data without paraphrasing them; the titles of his works are meant to spark many different significations for visitors.

His technique is also one of variation: his series spectra , matrix , datamatics, A , and also dataphonics are all designed so that his concerts, installations, and performances can be adapted to the venue, the country, the formal constraints, and evolving methods and technologies; for example, there have been some twenty versions of datamatics adapted and presented in Taiwan, Madrid, Tokyo, Bogota, Montreal, and the Grand Palais in Paris.