“The French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), New York’s premiere French cultural center, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art kick off the 2017 edition of the Crossing the Line Festival with the New York Premiere of groundbreaking audiovisual artist Ryoji Ikeda’s supercodex [live set].

Renowned for his achingly beautiful minimalism, ultra-spare beats, and mesmerizing audiovisual installations, Ikeda transforms his celebrated 2013 album supercodex into a singular live performance, in which he takes the stage surrounded by mammoth projections of arresting black and white digital imagery.

In supercodex, he mines raw material from previous records and mathematical models to masterfully construct new music. Performed live, what at first sounds like a battle of digital noise, blips, and bass drones gradually engages the listener with elements of techno and dance music. Mammoth projections of stark imagery add dazzling textures of percussion. The result is a beeping, pulsating, immersive mix of sound and multimedia art that dazzles the senses.” — FIAF

For Ikeda, “the purest beauty is in mathematics. Its perfect assemblage of numbers, magnitudes, and forms persist, independent of us. The experience of the sublime in mathematics is awe-inspiring. It is similar to confronting the vast magnitude of the universe, which always leaves us open-mouthed.”

Supercodex [live set], 2013 © Ryoji Ikeda photo by Ryo Mitamura: Shown (in silhouette): Ryoji Ikeda

Supercodex [live set], 2013 © Ryoji Ikeda photo by Ryo Mitamura: Shown (in silhouette): Ryoji Ikeda

Supercodex [live set], 2013 © Ryoji Ikeda photo by Ryo Mitamura: Shown (in silhouette): Ryoji Ikeda

Headshot: RI_portrait © Ryoji Ikeda

Images courtesy French Institute Alliance Française.