Still images of Ikeda’s physically imposing video works often feature tiny human figures dwarfed by his explosions of color and towering walls of data streams flowing through space like water. Hoping to entice audiences to visit the exhibition with that epic scale, billboards placed around Atlanta will convey the jaw-dropping monumentality of Ikeda’s installations that bridge music composition, haptics and visual art.

Credit: ASANO Takeshi

Credit: ASANO Takeshi

The High’s senior curator of modern and contemporary art, Michael Rooks, likens “data-verse’s” opus of light and sound to the climactic “Star Gate” sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) enters a psychedelic tunnel of light in outer space, signaling a move from one dimension into another. Accompanied by Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s discordant orchestral composition “Atmosphères,” the scene is a destabilizing, kaleidoscopic terror.

That “2001″ sequence, says Rooks, embodies some of the same sensations of sensory overload experienced in Ikeda’s work. He describes it as an “overwhelming, exuberant but also horrifying visual, aesthetic experience … unlike anything you’ll ever see. It’s totally unprecedented” for the High, says Rooks. “It’s pretty mind-blowing.”

Writing about the use of sound in Ikeda’s work, the Walker Art Center’s Sam Segal describes the sensation: “Shards of static tickle the insides of your ears. You can feel his impossibly heavy bass drones in the pit of your chest. Sine waves bouncing back and forth between the left and right channels increasingly disorient your sense of space.”

Writing in Wallpaper magazine, Harriet Lloyd-Smith said of Ikeda’s 2022 London show: “This does not feel like an exhibition, it feels like a sensory assault course that one does not view, one survives.”

Credit: David Stjernholm

Credit: David Stjernholm

Rooks first saw Ikeda’s work in 2018 at Taiwan’s Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

“I thought I’ll go see the show for a half hour,” says Rooks. “I was there for eight hours.”

While the High has featured monumental, immersive, crowd-pleasing exhibitions before, such as Yayoi Kusama’s Instagrammable “Infinity Mirrors” in 2018, the experience and effects of Ikeda’s work are unique, says Rooks. It’s wrapped up in the idea of the sublime in art, inspiring complex feelings of wonder and a destabilizing contemplation of the unknown.

“If it’s beautiful, you can handle it; the sublime, you cannot,” Ikeda, a club DJ in Tokyo in the 1990s, said in a 2019 interview in London’s Financial Times. “If you stand in some great whited-out landscape in Lapland, the Sahara or the Alps, you feel something like fear. You’re trying to draw inform­ation from the world, but it’s something that your brain cannot handle.”

“Data-verse” is the cornerstone of a multifaceted exhibition that unfolds in multiple galleries on the Wieland Pavilion’s second floor.

The composition of image and sound unfolds in seven different movements as visitors travel through the High’s Cousins galleries.

The experience begins with “point of no return,” which suggests a black hole surrounded by pulsing white light, what Rooks calls “a sculpture made of light.” It’s one of many pieces that use a strobe effect. The show is accompanied by disclaimers for viewers sensitive to strobe lights, which can trigger nausea, disorientation and even seizures in those with epilepsy.

The second work in the exhibition sequence, “mass,” is much larger in scale and is projected onto the second gallery floor. Visitors enter a long corridor “line” with a beckoning white light in the distance that leads to the massive trilogy “data-verse.” Another hallway then leads to “data gram,” which dismantles and reconfigures data from “data-verse.”

The last gallery features two-dimensional works using microfilm, punchcards from vintage computers, a piano roll from a player piano, 16 mm film and other analog works that inform Ikeda’s larger compositions.

Because he creates a singular, enveloping experience wherever his work is installed, architecture plays a role in Ikeda’s work.

Credit: Julien Gremaud

Credit: Julien Gremaud

“He likes to think of his work in terms of total compositions so they form a unique integrated whole and that includes the building architecture,” says Rooks.

While the Piano expansion provided the necessary space to install “data-verse,” there were technical hurdles involved in bringing Ikeda’s work to the museum. For one thing, the Cousins galleries’ wood floors create glare that can interfere with the video projection, so a custom carpet was installed to create “a perfectly black dark space to maximize the experience,” says Rooks.

Installing “data-verse” also required technical skills the museum staff didn’t have, so local technical consultants and staff at Ryoki’s studios in Tokyo and Paris were employed, which created its own challenge when it came to setting up calls and Zooms with people in three different time zones.

“Just communicating and coordinating everyone’s schedule is a challenge,” says Rooks.

If online videos of Ikeda’s mesmerizing blend of abstracted data light and transportive soundtrack are any indication, the difficulty of bringing “data-verse” to America for the first time will be worth the effort.

But the High’s biggest obstacle might be conveying to audiences what they will see and how they will experience the exhibition.

“It is a challenge for us,” says Rooks, who expects social media and word-of-mouth to help spread the word.

“We hope it will capture their imagination, and we hope they will want to learn more about it.”

ART PREVIEW

“Ryoji Ikeda: data-verse.” March 7-Aug. 10. $23.50. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta. 404-733-4444, high.org

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