Ryoji Ikeda.The Transfinite. Armory

There is something very meditative in images or even bands of color that start and stop in given patterns.. In Brion Gysin's cutup which he pioneered with William S. Burroughs,and which was on view at the New Museum last summer,you are stopped from following a visual narrative because the image cuts out before you have chance to make a story about it.

In Ikeda's work, there is a similar cutting up of reality. Stripes of varying thicknesses of light and dark move up a huge screen and floor, while electronified music plays. However, in my opinion, while the visual narrative is missing, the entire sound becomes a narrative at one minute the sound was very celestial and soothing at another, it became disturbing.Ikeda claims to be dealing with the concepts of beauty and the sublime in his work. From my studies of the term sublime in 19th century painting, I know there is a haunted quality to the sublime.When my friend and I were looking at the piece when it turned to static, we found ourselves suddenly talking about older scary movies like "Poltergeist" and " The Ring". Our conversation was almost a part of the piece.

Behind the big screen stretching to the nineteenth century vaulted ceiling the back of the screen was a "The Matrix"- like pattern of numbers, not in binary but individual numbers. In addition to evoking a giant suduko puzzle it seems to raise the question whether beauty and the sublime can be quantified. The number pattern screens continued in a number of boxes behind the screen. Or perhaps beauty was the numbers and the patterns of stripes in
the front were the sublime. It is interesting to think about.