Nine Athenian photographers lost themselves in Ryoji's Ikeda universe

After spending some time inside the exhibition space, and once the video installation had looped a few times over, I realized that my gaze began – perhaps unconsciously – to fall on small details within the space. On the room’s structural columns, on the video projectors, even on the traces people had left in the carpet when passing through. That’s when I began to notice the soundscape which, amid the torrents of information, had not particularly drawn my attention before. Moving up close to the speakers, I noticed that their textures were similar to those of the projections sweeping across the walls. On the basis of this idea, and in an attempt to make the work’s very soundscape visual, I created an image in the highest possible resolution in order to capture the atmosphere of the entire installation in an oblique way.

Ryoji Ikeda’s “data.flux [12 XGA version]” represents the universe in digital abstraction: an infinite number of micro-elements given structure by mathematical algorithms. Is the work a tiny microcosm or an enormous macrocosm? I decided to place a well-known face – the actor Dimitris Mothonaios – inside the space in order to reveal to the general public, through the shock of transformation, the nature of the contemporary cyborg as seen by a human eye (a symbol of human intelligence) and by a computer-screen eye (a symbol of artificial intelligence).

Ryoji Ikeda’s “datamatics” project is a masterful take on how individuals engage with digital technologies, one that electrifies visitors and arouses the deepest of questions concerning the thresholds of human perception within digital conceptions of the universe. In his work, Ikeda presents the bigger picture through myriad, alternating, and accumulative patterns. This particular series of portraits bring the discourse back to the Japanese artist’s root concern – to the level of the isolated and discrete individual unable to process a mass of endless oncoming data. The features of these faces are altered and identities become fluid in a process of assimilation. In reality, the portraits formulate a visual comment on the existential angst that accompanies the transformation of our very beings into digits of data.

Entering the space, grew in me a scrutinizing sense of being tested. As I observed the alternating patterns and heard the sounds inside that empty room, the light constantly pulsing, I felt myself stop my mechanical thinking and start really experiencing my surroundings. In this exploratory universe, in among other individuals, each experiencing it in their own special way, there was a moment after a time when I wanted to close my eyes for a while, and that’s when I felt the pulse of the sounds inside my body, as the projections interposed darkness and light. You feel safe inside this intense audiovisual process, and unconsciously seek to let go.

Humans are the most technologically advanced data-processing entities known to exist. We evaluate available data-sets and react accordingly. Humankind is a stretch of interconnected neural networks. We are the computers we are trying to create.

My work “Y0u + I / a non-binary love story” explores the nature of love and eroticism in a society where technology is in continual development, changing everything around us.

In today’s reality, where individuals find themselves constantly connected to the rest of the world through their digital selves – incessantly feeding digital networks with data from their lives, and all the while absorbing huge amounts of information from the world around them – the nature of the Ego finds itself under constant transformation. At the same time, notions of sexual identity and eroticism are engaged in processes of unprecedented renegotiation, both within individuals themselves and within societal networks in their entirety.

The work “Y0u + I” concerns itself with concepts of love and gender in a world constantly being transformed by masses of data and information.

In this environment, flooded with a torrent of digital data, we see the erotic attraction between two entities whose gender is both present and absent in the same moment. They function by intimating traditional roles while simultaneously undermining them; male and female coexist in a way that ends up unifying the two notions, and the only thing that matters is love itself and the very charm of attraction. And in the end, individuals can experience attraction to their own selves through their reflection in the Other.

Bodies interact in erotic ways within an overwhelming environment and, at the end of the day, their interactions function as a recollective echo of archetypal love, creating both discord and concord with the now, since love is at bottom a universal notion – one that individuals will always experience, and always seek out in their surroundings.

Concept and texts curated by Evangelia Baklava.

Humans lie at the heart of everything. In all their forms, they will always be an exceptionally interesting kind of being. Moreover, ever more data is being encoded, recorded, interpreted, and given form. In this time of technological triumph and of the seeming self-sufficiency of the intellect, abbreviatory approaches are presented as the new – and only – way forward. Events unfold at speeds that make them hard to perceive, resulting in the creation of stimuli that appear more like parallel lines, separated by empty space. But this empty space can connect and reformulate data. In the end, it is this empty space that sparks change. What humans will do again is to fill it with personality, conviction and tension.

The flood of audiovisual information in Ikeda’s work is so intense that I found it interesting to add elements of my own to it, that is to proceed in the same vein, in a way that both captures in photographic images, and doubles down on the main message of the original work. So copious is the information that it spills out beyond the projection screens, going everywhere. On a technical level, the final result was achieved through light painting, making use of various lighting sources and myriad failed attempts.

Through his work, Ryoji Ikeda manages to stimulate viewers’ senses in new and different ways. Drawing inspiration from his work, I created a multiform self-portrait by projecting the artist’s work onto myself, thus capturing all these different patterns. In this way, I tried to create a different reading and interpretation for each. In this digital age, where the image is both so very important and so very unimportant at the same time, the distinctive features of individuals are lost, and individuality is sacrificed at the altar of social media and the digital image. That is why I’m trying with this work to speak mainly about the place of women in the digital age. About how invisible they might feel when faced with the continual projection of data, and how difficult it can be to stand out or even survive in today’s mass culture.