by Adela Lovric // Feb. 11, 2025
Ryoji Ikeda’s exhibition at the Estonian National Museum in Tartu sees his creative edge sharpened to a local focus, tackling Estonia’s history and culture with a minimalistic high-tech approach. Anchored by two newly commissioned works, the show unfolds in dialogue with the artist’s monumental audiovisual tryptich, ‘data-verse 1/2/3’ (2019–2020). The result is a portal of sorts between the immense, highly abstract realm of data and the visceral immediacy of visuals and sounds.
At the entrance into the exhibition’s darkened environment, the sound installation ‘vox aeterna’ (2024) resonates throughout the space. Though conceptually distinct, it is almost inseparable from the adjacent artwork, ‘the critical paths’ (2024), a spectacular-looking, 25-meter-long installation that monopolizes attention and swallows the ethereal soundscape as its own. This seems a bit unfortunate, as ‘vox aeterna’ is a milestone in Ikeda’s body of work, marking his first foray into composing for the human voice and a significant departure from his 30-year legacy of mostly electronic and fully instrumental music and sound art.
Ryoji Ikeda: ‘the critical paths,’ 2024, installation view at Estonian National Museum, Tartu, 2024 // Photo by Maanus Kullamaa
Created in collaboration with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, this multi-phonic composition for a 9-channel speaker system reconfigures the voice as pure sonic material, straddling the line between the organic and the synthetic. While drawing from Estonia’s deep-rooted choral traditions, it eschews the expected warmth of vocal harmony in favor of a more cinematic, sci-fi-inflected soundscape. Voices dissolve into an electronic murmur, reinforcing the exhibition’s overarching sensibility—one that pendulates between the human, the transhuman and, at times, something wholly alien.
For Ikeda, reality is data—an axiom that has shaped much of his artistic practice. Installed as a 25-meter-long corridor, ‘the critical paths’ slightly adjusts this idea, suggesting that humanity is data, as well. Departing from the abstract global datasets of his earlier works, ‘the critical paths’ utilizes the DNA of 100,000 Estonians sourced from the University of Tartu’s Institute of Genomics, transmuting human history since the beginning of time into pulses of light, sound and motion.
Ryoji Ikeda: ‘the critical paths,’ 2024, installation view at Estonian National Museum, Tartu, 2024 // Photo by Maanus Kullamaa
Despite the artwork’s technical coldness and the detachment inherent in reducing humanity to data, experiencing it feels strangely life-affirming. Ikeda somehow manages to represent the history of Estonia through data visualization in a way that is alien-like, rather than alienating. What might appear as an impenetrable cascade of information—streaming across overhead LED panels and infinitely multiplying in reflections of opposing mirrored walls—feels inviting, intimate and boundless. Typically reserved museum visitors become playful as they walk through the digital sublime of this multi-colored and multi-directional river of data, seeing themselves and each other as one with a meticulously composed flow of zeroes and ones.
Ryoji Ikeda, ‘data-verse 1/2/3,’ 2019-2020, installation view at Estonian National Museum, Tartu, 2024 //Photo by Anu Ansu
‘data-verse 1/2/3’ is displayed in the following room—a black box where three screens stand side by side, their visually synchronized projections moving in sync with a minimalist electronic soundtrack. This massive datascape contains datasets from 45 scientific disciplines, revealing the artist’s fascination with the scientific foundations of existence in the vast universe we inhabit. Drawing from open-source datasets of places such as CERN, NASA, Human Genome Project, weather stations, satellites and financial markets, the work collapses elementary particles and cosmic scales, offering an almost extraterrestrial perspective on Earth’s intricate matrix.
Ikeda is essentially a composer, only his medium is data—raw material to be structured into rhythmic audiovisual patterns and experienced spatially and sensorially. His exhibition at the Estonian National Museum subtly provokes contemplation on the idea of living in a matrix, governed by hidden structures and imperceptible forces. However, it is in no way didactic or moralistic; it doesn’t seek to elucidate, but rather to immerse. The show channels the digital sublime through overwhelming data flows and towering datascapes, in the same way artists of the past captured the awe of grandiose landscapes.
Exhibition Info
Estonian National Museum
Ryoji Ikeda
Exhibition: Nov. 2, 2024-Mar. 2, 2025
erm.ee
Muuseumi tee 2, 60532 Tartu, Estonia, click here for map
