Although widely known as a composer of electronic music, 42-year-old Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda began working with light as a medium in the 1990s as a member of the multimedia art group Dumb Type. His previous installations include spectra (2004), a brightly illuminated walkway in Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal, and a corridor pulsating with strobe lights and red lasers called spectra II (2002) that has been staged in galleries and elsewhere. In these works, Ikeda challenges spectators with audiovisual stimulation: Intensely bright rooms or dead sound chambers create discomforting situations as well as a sense of infinity.
Ikeda recently continued his spectra series at this year’s Dream Amsterdam outdoor arts event in June. With four installations, including a 600-foot-high projection aimed toward the sky and a slash of light on the facade of Kisho Kurokawa’s Exhibition Wing for the Van Gogh Museum, the artist continued exploring the themes of his earlier works, but at a much greater scale.
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