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Ryoji Ikeda - Supersymmetry

Date uploaded: February 16, 2015

The Vinyl Factory has announced the UK premiere of a new work by international artist-composer Ryoji Ikeda to mark a year of site-specific installations in Brewer Street Car Park in Soho. Running from the 23rd of April to the 31st of May 2015, 'Supersymmetry' is Ikeda’s first large-scale solo exhibition in London.

23rd of April to the 31st of May 2015
Brewer Street Car Park, Lexington Street, London W1

Drawing on Ikeda’s residency at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics research institute, supersymmetry explores the aesthetics of quantum information theory and particle physics.  In the first of two pitch black spaces in Brewer Street Car Park, tiny ballbearings move in complex, seemingly random ways across inclined light boxes emitting intense white light.  The movements are simultaneously translated into rapidly changing, blinking data on two 20m long screens and forty monitors in the next space. An immersive disorientating collision of mutating, sound, text and visual data, the work is a close interrogation at the intersection of music and visual art through mathematics, quantum mechanics and logic.

Ryoji Ikeda is Japan’s leading electronic composer and visual artist who creates projects orchestrating sound, visual materials, physical phenomena and mathematical notions into immersive live performances and installations presented internationally at cultural venues, festivals and in site-specific environments.

Ryoji Ikeda is the latest artist collaborating with The Vinyl Factory for their vast new cultural hub in Brewer Street Car Park.  He follows installations by practitioners such as Richard Mosse, Conrad Shawcross and Dinos Chapman that reflect The Vinyl Factory’s vision for creating, supporting and showcasing audio-visual art as well as record label releases, and hosting events and performances. The Vinyl Factory Press recently launched the world’s first mobile record pressing plant, and have just launched a major collaboration with White Cube in London on a solo show by Christian Marclay.  On the 25th of February acclaimed creative director, artist and music producer Trevor Jackson releases F O R M A T, a unique limited edition consisting of 12 different musical formats, all on The Vinyl Factory.

Following supersymmetry is the European premiere of Carsten Nicolai’s unicolor, the first presentation of the work as an installation in the UK. The pairing of these new works by Ikeda and Nicolai continues an association between the artists that originated in 1999 when they collaborated on cyclo., a project exploring the visualisation of sound using equipment developed originally for mastering vinyl records. Since then they have worked together researching and expanding the potential of digital technologies in audio visual art.

* In particle physics, ‘supersymmetry’ is a theoretical mathematical model that helps explain why particles have mass, and which is being tested in orchestrated experiments at CERN (Centre for Nuclear Research).

23rd April to 31st May 2015, Brewer Street Car Park, Top Floor, 2 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LA.  Free admission. Open Tuesday – Sunday, 12:00pm – 6:00pm (closed Mondays). 

For further information click here.