Ryoji Ikeda

Biography

Ryoji Ikeda is a Japanese composer and visual artist, born in 1966 in Gifu, Japan, and now based in Paris, widely regarded as a pioneer in fusing sound, data, and visual technology into immersive audiovisual experience. His practice focuses on the essential physical characteristics of sound itself, translating precise scientific and mathematical data into rigorously choreographed compositions of light, sound, and time. His long-running datamatics project and related data-driven series convert raw information, from particle physics measurements to cosmological data, into a continuous, machine-speed stream of numbers rendered as image and sound. At Art Basel's Zero 10 sector in Basel in 2026, Ikeda presented data.gram [n°11] with Almine Rech gallery, an installation that translates scientific data spanning particle physics to cosmological measurement into a precisely choreographed audiovisual composition, with computer displays continuously converting numbers into light, sound, and time. Ikeda is recognized as one of the most consequential figures working at the intersection of music and visual art, with a career spanning large-scale installations, acoustic concerts, recordings, and collaborative performances presented at major venues internationally across Europe, Asia, and North America. His work is distinguished by its extreme precision and minimalism, using vast quantities of data and sound frequencies at the edges of human perception.