How Not to be Eroded
How Not to be Eroded
Action 6 ︎︎︎ Ryoji Ikeda’s data-verse at the High Museum of Art
send me an email
On Ryoji Ikeda’s data-verse
There is a particular kind of awe that emerges in the presence of the incomprehensible. Not the mystery of myth or metaphor, but the sublime of hard data — vast, clinical, absolute. Ryoji Ikeda’s data-verse, currently on view at the High Museum, traffics in this form of awe. It is an art of overload: sight, sound, scale. A deluge of information rendered into aesthetic form.
Ikeda translates quantum theory and cosmic mapping into pulsating grids, pixel flares, and staccato bursts of white noise. The effect is often too much. Visitors speak of dizziness, of disorientation, of being unable to stay in the room for long. Even museum docents, tasked with sitting among the work, have reportedly struggled to endure its sensory onslaught.
But this discomfort is not incidental. It is the work.
data-verse does not invite contemplation so much as it enacts a failure of comprehension. It overwhelms — not sentimentally, but structurally. It reveals the gap between our evolved, flesh-bound perceptual system and the systems that now define our world: computational, cosmic, informational. What we encounter is not just data, but the scale of data. The universe, made electric.
In this way, Ikeda’s work is not unlike the actual universe. That is: the universe we know exists, mathematically, scientifically, but can never feel. The one in which stars spin off neutrinos we’ll never detect, in which ninety-five percent of matter is dark, in which time is responsive to mass, in which the multiverse is not metaphor but theoretical prediction. We live inside this — and cannot sense it.
Ikeda gives that unfeeling a form.
The soft metaphysics of earlier sublime traditions still accommodated the human — it held a place for us, even as it gestured toward vastness. It’s the sublime with a bench, so to speak. It lets us stay in the room.
Think of Caspar David Friedrich’s monk in the fog, or Rothko’s radiant voids: these are landscapes of enormity, yes, but also of presence. The viewer is not erased but situated — small, perhaps, but spiritually legible. These works offer emotional legibility, a kind of reverent melancholy. You are still the subject, still allowed to feel something about your own smallness.
Ikeda’s sublime is different. It is clinical. It is coded. There is no figure in the landscape, no narrative arc, no human scale to cling to. Just the system, pulsing, impersonal. Just the universe, stripped of metaphor, rendered in sound and light.
And yet: it is beautiful. Or at least, it is overwhelming in a beautiful way. Which is to say — it demands reverence. Not for what we understand, but for what we never will.
This is the strange gift of Ikeda’s work: not a translation of data into feeling, but a staging of their mutual irreconcilability. It doesn’t make the universe graspable. It doesn’t domesticate the machine. Instead, it offers a place to sit — however briefly — inside that vast tension. To let the system pass through us, loud and bright and unintelligible.
I notice that even in the promotional images for data-verse, a human figure is always present — dwarfed by light, standing at the edge of the system. It’s a familiar composition, echoing Friedrich’s monk. The impulse is clear: we need scale, and the museum’s marketing department delivered it. We need a body in the frame to make the incomprehensible feel legible. In doing so, we agree to soften Ikeda’s clinical sublime, turning it back into something romantic — something we can feel about. Even in a system designed to exceed us, we insert ourselves, because that’s what we’ve always done.
There is a particular kind of awe that emerges in the presence of the incomprehensible. Not the mystery of myth or metaphor, but the sublime of hard data — vast, clinical, absolute. Ryoji Ikeda’s data-verse, currently on view at the High Museum, traffics in this form of awe. It is an art of overload: sight, sound, scale. A deluge of information rendered into aesthetic form.
Ikeda translates quantum theory and cosmic mapping into pulsating grids, pixel flares, and staccato bursts of white noise. The effect is often too much. Visitors speak of dizziness, of disorientation, of being unable to stay in the room for long. Even museum docents, tasked with sitting among the work, have reportedly struggled to endure its sensory onslaught.
But this discomfort is not incidental. It is the work.
data-verse does not invite contemplation so much as it enacts a failure of comprehension. It overwhelms — not sentimentally, but structurally. It reveals the gap between our evolved, flesh-bound perceptual system and the systems that now define our world: computational, cosmic, informational. What we encounter is not just data, but the scale of data. The universe, made electric.
In this way, Ikeda’s work is not unlike the actual universe. That is: the universe we know exists, mathematically, scientifically, but can never feel. The one in which stars spin off neutrinos we’ll never detect, in which ninety-five percent of matter is dark, in which time is responsive to mass, in which the multiverse is not metaphor but theoretical prediction. We live inside this — and cannot sense it.
Ikeda gives that unfeeling a form.
The soft metaphysics of earlier sublime traditions still accommodated the human — it held a place for us, even as it gestured toward vastness. It’s the sublime with a bench, so to speak. It lets us stay in the room.
Think of Caspar David Friedrich’s monk in the fog, or Rothko’s radiant voids: these are landscapes of enormity, yes, but also of presence. The viewer is not erased but situated — small, perhaps, but spiritually legible. These works offer emotional legibility, a kind of reverent melancholy. You are still the subject, still allowed to feel something about your own smallness.
Ikeda’s sublime is different. It is clinical. It is coded. There is no figure in the landscape, no narrative arc, no human scale to cling to. Just the system, pulsing, impersonal. Just the universe, stripped of metaphor, rendered in sound and light.
And yet: it is beautiful. Or at least, it is overwhelming in a beautiful way. Which is to say — it demands reverence. Not for what we understand, but for what we never will.
This is the strange gift of Ikeda’s work: not a translation of data into feeling, but a staging of their mutual irreconcilability. It doesn’t make the universe graspable. It doesn’t domesticate the machine. Instead, it offers a place to sit — however briefly — inside that vast tension. To let the system pass through us, loud and bright and unintelligible.
I notice that even in the promotional images for data-verse, a human figure is always present — dwarfed by light, standing at the edge of the system. It’s a familiar composition, echoing Friedrich’s monk. The impulse is clear: we need scale, and the museum’s marketing department delivered it. We need a body in the frame to make the incomprehensible feel legible. In doing so, we agree to soften Ikeda’s clinical sublime, turning it back into something romantic — something we can feel about. Even in a system designed to exceed us, we insert ourselves, because that’s what we’ve always done.
