Ikeda began his career as a musician and sound artist and is recognized as an important figure in both electronic music and installation art. He describes himself as a composer, and there are aspects of his music that carry over into the visual dimensions of his work. In an article for the new music journal Organised Sound, Marina Sudo points out that Ikeda’s music, which is based primarily on rhythmic patterns rather than melodic or harmonic movement, “does not ‘resolve’” in the manner of traditional tonal music. Rather, each element, “leads to the new environment emerging from it.” This is very much the case for the flow of visual information across the three screens of Dataverse 1/2/3. Each segment is internally coherent in terms of the kinds of imagery presented and the tempo at which it is arranged: a series of animated city maps, for instance, with routes traced through them in red and blue, or a layered and animated sequence of medical imaging with areas highlighted again in red and blue. Electronic music punctuates the images’ movement, with repeated beeps and blips indicating shifts. But there is no discernable thematic reason for the juxtapositions of images that appear side by side on the screens or for the transitions, some of which are quite smooth while others are very abrupt. As in Ikeda’s music, there is no sense of direction or resolution in his flows of images, only succession, one thing after another.

​

Ikeda’s interwoven test pattern projects (2008 - present) illustrate the way he uses a single concept across a wide range of media. Test pattern itself is a system that derives barcode patterns from data in real time. Ikeda first used the system in a live performance of 2008 to provide a visual background for his DJ set. Thereafter, he developed several different installations in which projected black-and-white barcode patterns move along the floor extremely fast, creating the illusion of motion and a disorienting environment for viewers to negotiate. In some cases, the test patterns are projected on a wall as well as the floor. A monumentally scaled version of the test pattern installation appeared in 2014 on the sides of multiple buildings in New York’s Times Square as part of the Midnight Moment program for which video artworks are screened at night in public space. The rapid movement, both horizontal and vertical, of lines, bars, and blocks in black, white, and gray constituted a kind of interference with all the other video signage on the square. The test pattern project also includes an artist’s book (2017) and a CD (2008) of music produced by converting data into bar codes, then converting the bar codes into audio signals. The extension of this project over more than a decade and across various media speaks to the ubiquity, durability, and seemingly infinite malleability of data, the relative ease with which it can be upscaled, downscaled, and converted into an endless array of forms. In 2019, Ikeda produced a series of vertical pigment prints on paper of barcodes, each approximately 40 by 55 inches. Whereas the installation versions of test pattern, like Ikeda’s installations generally, trade in sensory overload (albeit in black-and-white), the prints present barcodes as objects of contemplation and aesthetic appreciation. Even though the more conventional works of visual art Ikeda produces may seem to be by-products of his installations, they represent the quiet center at the heart of Ikeda’s art. The ultimate paradox of his installations is that their frequently massive scale and assault on the senses do not just overwhelm. They somehow produce moments of stillness that permit reflection, even meditation.