Today I went to see Ryoji Ikeda at the Barbican. The night started off with the artist Rachika Nayar who performed a beautiful ambient set without visuals, the set consisted of beautiful evolving pads and progressive chords that filled the room. For most of the set I kept my eyes closed and the music took me to another place. Whereas for Ryoji Ikeda’s set I had my eyes wide open staring at the screen and couldn’t take my eyes away even if I tried. Ryoji Ikea played his album Ultratronics in full, it blew me away. I had never been to an audio visual performance before but now my interest in the form of art had peaked. The visuals completely captured the essence of the music and made me interested in how I could replicate this myself. I did some research and found that he uses puredata, I had used this last year but only for audio. My favourite part of the experience was the ending when he added colourful imagery of the sun, planets and molecules combined with glitchy code and ambient audio to create a breathtaking scene.
