Yingyang Zhou-LookingOutwards-11

For week 4 looking outwards, I wrote about Ryoji Ikeda, I really appreciate his work with full of beauty of math. His work is more “sound art” than music, becuase there are a lot of visual element invovled and it needs you to “interpretate” it instead of only “listen” to it. I want to talk about another piece of his work I really like, “datamatics [prototype-ver.2.0]”.

Using pure data as a source for sound and visuals, datamatics combines abstract and mimetic presentations of matter, time and space. datamatics is the second audiovisual concert in the datamatics series. Projecting dynamic computer-generated imagery in pared down black and white with striking colour accents, the intense yet minimal graphic renderings of data progress through multiple dimensions. From 2D sequences of patterns derived from hard drive errors and studies of software code, the imagery transforms into dramatic rotating views of the universe in 3D, whilst in the final scenes four-dimensional mathematical processing opens up spectacular and seemingly infinite vistas. A powerful and hypnotic soundtrack reflects the imagery through a meticulous layering of sonic components to produce immense and apparently boundless acoustic spaces.

datamatics [ver 2.0] is the full–length version of this audiovisual concert. With a commissioned second part added, datamatics [ver.2.0] is significantly developed from the earlier version of this piece which premiered in March 2006. Driven by the primary principles of datamatics, but objectively deconstructing its original elements – sound, visuals and even source codes – this work creates a kind of meta–datamatics. Real–time program computations and data scanning are employed to create an extended new sequence that is a further abstraction of the original work. The technical dynamics of the piece, such as its extremely fast frame rates and variable bit depths, continue to challenge and explore the thresholds of our perceptions.