Oscillator

Data Frenzy

Last night I went to see Ryoji Ikeda’s datamatics at Sanders Theater at Harvard and it was AWESOME. From wikipedia because I find it hard to describe (that’s Nick’s job), Ikeda:

is a Japanese sound artist who lives and works in New York City. Sometimes harsh, sometimes remarkably gentle, Ikeda’s music is concerned primarily with sound in a variety of “raw” states, such as sine tones and noise, often using frequencies at the edges of the range of human hearing. The conclusion of his album +/- features just such a tone; of it, Ikeda says “a high frequency sound is used that the listener becomes aware of only upon its disappearance” (from the CD booklet). Rhythmically, Ikeda’s music is highly imaginative, exploiting beat patterns and, at times, using a variety of discrete tones and noise to create the semblance of a drum machine. His work also encroaches on the world of ambient music; many tracks on his albums are concerned with slowly evolving soundscapes, with little or no sense of pulse.

Here’s a fan-made video of another Ikeda piece to give you an idea of what it sounds like (lots more onYouTube too!)

The music was accompanied by an overwhelming movie made out of data visualizations of star positions, genomes, and proteins. The images moved at the edge of perception, it wasn’t about reading or understanding the data, but experience it, being bombarded by moving lines, high pitched beeps, and chest-rumbling bass (not quite loud enough sometimes for fear of breaking the stained glass windows of the church-like hall).

The sounds, projections, and images were all made by computers, but they represented real things being experienced by real people. It made me feel data in a way that is impossible when I look at the genome browsers or protein visualization programs that it was based on. The transformation of biology into an information science has been progressing for the past decade, with more and more data and more and more sophisticated visualizations but without necessarily more understanding. By stripping away the real physical part of biology, we end up with something that is overwhelming and often uninformative. Synthetic biology is (for me) about making that information real again, taking gene sequences, strings of data, and turning them into physical proteins that do something. There still isn’t enough data for synthetic biology to be able to do everything it wants or claims, but by requiring a working product, I think it brings biology back to it biological, physical reality.