Reviewed by Barry Lenny, Tuesday 29th September 2015
Adelaide Festival Centre and Sydney's Carriageworks have brought Paris-based Japanese electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda's work,
Superposition, to Adelaide. It combines electronic music, visuals, displayed on assorted screens, and features two performers, Stéphane Garin and Amélie Grould. It is based, we are told, in "mathematical notions of quantum mechanics".
It all begins with a low rumble that slowly increases. The very front row of video screens show numbers with many decimal places and a multiplier, some counting up, others down, all blacking out and restarting the counts. A wide projector screen is behind them, subdivided to appear as the same number of screens as the front row. A huge projector screen is at the very rear, subdivided into two halves. Numbers are plotted as dots on all of these screens, creating clusters, some tightly packed, others widespread.
We could be watching the plotting of anything from subatomic particles, to stars in distant galaxies, or any other set of values. We need a frame of reference, and that comes from the earlier statement referring to quantum mechanics, telling us that we are delving into the world of the quantum physicist, the Large Hadron Collider springs briefly to mind. The plots then begin to rotate, showing their three-dimensionality. All the while the music has been evolving, adding layers and percussive effects, pushing the limits of hearing at both the low and high ends of human capabilities.
The work is divided into several sections and the two performers arrive after this opening overture, to sit at opposite ends of a long trestle. Here they each have a Morse key and this second section uses sounds generated as part of the music. This is high speed Morse code, made possible by the use of automatic Iambic (dual lever) paddle keys, a far cry from the early straight Morse keys and a further development from the single paddle keys. It was intriguing that in a presentation of electronic music that such old technology was revived, Samuel Morse first demonstrated his code in the 1830s and that enabled the telegraph. By the start of the twentieth century the telegraph had been replaced by other technologies, but the Morse code lived on in the new technology of radio. The double paddle automatic keys began in the 1940s and have been improved since.
I momentarily began trying to follow the high speed flow of dots and dashes, but then noticed that letters were appearing on the screens, building into words and sentences, and promptly abandoned the attempted interpretation, which was failing anyway as I have not used Morse code for decades. The references to past technologies did not end there.
In another section, the two performers moved to the rear of the table and began manipulating various things beneath a camera, which was then projected onto the screens. These included microfilm and microfiche, the pre-computer document bulk storage systems. Even the electronic music included sounds and techniques we were employing back in the days before computers, when multi-track open reel tape recorders were major players. Building to a crescendo at the end and then sudden silence, occurring in a number of the sections of this performance, was something we were doing back thirty to forty years ago, when I was studying with the late Tristram Carey, pioneer of electronic music and leading light at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
The combination of old and new, history and cutting edge exploration of the unknown and invisible, and the use of rapidly expanding fields of science and mathematics to attempt to prove what we suspect, made for a captivating performance. That idea of knowledge expanding at an ever increasing rate was reflected in the music and the visuals, at one point every screen flashing multiple images at incredible speed, relying on the remanence of the retina and subliminal retention.
If, however, you know nothing whatever about quantum mechanics, advanced mathematics, or any of the old or new technology referred to within the work, it really doesn't matter as one can enjoy the music and visuals for their aesthetics alone. As with all festivals, performances have very short runs, which is a pity. I would have liked to have seen this work a second time as there is so much to take in but, then again, that is part of the point of this work, to be experiential, to be absorbed, and it is certainly absorbing.
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