FIAF Presents the New York Premiere of SUPERCODEX [live set] at 2017 Crossing the Line Festival

The French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), New York's premiere French cultural center, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art are thrilled to kick off the 2017 edition of the Crossing the Line Festival with The New York Premiere of groundbreaking audiovisual artist Ryoji Ikeda's supercodex [live set] on Wednesday, September 6 and Thursday, September 7 at The Met's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium.

Renowned for his achingly beautiful minimalism, ultra-spare beats, and mesmerizing audiovisual installations, Ikeda transforms his celebrated 2013 album supercodex into a singular live performance, in which he takes the stage surrounded by mammoth projections of arresting black and white digital imagery.

One of the world's leading electronic music composers and a renowned visual artist, Ryoki Ikeda has gained an international reputation for his thrilling combination of music and imagery into one hybrid art form that is as astonishing to encounter in a night club as it is in a museum. He has performed and exhibited worldwide, at venues including Centre Pompidou (Paris), Sonar Festival (Barcelona), Tate Modern (London), Festival d'Automne (Paris), and Park Ave Armory (New York). Ikeda made his US debut at the 2010 Crossing the Line Festival, and last appeared in the festival in 2014, when he performed superposition to acclaim at The Met.

In supercodex, he mines raw material from previous records and mathematical models to masterfully construct new music. Performed live, what at first sounds like a battle of digital noise, blips, and bass drones gradually engages the listener with elements of techno and dance music. Mammoth projections of stark imagery add dazzling textures of percussion. The result is a beeping, pulsating, immersive mix of sound and multimedia art that dazzles the senses.

For Ikeda, "the purest beauty is in mathematics. Its perfect assemblage of numbers, magnitudes, and forms persist, independent of us. The experience of the sublime in mathematics is awe-inspiring. It is similar to confronting the vast magnitude of the universe, which always leaves us open-mouthed."

About Ryoji Ikeda

Ryoji Ikeda, one of Japan's leading electronic composers and visual artists, focuses on the essential characteristics of sound itself and that of visuals as light by means of both mathematical precision and mathematical aesthetics. Ikeda has gained a reputation as one of the few International Artists working convincingly across both visual and sonic media. He elaborately orchestrates sound, visuals, materials, physical phenomena and mathematical notions into immersive live performances and installations.

Throughout his diverse, multidisciplinary career, Ikeda has worked on several long-term projects through a variety of artistic mediums. Notable works include: datamatics, presented by FIAF's Crossing the Line in 2006; spectra, the jaw-dropping pillar of light that shot into the LonDon Sky to commemorate World War I; cyclo, a collaborative project with Carsten Nicolai; superposition, performed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014; supersymmetry; and most recently, the audiovisual installation micro | macro. His albums +/- (1996), 0°C (1998), matrix (2000), dataplex (2005), test pattern (2008), and supercodex (2013) pioneered a new minimal world of electronic music through his razor-sharp techniques and aesthetics. In 2016 The Vinyl Factory released a limited edition vinyl of The Solar System, and in 2017 Ikeda will release a new record, music for percussion.

Ikeda performs and exhibits worldwide at spaces such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Park Avenue Armory New York, The Barbican Centre, Tate Modern and Somerset House London, Centre Pompidou and Festival d'Automne Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Singapore Art Museum, Ars Electronica Center Linz, Elektra Festival Montreal, Grec and Sonar Festivals Barcelona, Aichi Triennale Nagoya, Palazzo Grassi Venice, The Whitechapel Gallery, Museo de Arte Bogota, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, DHC/Art Montreal, Festival d'Automne Paris, Sharjah Biennale, Carriageworks Sydney, Auckland Triennale, MONA Museum Hobart - Tasmania, Ruhrtriennale, Telefonica Foundation Madrid, and Kyoto Experiment Festival.

In 2014, Ikeda won the Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN. In 2015-16, major exhibitions included supersymmetry presented at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes, The Vinyl Factory, London, and Kumu Art Museum Tallin, Estonia; micro | macro at ZKM centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, and solo exhibitions at Espai d ?art contemporani de Castelló, Spain, and Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh. His works were also part of group show exhibitions and festivals at ACT Centre Gwangju (Korea), Singapore Art Science Museum, Kunstverein Hannover, MONA Museum Hobart (Tasmania), Lichtkunstfestival in Ludwigsburg (Germany), and Kyoto Experiment Festival. In 2016 he premiered a new acoustic stage piece music for percussion in collaboration with ensemble Eklekto (Geneva), currently on tour. In 2017, he is part of group exhibitions such as Elevation 1049: Avalanche (Gstaad, CH), Nikolaj Kunsthal (Copenhagen, DK), Centre Pompidou (Metz-FR), La Villette/Festival d'Automne (Paris, FR), and Festival of Vicenza (Vicenza, IT). Solo shows include Galerie Almine Rech, organized with Olivier Renaud Clément (London, UK).

About the 2017 Crossing the Line Festival

"Adventurous programming that makes you think as much about your place in the world as about art itself."-The New York Times

Crossing the Line is an international arts festival for New York City produced by the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) in partnership with leading cultural institutions. The festivalis co-curated by Lili Chopra, FIAF's Executive Vice President and Artistic Director; Simon Dove, Executive and Artistic Director of Dancing in the Streets; and Gideon Lester, Artistic Director for Theater and Dance at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College.

France has a long history of supporting national and international cultural practices, welcoming and nurturing new ideas and influential perspectives from around the world. FIAF, as the leading French cultural institution in the US, critically maintains that practice through the Crossing the Line Festival, presenting leading-edge artists from France and the US alongside their peers from around the world.

Since its inauguration in 2007, the Crossing the Line Festival has cultivated an increasingly large and diverse following, and received numerous accolades in the press including "Best of" in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, Artforum, and Frieze. Festival performances have earned multiple Obie and Bessie awards. crossingtheline.org

About FIAF

The French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) is New York's premiere French cultural and language center. FIAF's mission is to create and offer New Yorkers innovative and unique programs in education and the arts that explore the evolving diversity and richness of French cultures. FIAF seeks to generate new ideas and promote cross cultural dialogue through partnerships and new platforms of expression. www.fiaf.org

About MetLiveArts

The critically acclaimed performance series at The Metropolitan Museum of Art commissions and presents contemporary performance through the lens of the Museum's exhibitions and gallery spaces. MetLiveArts invites artists, performers, curators, and thought leaders to create groundbreaking new work, including live and digital performances as well as site-specific durational performances that have been named some of the most "memorable" and "best of" performances in New York City by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Broadway World. metmuseum.org

Merci!

Crossing the Line 2017 is made possible with generous leadership support from Air France and Delta Air Lines, the official airlines of FIAF; The Edmond de Rothschild Foundations; The Florence Gould Foundation; The Hermès Foundation (Fondation d'entreprise Hermès) within the framework of the New Settings program; and JCDecaux; and with generous major support from Cultural Services of the French Embassy; Enoch Foundation; FACE; Howard Gilman Foundation; National Endowment for the Arts; New England Foundation for the Arts; NYC Department of Cultural Affairs; NYSCA; New York State Council on the Arts; Pommery; Perrier; and Performing Arts Fund NL.

Our Producer's Circle: Sarah Arison, Michel G. Bernard, Ron Guttman, Isabelle Kowal, Didier Lestienne & Pierre Rouy-Cartier, Marie Nugent-Head, and Elisabeth Wilmers.

FIAF would like to thank the following for their generous support of Crossing the Line 2017:

British Council; Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York ; Institut Français; King's Fountain; Omaha Foundation; Robert de Rothschild; and SACD (Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques).

Photo Credit: Supercodex [live set], 2013, © Ryoji Ikeda photo by Ryo Mitamura