Merging Science and Performance Art: Ryoji Ikeda's superposition

Photo by Stephanie Berger. View a slideshow of images from this event.

«On Friday, October 17, electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda's superposition made its U.S. premiere here at the Met. The sold-out audience was abuzz with the anticipation of an experience that would push the boundaries of multimedia performance—especially if they were already familiar with Ikeda's Transfinite, performed at the Park Avenue Armory in 2011, or if they had caught his 2008 work Test Patterns, which was recently reimagined and will be projected in Times Square every night throughout October as part of the French Institute Alliance Française's Crossing the Line Festival.»

Superposition, performed twice in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, was a high-intensity, hypnotic piece. A music and theater work inspired by the subatomic world, superposition mines the notion that it is not possible to describe fully the behavior of a single particle except in terms of probabilities. With two performers (Stéphanie Garin and Amélie Grould) and twenty-one screens of various sizes on stage, the performance was nothing but immersive, mind-bending, and beautiful.

Ikeda led the audiences through color spectrums, a visualization of audio frequencies and reverberations, an appreciation of our environment's innate beauty and vastness, as well as an attempt at mapping randomness. Although there was a wealth of material incorporated into the sixty-five-minute work, it was stunningly organized and well crafted.

View a slideshow of images from the superposition performances.