The Art of Noise StoreX The Vinyl Factory
Ryoji Ikeda Test Pattern #12
I’m a really big fan of immersive art and in particular light, visual and sound installations that create an experience the audience becomes part of. The first time I saw De La Guarda’s, ‘Villa Villa’ in 1999 at the Round House, I was so excited with anticipation. The heady mix of loud music, aerial acrobats flying overhead above a translucent fabric collecting water. Without warning, a high flying trapeze artist broke through the fabric drenching those nearby and took a member of the audience back-up through the fabric. At that moment, I was so taken aback with excitement and nerves, my heart skipped a beat.
My barometer for something incredible’s about to happen is…the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, followed by an attack of the goose-bumps. Immersive art has the propensity to give the gift of goose-bumps. In my top three immersive art installations to date is; The Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson hung from the impressive Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. The installation represented the sun and visitors behaved differently basking in the light.
Also in my top three; a pop-up that I couldn’t not be at. I ended up buying tickets to the UK’s most disappointing visitor attraction via an over-priced ticket re-sale site. Banky’s apocalyptic theme park ‘Dismaland’ was quite possibly the best worst art experience featuring a demented assortment of bizarre and beautiful artworks from no less than 58 global artists.
And last but by no means the least is Japan’s leading electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda. Ikeda’s music is primarily raw states often using frequencies at the edges of the range of human hearing. We stumbled across ‘Data Path’ a solo exhibition in Madrid in 2013 and have been fans ever since. This December, we got to see Ryoji’s Test Pattern #12 part of an on-going project started in 2006 commissioned by Store X The Vinyl Factory at the Store Studios, 180 The Strand.
Below are some photos of the artists also featured at The Store Studios.
Anish Kapoor’s At the Edge of the World Sculpture II (1998).
Ceal Floyer’s wall of speakers Line Busy (UK) (2011).
LA-based artist - Haroon Mirza’s, ‘A Chamber for Horwitz complex notational sequences into a multi-coloured sonic score and ‘live’ choreographed compositional concert.
Cory Arcangel’s hacked computer game screens, MIG 29 Soviet Fighter Plane and Clouds (2005).
Susan Hiller’s Channels (2013) Multi-channel video installation featuring; 106 television sets, 9 media players, 7 dvd players and signal splitters. “Channels is an artwork designed to engage us in a consideration of some of the gaps and contradictions in our modern belief system and collective, cultural life. It is… a destabilising aesthetic device open to the un-representable”. Susan Hiller.
Ai Weiwei’s 50-metre long wallpaper installation, Odyssey (2016) represents the global, ancient and continuing
movement of peoples, touching on themes from his newly-released film on the
plight of refugees worldwide, Human Flow.