Ryoji Ikeda's Spectra: White Light Installations Across Amsterdam

Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda, known for his electronic music and audiovisual works, created four nocturnal light installations in Amsterdam from June 6 to 21, 2008, commissioned by the British agency Forma and the Dream Amsterdam foundation. The series, titled Spectra, abandons his usual sound and digital data elements, using only white light beams. The installations were sited at Vondelpark's music kiosk (paying homage to René Magritte's Empire of Lights), the new Van Gogh Museum building (designed by Kisho Kurokawa in the late 1990s), a former gas reservoir surrounded by 68 projectors, and a port area with 25 luminous columns. Dream Amsterdam's curator Jamain Brigitha stated the foundation annually invites an artist to use the city as an open-air laboratory. Ikeda's work, emerging from the techno-theatrical collective Dumb Type (joined in 1994), typically involves precise digital renderings of numbers, diagrams, and algorithms. The Spectra series was also presented at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, with new installations at Le Laboratoire (October 3 – January 12) and a revival of datamatics [ver.2.0.] at Centre Pompidou on November 21 and 22, 2008.