Ryoji Ikeda’s SUPERPOSITION is part of FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival (photo © 2012 Kazuo Fukunaga / Kyoto Experiment in Kyoto Art Theater, Shunjuza)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
October 17-18, $35, 7:00
212-570-3949
www.fiaf.org
www.metmuseum.org
In the summer of 2011, Japanese multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda dazzled New Yorkers with the immersive site-specific work the transfinite, which invited visitors to sit down in the Park Avenue Armory and merge with a two-sided monolithic wall, extended onto the floor, that came alive with a mind-blowing array of experimental digital music and mathematically based projections, as if welcoming people inside the mind of a cutting-edge computer. Things will be only slightly more contained for the U.S. premiere of superposition, Ikeda’s theatrical piece being presented October 17 & 18 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. Ticket holders may be sitting in seats, but what’s happening onstage will take them through mesmerizing sound and visuals that combine art and science, mathematics and human behavior in unique ways, exploring technology, philosophy, probability, and the future of existence, zeroing in on a single subatomic particle. The work is being presented as part of the French Institute Alliance Française’s annual Crossing the Line Festival, consisting of multidisciplinary projects and performances at locations throughout the city. In conjunction with superposition, Salon 94 on East Ninety-Fourth St. is hosting a solo exhibition of Ikeda’s work October 20-31, and his black-and-white test pattern [times square] is being projected on nearly four dozen digital screens in Times Square nightly from 11:57 to midnight for the October installment of “Midnight Moment,” the monthly program organized and supported by the Times Square Advertising Coalition in partnership with Times Square Arts; on October 16, the visuals will be accompanied by an Exclusive Sound Experience, with limited headphones available beginning at 11:00. (If you’re attending the October 17 performance of superposition, be sure to arrive at the museum early, as Icelandic cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir will be playing a special pop-up concert at 6:00 in the Carroll and Milton Petrie European Sculpture Court (Gallery 548) inspired by the Costume Institute’s upcoming “Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire,” which opens October 21.)