The Transfinite I made it just in the nick of time yesterday to see Ryoji Ikeda's extraordinary the transfinite at the Park Avenue Armory (now closed.) Projected on both sides of a 50-foot high wall in the center of the cavernous Drill Hall, the work consisted of three distinct works that created all-around sensory assault of electronic music and video: test pattern, data.tron and data.scan. It wasn't immediately clear what Ikeda was getting at with all of the computer-generated visuals and wildly modulating sounds, other than to convey the intersection between what he regards as "beautiful" (as exemplified by the precise elegance of mathematics) and the awe-inspiring experience of the "sublime" - or infinity. A few visitors made it around to the darkened back side of the wall, where vast data sets poured forth both on the wall and on a row of upwardly-facing monitors. But, most seemed content to zone out on the white space in front of test pattern, staring up at the wall like the drones in Apple's famous 1984 commercial. It was all a bit Big Brother-y, like the reprogramming scene in A Clockwork Orange, without the scenes of violence. Or the toothpicks. A brief video sample above or here. More images on Flickr.