takio

Cars have often crossed paths with the art world, and one might rightfully argue that many cars are themselves worthy of being considered works of art. But Ryoji Ikeda's latest installation is not so obvious. True to his minimalist approach, Ikeda collaborated with Honda to produce a rather stunning audiovisual experience based on the full CAD drawings of the new Civic. These are decomposed, rearranged, superimposed and otherwise "recoded" into patterns and glimpses that reconfigure the car's "anatomy" into a vast exploration of what could be a coded alien message to build some confounding device. It was "like being given a secret file from the FBI", said Ikeda about the massive amount of data delivered to him by Honda, product of four years of research and development by thousands of engineers.
Data.anatomy is on display at a disused power station in Berlin Mitte, Kraftwerk Trafo. The industrial setting is a perfect fit, providing both context and envelopment to a densely restrained piece. On the tech side, not much is revealed: three projectiondesign F32 projectors light up a 20x4m wall with up to 8000 lumens each. Let's just call that a very nice setup that provides what the artist calls "the necessary 'wow' factor for a work that’s predominantly monotone".
One might take this for a sophisticated promotion stunt from Honda, but the origin of this work is not so linear, according to Ikeda's blog:

"We thought we’d tell you a little more about Mitsuru Kariya, who provided Ikeda with the data needed for data.anatomy [civic]. The two Japanese first met in early 2011, while Kariya was finalising the development of the new Honda Civic and Ikeda was showing Datamatics at the Barbican in London. (http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?ID=11511). As the development leader for the car, Kariya was responsible for a huge team of engineers, based in Japan and Europe. For four years, he’d been working on a hugely complex programme generating vast swathes of CAD (Computer Aided Design) data and it was this that drew Ikeda’s interest. Ikeda was particularly inspired by the numerical data from the engine emissions and performance. Kariya took the extraordinary step of giving Ikeda access to the CAD data, from which he has composed data.anatomy."

So, there. Apparently the people at Honda were not at all displeased with the results, as a number of special edition Civic cars are now circulating Berlin, featuring a black matte painting and subtle livery alluding to and in tune with the installation, as can be seen in one of the photos above.

Curious? If you can't go there, you can always watch the video with Ikeda's sparse commentary and follow the links below.