The Language of Scale
Data as sensory logic

In the emerging architectures of computation, scale has become the dominant grammar of intelligence. From the mapping of subatomic particles to the modelling of planetary systems, the scope of data increasingly defines its meaning as much as its content. This shift alters how intelligence, human or machine, must engage with information. Data is no longer a passive abstraction. In many domains, it is an active component of reality itself, feeding and shaping the systems it describes.

 

Ryoji Ikeda’s Data-verse offers a rare cultural exploration of this condition. Recently exhibited at the High Museum in Atlanta, the installation translates vast scientific datasets into precisely synchronized architectures of light and sound. Rather than explaining the data, it stages an encounter with its structural logic, an environment where scale is the primary language.

 

Data as Substance

Ikeda works with some of the most complex and precise datasets available: NASA’s astronomical observations, the genomic sequences of the Human Genome Project, molecular protein structures, quantum simulations, and cosmological constants. In raw form, these are often inaccessible to human perception. Through custom-built algorithms, Ikeda transforms them into high-contrast visual fields and sonic patterns that retain mathematical order while shifting to a sensory medium.

 

The effect is immersive but not illustrative. DNA appears as flickering grids of white light. Galactic coordinates become pulses of sound. Particle behaviours emerge as shimmering fields of probability. This is data as substance, not representation, an environment to inhabit rather than decode.

 

From Detail to Scale

For most of the modern data era, detail has been the primary measure of value: higher resolution images, fine-grained measurements, more precise samples. But as sensing, computation, and storage capacities have expanded, detail has reached a point where it can be effectively infinite. The emerging challenge is not to capture more, but to understand across scales, from molecular systems to planetary networks, and to perceive the relationships that link them.

 

Data-verse operates in precisely this space. It places the genetic and the galactic into a single perceptual continuum, suggesting that scale is itself a form of meaning. This has direct resonance for the sciences and technologies now moving toward multi-scale modelling, synthetic simulation, and systems that navigate between radically different orders of magnitude.

 

Datascapes as Reality

The term “datascape” has been used metaphorically to describe large information environments. Yet, in cyber-physical systems and high-fidelity digital twins, data goes beyond describing the world to active participation. Real-time streams adjust industrial processes, coordinate autonomous fleets, and manage energy grids. In these contexts, data is a part of the operational fabric of reality.

 

Ikeda’s work prefigures this state. Inside the Data-verse, the viewer confronts data as an active spatial presence. It behaves less like a static archive and more like an environment with its own physical logic. This positions the work as more than an aesthetic exercise: it is a prototype for how humans might learn to navigate continuous, multi-scale environments of information.

 

A Global Circuit of Ideas

Since its debut between 2019 and 2021, the Data-verse trilogy has been presented at the Venice Biennale, the Barbican Centre in London, Tokyo Midtown, and now the High Museum in the US. These presentations function as public laboratories for perception.  Rare spaces to experience the conditions of scale without the mediation of a utilitarian task or the filter of an analytical interface.

Prefiguring the Cognitive Implications

Emerging technologies, from AI-driven pattern recognition to environmental sensing, are extending intelligence into scales well beyond ordinary perception. Yet the frameworks for engaging with these systems remain underdeveloped. Ikeda’s work anticipates the gap. It does not explain these systems or serve their operational goals; it rehearses the demand for perceptual adjustment.

 

By shifting the focus from detail to scale, Data-verse challenges the assumption that understanding is a matter of closer inspection. It suggests that in the coming decades, the capacity to navigate between scales, to hold the genomic and the cosmological in the same frame, will be as critical as the ability to parse information at any single level.

 

 

Data-verse is not simply a work about data. It is an instrument for sensing realities that exceed the limits of ordinary perception. By treating data as a sensory logic, Ikeda opens a space for considering how humans might inhabit the continuous datascapes that future technologies will generate.

 

As intelligence systems move fluidly between scales, the challenge will not only be to build tools capable of processing them, but to cultivate the human capacity to live within them. In showing what it means to inhabit the language of scale, Ikeda’s work offers both a warning and an invitation, to prepare for a reality in which the boundaries between information and existence grow increasingly thin.

Media Details

 

'Data-Verse' presented at High Museum of Art in Atlanta, USA, through March 7th to August 10th, 2025

https://high.org/exhibition/ryoji-ikeda/