Yoshi Sodeoka began painting with oils at age 5. Guitar lessons started at age 13. He says his training in these traditional disciplines inform his current artistic practice, but you wouldn’t know from looking at it.

Sodeoka’s artworks, particularly those most recent ones, have nothing traditional about them. They actually depict a type of seeing that did not exist until recently. Sodeoka’s works are a new sort of representation - that of digital senses.

Sodeoka relocated from Japan (he was born in Yokohama) in the 90s. By the early 2000s, after studying at Pratt, he was producing work that integrated features from cutting edge commercial technology, a strategy that has come to define much of his practice.

The particular attention Sodeoka pays to sound in his work has made him an attractive collaborator to some musicians. He has worked repeatedly with Tame Impala, including on the music video for the song ‘Elephant,’ and recently co-directed Metallica’s ‘You Must Burn’ music video.

Sodeoka’s calling card for these works has been an immersive and synesthetic (he seems to have a touch of synesthesia) visual experience–the videos are meant to be additive. Perhaps this is why some artists have enlisted his help for tour visuals. He is deft at integrating the senses. Often this takes the form of integrative video works utilizing found footage, visual sampling and augmentation, and ambient soundscapes.

Sodeoka’s most interesting work is also about integrating senses. But not the senses humans have.

Take one of his more famous works, ‘ASCII BUSH,’ a piece from 2004. It is an augmented video of the elder Bush’s 1991 SOTU Address. Both visual and audio are digitally augmented; form dissolves into numbers and characters, sound boils down into a robotic monotone. The video has undergone a digital filtration process, reduced to the sensory forms that a computer can grasp. 0s and 1s, base tones and white noise.

His most recent work, clips of which are posted to his Instagram profile, feature the same digital reduction.

Base footage of a bird flock flicks through various digital overlays: the red circles and x’d dots of digital projectile recognition, the neon green background of artificial editing, line vectors reading and rendering individual bird’s directions and speeds. The video cycles through the different data overlays several times. Nondescript beepings and clickings we associate with computerized mechanics play over.

The experience of viewing one of these works is paradoxical. On the one hand they’re obviously incredibly stimulating. On the other they’re tantric, almost calming. The calmer segments of the cycle, such as the green screen, are even peaceful.

The data itself also exhibits contradiction. The lines are complicated, the screens busy and crowded. But this visual output is also a reduction, a partial description of the natural event in a way that a computer can understand. The complexity of a circling bird flock is actually limited in Sodeoka’s.

This sort of data-infused art is increasingly a style class (@drezzdon is another example) and it’s not hard to imagine a future in which similar artworks are created for entirely artificial audiences.

Today more than ever, there are barriers between us and the things we perceive. This alienation may come in the form of a screen, or a lack of focus. Whether Sodeoka’s art is a critique or a symptom is up for debate (this is one of its strengths) but it does make at least one thing clear: experiencing the world through the eyes of data can be beautiful.