Festival Editions
n_polytope – Behaviours in Sound and Light After Iannis Xenakis
Stattbad I, Gerichtstr. 65, 13347 Berlin → MapTickets: Free entrance
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Sun"n_polytope: Behaviours in Light and Sound After Iannis Xenakis" is a spectacular light, sound, and architectural environment.
The performance-installation by Chris Salter, in collaboration with Sofian Audry, Marije Baalman, Adam Basanta, Elio Bidinost, and Thomas Spier combines cutting-edge lighting, lasers, sound, and sensory and artificial intelligence software technologies inspired by composer Iannis Xenakis’s radical 1960s-1970s works, "Polytopes" (from the Greek poly, many and topos, space).
Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music and is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers. His original "Polytopes", large scale, immersive environments, were created far ahead of their time and remain relatively unknown. Chris Salter's installation attempts to both re-imagine Xenakis's work with new techniques, and to explore how these techniques resonate with our own historical moment of extreme instability in natural and artificial systems, allowing the audience to immerse themselves within its sound and light environment, thus "feeling" the algorithms as two forms of "life" – that of the movement of light and sound, as well as the "life" of experiencing such a system evolving in the present.
The presentation of n-polytope at CTM 2014 is supported by the Embassy of Canada, and the Quebec Government Office in Berlin. Special thanks also to David Sommer.
The work's ongoing production is supported by LABoral, LabXmodal (Montréal, CA), FCC (Fomento de Construcciones Contratas), Fonds de recherche du Québec: Société et culture (FQRSC, Canada); Hexagram Concordia (Montréal, CA); Schlaich Bergermann & Partner (Germany), and STEIM.
Marije Baalman[NL]
Marije Baalman is an artist and researcher/developer working in the field of interactive sound art. Her work explores the sonic output of realtime interactions among performers and/or audiences.
Thomas Spier[DE]
Thomas Spier is an architect and photo-designer.
Chris Salter[CA/QC]
Chris Salter is Director of the Hexagram Concordia Centre for Research and Creation in Media Art and Technology, Co-Director of Hexagram|CIAM, and Associate Professor in Computation Arts in the Department of Design and Computation Art at Concordia University, Montreal.