n-Polytope

Vitra Installation View
image/jpeg
1500 × 1000

chris salter_n-polytope_1
image/jpeg
400 × 266

chris salter_polytope_2
image/jpeg
400 × 266

n-Polytope. Behaviours in Light and Sound after Iannis Xenakis is a spectacular light and sound environment combining cutting edge lighting, lasers, sound, sensing and artificial intelligence software technologies inspired by composer Iannis Xenakis’ radical installations named “Polytopes” (from Greek poly, many and topos, space), the first of which premiered at Expo ‘67 in Montreal. Far ahead of their time and little known outside of artistic circles, Xenakis’ Polytopes are, however, a major landmark in the history of the audio-visual arts: large scale, immersive architectural environments that make the indeterminate and chaotic behaviour of nature (rivers, clouds, waves and cosmological phenomena) experiential through the temporal dynamics of light and the spatial dynamics of sound.

The installation created by Chris Salter has been developed during a production residency at LABoral’s Plataforma 0. Centro de Producción since the end of last month (June) in collaboration with his team: Sofian Audry, Marije Baalman, Adam Basanta, Elio Bidinost and Thomas Spier. Hundreds of LED’s that function as powerful bursts of light and hundreds of tiny speakers are suspended through the space on thin wires, constructing a walk-through performance environment. While the LED’s create a changing space of bursting points, coloured lasers that bounce off the surface of fixed and changing mirrors generate virtual architectures that appear, flicker and disappear before the visitors’ eyes.

Counterpointing the intense visual scenography, multi-channel audio fills the space, shifting between sparse natural and dense electronic textures – noisy bursts, clangourous lines and percussive explosions of sound.

n-Polytope goes far beyond a simple historical exercise. Xenakis’s creation of these dense artistic experiences that fundamentally examine and model the behaviour and patterns of nature and the cosmos in their exquisite fluctuations between order and disorder powerfully resonates with our historical moment of extreme instability in natural and artificial systems.

(http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org/en/exposiciones/chris_salter)