n-Polytope

(2012)

by Chris Salter is a large-scale audiovisual performance-installation employing today’s existing technology to reinterpret and adapt the spectacular architectural environments imagined by the Greek architect and composer Iannis Xenakis.

The design and final construction of the installation by Chris Salter, who is exhibiting his artwork for the first time in Spain, was made possible by an alliance of collaborating between entities and institutions from different countries, with the Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial acting as the unifying agent. In this way, the coproduction between LABoral and the Canadian studio-laboratory LabXModal has been complemented by the financial support of Fonds de recherche du Québec-Société et culture [Quebec Research Fund for Society and Culture](FQRSC), Canada, by the German engineering consulting firm Schlaich Bergermann & Partner, by STEIM (STudio for Electro Instrumental Music) from the Netherlands and by the Spanish company Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas.

n-Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound after Iannis Xenakis is a contemporary re-imagining of the Greek composer and architect Iannis Xenakis’s radical architectural environments called Polytopes (from the Greek poli, ‘many’ and topos, ‘space’). The first of these spaces, articulated through light and sound, was presented at the Expo'67 in Montreal and subsequently in Europe and the Middle East in the 1970s and 80s. Through the temporal dynamics of light and sound, these installations evoke the indeterminate and chaotic behaviour of nature: rivers, clouds, waves and cosmological phenomena. Reinventing these polytopes goes far beyond a simple historical exercise given that they represent seminal works in the history of new media and of which, still to this day are little known outside of contemporary music circles.

Iannis Xenakis creation of dense artistic experiences that fundamentally analyse and model the behaviour and patterns of nature and the cosmos in their fluctuations between order and disorder evoke, without doubt, the instability of the present moment. The visitor will thus enjoy a strange, flickering, unstable experience; one of intense beauty achieved by the light and sound-constructed ambience. (...)

Chris Salter is an artist, Associate Professor for Design + Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal and Director of the Hexagram Concordia Centre for Research-Creation in Media Arts and Technology.

He studied philosophy, economics, theatre and computer music at Emory and Stanford Universities. After collaborating with Peter Sellars and William Forsythe/Ballett Frankfurt, he co-founded and directed the art and research organization Sponge (1997-2003). His solo and collaborative work has been seen all over the world at such venues as the Venice Architecture Biennale, National Art Museum of China, CTM, Ars Electronica, Meta. Morf in Norway, PACT Zollverein, Todays Art, Villette Numerique, EMPAC, Transmediale, EXIT Festival, Place des Arts, Elektra, Shanghai Dance Festival, V2_, among many others. He is the author of Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (MIT Press, 2010).

Source: La Laboral. Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial

n-Polytope, architecture, real time, Installation

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Farbe-Licht-Musik – Synästhesie und Farblichtmusik (2005) by Jörg Jewanski and Natalia Sidler focuses on the research on the color-light-music of Alexander Lászlo who in 1925 achieved overwhelming success with his multimedia show. A short time after his new art form fell into oblivion. The autors of this work revived and developed the experiments of Lászlo: his music has been rediscovered and coupled with actual visuals. (Natalia Sidler)

Audiovisuology: See this sound (2010) - An Interdisciplinary Compendium of Audiovisual Culture. This all-embracing compendium brings together texts on various art forms in which the relationship between sound and image plays a significant role and the techniques used in linking the two. The entire spectrum of audiovisual art and phenomena is presented in 35 dictionary entries. (Cornerhouse)

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Christopher Salter (*1967) is a media artist, performance director and composer/ sound designer based in Montreal, Canada and Berlin, Germany. His artistic and research interests revolve around the development and production of real time, computationally-augmented responsive performance environments fusing space, sound, image, architectural material and sensor-based technologies. Chris Salter collaborated with Peter Sellars and William Forsythe and co-founded the collective Sponge, whose works stretched between artistic production, theoretical reflection and scientific research. Chris Salter’s performances, installations, research and publications have been presented at numerous festivals and conferences around the world. (TASML)

Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) was a Greek composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers. Iannis Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances. (Wikipedia)

Mycenae-Alpha (1978) composed by Iannis Xenakis on the UPIC system, presents an example of the relationship between graphic image and sonic structure in electroacoustic music. The graphic score of Mycenae-Alpha provides a basis for an analysis of the work’s form and a guide to its characteristic sonic features. Mycenae-Alpha is also the first work to be composed entirely on the UPIC system. The UPIC is a tool for the graphic composition of electroacoustic music which was first developed in the late 1970s by Iannis Xenakis and his staff at the Center for Studies in Mathematical and Automated Music in Paris. (Ronald Squibbs)

META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (2007) by pioneering digital artist Mark Amerika mixes (and remixes) personal memoir, net art theory, fictional narrative, satirical reportage, scholarly history, and network-infused language art. META/DATA is a playful, improvisatory, multitrack digital sampling of Amerika's writing from 1993 to 2005 that tells the early history of a net art world gone wild while simultaneously constructing a parallel poetics of net art that complements Amerika's own artistic practice. (The MIT Press)

complex composition (2010) by Itaru Yasuda is a generative audiovisual concert piece updated every presentation. All sound and graphics are generated in real time by SuperCollider. (SuperCollider Symposium 2010)

ray vibration is a realtime audio-visual performance by Tina Tonagel, Christian Faubel and Ralf Schreiber. Three overhead projectors, three screens and three sound systems. Different electro-kinetic devices, machines and instruments are placed on the projectors. They produce movement and sound. The small sounds of what happens on the projectors are filtered, distorted and amplified. At the same time a triptych in cinemascope format displays magnified, filtered, distorted images of what happens on the screens/fresnel lenses of the projectors. (ray vibration)

Cycles 720 (2013) by Craig Allan is an hybrid visual/audio sequencer built using VVVV and Ableton Live with a custom M4L patch. Circle/Line interactions trigger percussion: rhythm and swing are dictated by the size, number of circles, their degree of separation, orientation and elasticity of each collision. (Craig Allan)

Golan Levin (*1972) is an American new media artist, composer, performer and engineer interested in developing artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression. Golan Levin's work focuses on the design of systems for the creation, manipulation and performance of simultaneous image and sound, as part of a more general inquiry into the formal language of interactivity, and of nonverbal communications protocols in cybernetic systems. (Golan Levin)

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