Chris Salter

Photo: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, avec la permission de/ courtesy of Guy L’Heureux

N-Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound After Iannis Xenakis─MAC Version, 2017

Steel cables, microelectronics, LEDs, speakers, software

This installation is a tribute to the Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis’s radical 1960s-1970s Polytopes, the first of which premiered at Expo 67 in the French pavilion, now the Montréal Casino. Reconfigured here for the museum’s rotunda space, it consists of 126 powerful LEDs and many tiny speakers suspended throughout the space on a geometric “ruled surface” constructed of thin aircraft cable, creating a light and sound environment continually swinging between order and disorder, echoing Xenakis’s original fascination with the behaviours of natural systems. The installation is steered by means of a sensor network that uses machine learning techniques to “learn” different rhythmic and temporal patterns produced by the light and sound, and influences the overall compositional action over time. N-Polytope is by no means a recreation of Xenakis’s Polytopes, but rather a re-imagining that explores how Xenakis’s interest in probablistic (so-called “stochastic”) systems can be made sense of and kept alive today using new technologies that were unavailable to the composer during his lifetime.

Concept and direction: Chris Salter
Composition: Chris Salter and Adam Basanta
Architectural design: Thomas Spier
Technical direction, embedded systems, media composition programming: Marije Baalman
Lighting design: Elio Bidinost
Media behaviour modelling and programming: Sofian Audry
Production assistance (Montréal): Owen Coolidge, Garrett Lockhart, Joseph Plazak and Alexandre Saunier
Electronics assembly: Simon Claessen, Rene Wassenburg (Schrikdraad Ontwerp) and Stan Verberkt
Production: xmodal/Montréal/LABoral
With the original support of: Fonds de Recherche du Québec Sociéte et Culture; Hexagram-Concordia; Schlaich Bergermann und Partner, STEIM (Amsterdam)
In collaboration with Sofian Audry, Adam Basanta, Marije Baalman, Elio Bidinost and Thomas Spier

Chris Salter was born in Beaumont, Texas in 1967. Salter is an artist and University Research Chair in New Media, Technology and the Senses at Concordia University and Co-Director of the Milieux network for Research-Creation in Media Arts and Technology in Montreal. He studied philosophy and economics at Emory University and completed a PhD in directing and dramatic criticism at Stanford University where he also researched and studied at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCMRA). His work has been seen all over the world at such venues as : Venice Architecture Biennale; Chronus Art Center, Shanghai; Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany; HAU-Berlin Theater; Digital Art Biennial, Montreal (2014); LABoral, Gijón, Spain; Lille 3000, France; CTM Berlin; National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; Villette Numerique, Paris; Todays Art, The Hague, Netherlands; Transmediale, Berlin; and EXIT Festival, Maison des Arts, Creteil-Paris among many others. He is the author of Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (MIT Press, 2010) and Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (MIT Press, 2015).