N-Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound After Iannis Xenakis

At Subspace from September 1, 2018 to October 23, 2018

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 Montreal at the French pavilion. Reconfigured here for the ZKM_Subspace, 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 that swings continually between order and disorder and echos Xenakis’s original fascination with the behaviors of natural systems.

The installation is steered by means of a wireless 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 probabilistic (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.