Associate professor wins honorable mention at Prix Ars Electronica

Christopher Salter, Design and Computation Arts associate professor and director of the Hexagram-Concordia Centre for Research-Creation in Media Arts and Technologies, won Honorable Mention in the Hybrid Arts award category at the 2013 Prix Ars Electronica for his piece, N_Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound After Iannis Xenakis. The project was one of 13 winning entries out of more than 400 submitted projects.

Created by Salter, with Sofian Audry, Marije Baalman, Adam Basanta, Elio Bidinost and Thomas Spier, N_Polytope is a spectacular light and sound performance-installation combining lighting, lasers, sound, sensing and machine learning software. Inspired by composer Iannis Xenakis's radical 1960s and 70s works named Polytopes (from the Greek 'poly', many and 'topos', space), N_Polytope is a largescale, immersive architectural environment designed, with hundreds of tiny lights and speakers suspended on cables, to explore how both scripted and indeterminate systems affect an individual's stability -- and how they move between order and disorder.

The Ars Electronica festival has sought out interlinkages and congruities, causes and effects between art, technology, society since 1979. Held annually in Austria, Ars Electronica's divisions - the Festival, the Prix as competition honoring excellence, the Center as a setting for presentation and interaction, and the Futurelab as in-house R&D facility - inspire one another and put futuristic visions to the test.