Paradoxical Symmetries: A Huddersfield Polytope

Free Event
Content Warning: flashing lights

Please note: an installation version of Paradoxical Symmetries will run from 12pm – 4pm

Clear + Park:
Nic Clear remixed digital audio / digital film / projections / voice
Hyun Jun Park digital animation / projections 

Nic Clear (UK / Ireland, 1963)
Paradoxical Symmetries: A Huddersfield Polytope (2025) 35’ World Premiere 

Paradoxical Symmetries: A Huddersfield Polytope – part performance, part installation – attempts to recreate the atmosphere of a Iannis Xenakis Polytope, taking inspiration from the sweeping hyperbolic paraboloid structures of Huddersfield’s Queensgate Market which echo the complex geometries employed by Xenakis in his own architectural projects. 

Animations created from 3D laser scans of the Market are transformed into abstract projections that shift and fold across the walls of the Create Lab, alongside a reworking of Xenakis’s Hibiki Hana Ma, created for the Polytope of Osaka in 1970 (the same year that Queensgate Market was built). Using multi-tracking and live mixing, the manipulations of the soundtrack follow similar processes to those applied to the film track (mirroring, stretching, looping), while additional lighting effects create an intense, spatial experience. 

The work’s title is taken from Dr Robin Evans’ essay on the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies Van Der Rohe. While Evans alludes to the way architects find symmetry in only one type of geometric configuration, here it reminds us of the multiple complex symmetries across Xenakis’s work in both music and architecture. 

Co-produced by CEADA, CeReNeM and hcmf// with support from the University of Huddersfield 

Photo:  © Nic Clear