This ambitious and comprehensive book explores technology’s influence on artistic performance practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Entangled, Chris Salter shows that technologies, from the mechanical to the computational–from a “ballet of objects and lights” staged by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1917 to contemporary technologically-enabled “responsive environments”–have been entangled with performance across a wide range of disciplines. Salter examines the rich and extensive history of performance experimentation in theater, music, dance, the visual and media arts, architecture, and other fields; explores the political, social, and economic context for the adoption of technological practices in art; and shows that these practices have a set of common histories despite their disciplinary borders.
Each chapter in Entangled focuses on a different form: theater scenography, architecture, video and image making, music and sound composition, body-based arts, mechanical and robotic art, and interactive environments constructed for research, festivals, and participatory urban spaces. Salter’s exhaustive survey and analysis shows that performance traditions have much to teach other emerging practices–in particular in the burgeoning fields of new media. Students of digital art need to master not only electronics and code but also dramaturgy, lighting, sound, and scenography. Entangled will serve as an invaluable reference for students, researchers, and artists as well as a handbook for future praxis.
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In Alien Agency, Chris Salter tells three stories of art in the making. Salter examines three works in which the materials of art—the “stuff of the world”—behave and perform in ways beyond the creator’s intent, becoming unknown, surprising, alien. Studying these works—all three deeply embroiled in and enabled by science and technology—allows him to focus on practice through the experiential and affective elements of creation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic observation and on his own experience as an artist, Salter investigates how researcher-creators organize the conditions for these experimental, performative assemblages—assemblages that sidestep dichotomies between subjects and objects, human and nonhuman, mind and body, knowing and experiencing.
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As techno-science increasingly reaches into every aspect of life, formerly fast held distinctions between the inert and the active, the human and non-human and life and matter are cracking. From biotechnical engineering to the cataclysmic imminence of climate change, our very notions of what and how we consider life are under fire. What are the ethical, aesthetic and political stakes in understanding a worldview in which humans are no longer at the centre?
The Vibrancy Effect is the result of a closed expert meeting organized by V2_ and Chris Salter that brought together artists, social scientists, natural scientists and humanities experts to explore the question of what matter does, to us and the world, and to bridge the gap between different disciplines conceptualizing and working with new notions of ‘vibrant materiality’ (Jane Bennett) and ‘material agency’ (Andrew Pickering). This meeting resulted in a multimedia e-book, available for purchase at V2_.
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