Alien Agency

Description

An investigation into what happens in creative practice when the materials of art and research behave and perform in ways beyond the creators’ intentions.

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.

Salter reports on the sound artists Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger (O+A) and their efforts to capture and then project unnoticed urban sounds; tracks the multi-year project TEMA (Tissue Engineered Muscle Actuators) at the art research lab SymbioticA and its construction of a hybrid “semi-living” machine from specially grown mouse muscle cells; and describes a research-creation project (which he himself initiated) that uses light, vibration, sound, smell, and other sensory stimuli to enable audiences to experience other cultures’ “ways of sensing.” Combining theory, diary, history, and ethnography, Salter also explores a broader question: How do new things emerge into the world and what do they do?Acknowledgments ix
Preface xi
Introduction 1
I Resonances 19
1 Hearing Perspectives 21
2 From Agency to Practice 40
3 Green Belts in Goethe ’ s City 41
4 Stories Told of Sonic Reals 50
5 Four Ears, or Listening as Making 53
6 Can Architecture Hear? 62
7 Hearing View 65
8 Affects and Atmospheres 80
9 Tuning 83
II Cellular Vitality 85
1 A Living Machine? 88
2 Suspicions of a Wet Kind 92
3 Experiments in a Lab at the End of the World 94
4 The Tissue Culture Point of View — Part I 107
5 Techniques for Immortality 113
6 The Tissue Culture Point of View — Part II 116
7 Surface Tensions 119
8 The Tissue Culture Point of View — Part III 121
9 A Tutorial on Muscle Cell Energetics 124
10 Where the Art Is .   .   . 126
11 The Tacit Knowing of Tissue 127
12 A Revealing School Seminar 136
13 Goals and Purposes 138
14 Tissue Culture Hands On 141
15 Life ’ s Triumph in the Dish 150
16 Eight Failed Experiments in Substrate Sketching 152
17 Reflections on Bare Life at the Bench 155
18 Collagen Trials While the Clock Ticks 157
19 Suspension 162
20 Is Life in Bodies? 163
III Sensorium 167
1 Limens 169
2 Mediations of Sensation 170
3 Three Tensions 176
4 Four Seminars in Sensory Experience 178
5 Translation and Enactment 188
6 Atmospheres Unveiled 190
7 Technologies of the Senses 193
8 Seeding Alter 195
9 How to Invoke the Cosmos 201
10 Experience Near-Far 210
11 The Missing Sense 211
12 The Conditions of Sensory Assemblage 214
13 Displace 225
14 “ Death, Limbo, and then Heaven down the Hall ” 228
15 Is Sense in Culture? 235
Conclusion: Is the World a Laboratory? 239
Afterword by Andrew Pickering 243
Notes 247
References 273
Index 297Chris Salter is an artist, Professor of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University, and Codirector of the Hexagram network for arts, culture, and technology. He is the author of Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance and Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making, both published by the MIT Press.US

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