Alien agency : experimental encounters with art in the making / Chris Salter.

Author
Salter, Chris, 1967- [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2015]
Description
xiii, 311 pages ; 24 cm

Availability

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks BD418.8 .S25 2015 Browse related items Request
    Marquand Library - Remote Storage: Marquand Use OnlyBD418.8 .S25 2015 Browse related items Request

      Details

      Subject(s)
      Summary note
      "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?"--Publisher's description.
      Bibliographic references
      Includes bibliographical references and index.
      Contents
      • Introduction
      • Resonances : Hearing perspectives ; From agency to practice ; Green belts in Goethe's city ; Stories told of sonic reals ; Four ears, or Listening as making ; Can architecture hear? ; Hearing view ; Affects and atmospheres ; Tuning
      • Cellular vitality : A living machine? ; Suspicions of a wet kind ; Experiments in a lab at the end of the world ; The tissue culture point of view, Part I ; Techniques for immortality ; The tissue culture point of view, Part II ; Surface tensions ; The tissue culture point of view, Part III ; A tutorial on muscle cell energetics ; Where the art is... ; The tacit knowing of tissue ; A revealing school seminar ; Goals and purposes ; Tissue culture hands on ; Life's triumph in the dish ; Eight failed experiments in substrate sketching ; Reflections on bare life at the bench ; Collagen trials while the clock ticks ; Suspension ; Is life in bodies?
      • Sensorium : Limens ; Mediations of sensation ; Three tensions ; Four seminars in sensory experience ; Translation and enactment ; Atmospheres unveiled ; Technologies of the senses ; Seeding Alter ; How to invoke the cosmos ; Experience near-far ; The missing sense ; The conditions of sensory assemblage ; Displace ; "Death, limbo, and then heaven down the hall" ; Is sense in culture?
      • Conclusion: Is the world a laboratory?
      • Afterword / Andrew Pickering.
      ISBN
      • 9780262028462
      • 0262028468
      LCCN
      2014021817
      OCLC
      885982875
      Statement on language in description
      Princeton University Library aims to describe library materials in a manner that is respectful to the individuals and communities who create, use, and are represented in the collections we manage. Read more...
      Other views
      Staff view