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Alien agency : experimental encounters with art in the making
Salter C., The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015. 328 pp. Type: Book (978-0-262028-46-2)
Date Reviewed: Aug 11 2015

There aren’t any asteroids hitting our mother planet or Martian humanoids taking over museums and art galleries. The aliens in Alien agency: experimental encounters with art in the making, according to author Chris Salter, are evoked in three empirically based “adventures” involving the newest wave in art, aesthetics, and anthropology. Adventures are based on the use of sensory components designed for participants to encounter, engage with, and experience. Each adventure describes how encountering an environment in its totality, including parts heretofore unknown, affects its engaged participants. Salter’s selections describe the design process used to create environments that would expose the “alien”: the previously hidden, invisible, or veiled components of the human experiences with art, science, and our senses. Techniques anthropologists use to evoke the natural unknown forces within a culture were adapted and translated to suit adventure needs.

In Part 1, “Resonances,” sound artists Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, who produce sound installations in public places, developed an apparatus that captures both audible and inaudible sounds. For this project, sounds were captured in a variety of locations and architecture in the urban environment. The sounds were then manipulated and amplified to reveal to participants what may be acoustically hidden to them. What designers found was “that actually listening into the environment, the surplus of information is in how things interconnect …. And this aesthetic dimension ... has definitely to do with how much you go into it as a perceiver. How much you engage with it.”

Part 2, “Cellular Vitality” addresses tissue-engineered muscle actuators (TEMA), which involve the creation of a hybrid bioreactor, a “semi-living machine used to explore aesthetically the fragile borders between life and non-life.” This project, developed in the Laboratories of Art and Design at the University of Western Australia, uses tissue cells from a mouse muscle. The sound and visuals of the muscle’s contractions are amplified to human scale in order to create a visceral reaction in the spectators. The history of tissue culture is described, from its early mix of science, myth, and magic to standard biological techniques and the realm of artistic experimentation. It ends with queries as to “where does life take place?” There is no discussion as to who may own a human cell genome and other issues of ownership and privacy.

Part 3, “Sensorium,” is the major adventure in the book. Led by the author and David Howes (anthropology professor at Concordia University, Montreal), a leader in the “anthropology of the senses” movement, this adventure describes the process involved in the development of MoS/Displace (“Mediations of Sensation/Displace”) that will uncover “otherness” within the participants and the environment they are exposed to. In their search for “otherness” (or the “aliens” in the book title), Sensorium designers planned an interface using sensory anthropology, art, and technology linked to human senses. Visitors to this multiphased environment, “Displace,” would be exposed to an intermingling of stimuli including sight, hearing, tasting, smelling, and so on.

The designers agreed that “symbols and objects have powers that we cannot grasp due to their embeddedness in other cultural contexts.” Their job is one of translation, triggering the concept of a design for a “gymnasium” of the senses. In “Displace,” the gymnasium is translated into physical environments, incorporating anthropologically derived symbols. These are designed and constructed to allow participants the experience of an environment at the border of the “phantasmal.” Plays of color, heat, smell, sound and haze, and rattle and light sequences, along with vibrations at different intensities and shaking, all act to engage the participant in the finished environment.

At the wrap up, Salter explains, “‘Displace’ as a lived experience within an unfamiliar world suggests that culture is not contained in fixed symbols. … This is what artwork does. It functions as an assemblage of emergent perceptions and affects. … We cannot know the results of the experience without doing it …. The alien doesn’t rid us of the human …. Imagine a world of objects without us.”

In the book’s afterword, Andrew Pickering, author of The cybernetic brain: sketches for another future [1], comments, “Projects here are really weird. Are they really art? … Things are happening in the world of which this book is both a symptom and a landmark, but what?”

In the 20th century, as a Western culture we have been exposed to the uncertainties of new theories and ideas, and new ways to experience and/or accept the multiple changes as they evolved. The arts, sciences, and our very understanding of the universe have been reshaped, leading to new forms, concepts, and ideas to make sense of the world. Salter’s work is an example and a development of our hundred-year evolution. Pickering explains, “The works Salter includes are not one-offs. They do not exist in a historical vacuum. Many histories intersect in them. [For example] John Cage is a major historical presence in performative experimentation in art, once again looking east for philosophical inspiration.”

As a reviewer, I repeat the question: “Is the book more about dramaturgy than experiment?” Only within the past hundred years have Western cultures been examined to show, in various ways, how we have dealt with extreme changes to our knowledge of the universe. Einstein’s theory of relativity shattering concepts of time and space; the Big Bang and deconstruction of the atom; string theories, probabilities, and multiple universes; men landing on Earth’s moon in the 1960s; Nam June Paik and the introduction of experimental electronic media; mid-century happenings and performance arts; environmental art like Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Getty” and Christo’s “Valley Curtain” and wrapped structures; Disneyworld. Yet, as Andrew Pickering in the afterword points out, what the book lacks is the historical background for the work Salter describes. Entries in his extensive bibliography are almost all post-2000.

Read this for fun, or if you are interested in experimental art at the edge, or to learn about how research can influence creativity. “Like an unfinished symphony, culture is a work of art never meant to be completed. Its expressiveness demands that it be endlessly recreated and that its appreciation derive from this process of creation” [2].

Reviewer:  Bernice Glenn Review #: CR143678 (1511-0950)
1) Pickering, A. The cybernetic brain: sketches for another future. Unversity of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2010.
2) Guss, D. M. To weave and sing: art, symbol, and narrative in the South American rainforest. University of Calfornia Press, Berkeley, CA, 1989.
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