Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 17 Number 1, April 2016
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Salter, Chris, Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2015. 311pp, ISBN 978-0-262-02846-2, Hardback price 26.95 GBP.
Reviewed by
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
With a motto as deadpan as Bertolt Brecht’s claim that ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating,’ Chris Salter straightaway sets the tone for a book in which theory and practice are nothing if not emphatically ‘entangled’ – to borrow the title of its illustrious predecessor from 2010. But this is more than formal posturing, especially since Alien Agency ambitions to study art ‘in the making’ (xi). For such a subject, to Salter, almost automatically forces us to reconsider the outside world with which we continually engage as ‘dynamic, temporally emergent, contingent, and performative’ (ibid.). To this end, the book is structured around three ‘stories’ loosely linked by two intertwined questions: the theoretical ‘How are humans and media coproduced in the act of making things?’ and a more methodological ‘How does one write an account of [such] practice?’ Each of the three central ‘stories,’ in turn, revolves around its own key question. Part I, ‘Resonance,’ explores how one can (attempt to) record the unrecordable experience of sense and affect in the acoustic ‘life of the city.’ Part II, ‘Cellular vitality,’ discusses how one can grow and keep alive muscle cells that move and can move by themselves outside of a body part, while Part III, ‘Sensorium,’ takes on the challenge of generating environments of light, vibration, sound, smell, and taste molecules in which it is possible to experience other cultural ‘ways of sensing’ (ibid.). The answer to all these questions is just as (deceptively) simple as the book’s motto seemed disingenuous: through experimental artistic practice-as-research. After all, as Salter so succinctly reminds us, such a posture transversally engages with a world perennially on the make by investigating the interface between ‘material agency’ and ‘experiential affects’ – focusing, as it were, on how new things and experiences emerge in our ‘technically saturated world that is always on a threshold,’ and how we, humans, respond to this.
If feminist scholar Karen Barad is to be believed, any “typically human” response to a technologized society is delusional because to engage with such an environment effectively constitutes an act of ‘posthuman performativity’ (op. cit. 5). It is a reasoning Salter himself seems to embrace, as witnessed by his refusal to over-theorize his subject in favour of a ‘lived, bodily, experiential’ exploration of his research. Alien Agency, it soon enough transpires, is not your typical academic treatise, but an eclectic mixture of theory, diary entries, cultural history, ethnography, artistic annotations, as well as autobiography. Less gratuitous than it looks, it actually re-enacts the practice of “serious” scientific research which itself is descriptive inasmuch as it is performative first – i.e. organized along a pre-selected theory or referential framework that subsequently organizes our perception of the data. Hence Salter’s focus on agency as the driving force behind the effects we perceive in our everyday world, a principle that neatly bridges the apparently unbridgeable divide between “hard science” and artistic practice on behalf of a shared necessity of being ‘continually reconfigured by their instruments and data within responsive media’ (Joe Dumit op. cit. 14). Still, when starting on the first ‘story’ in the book it feels as if said metaphor is somewhat being overstretched. The introduction of Sonic Vista strikes as overly descriptive, impressionistic, and especially empirical while little headway seems to be made towards the artwork’s wider (conceptual) relevance. But well into the chapter, at a moment the reader has become comprehensively acquainted with the book’s academically alienating outlook, a sudden quotation strikes as no less estranging – yet for reasons diametrically opposite: ‘Agency,’ as Salter succinctly reprises, ‘is in constant flux, an in-between state that constantly violates and transgresses the physical boundaries of the elements that constitute it’ (Malafouris op. cit. 40). Despite the disorganized appearance of the chapter, this is no formal trifle. Indeed, somehow, we have been gradually coaxed towards accepting this insight as inevitable. And when a few pages later we find Salter’s own succinct definition of “affect” as ‘the preconscious, precognitive impact of things, bodies, forces at a distance on other bodies’ (47), the book’s structure in itself comes to strike as an instance of “alien agency.” Still, this too, gradually morphs into an eerie sense of acceptance by virtue of systematic insertions like Locke’s quote that ‘the material is always right [and] whatever goes wrong is because you didn’t pay enough respect to the materials’ (op. cit. 50).
The subject “material” of the second ‘story,’ though, is not nearly as susceptible to remain disregarded. It concerns Salter’s collaboration with SymbioticA, the Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts at the University of Western Australia, on the creation of a ‘“semiliving” machine’ (89) in order to explore the brittle boundaries ‘between life and nonlife and the age-old dichotomy between machine and organism’ (ibid.). In more concrete terms, the chapter describes the creation of a clump of muscle cells in vitro, the prodding of these with electrical or mechanical actuation in order to induce contractions, and sense and map these tiny contractions into the scale of human perception through sound, light, and vibration so that the tissue’s micro-movements are amplified and felt by spectators in an art gallery. Tissue culture as a means of artistic expression, as it were. Or as Salter himself has it: ‘science fiction’ (89). In this fascinating section the reciprocity between concept and object, as well as product and process is continually foregrounded, yet this is hardly surprising given the considerable leap from the über-sophisticated technology to the project’s artistic agenda. A more cynical reader would call it a means of avoiding to alienate the reader, but Alien Agency is rather more concerned with the case’s heuristic range. Moreover, the principle of engineering biological life as art is sufficiently alienating in its own right, just as the technology – despite its sophistication – remains very much an experimental affair. Most importantly, however, the tension between the technology and the alienating agency activated on so many levels simultaneously reminds us throughout this second ‘story’ of how important “artistic” thinking remains when engaging with complex phenomena, and how completely visceral our responses still are when realizing that ‘Oh! They’re moving!’ (151). For, despite the forbidding laboratory setting, the cutting-edge equipment, and the incomprehensible procedures, the main outcome of the entire setup is an overpowering impression of ‘potentiality’ (161).
As such, the bridge with the third ‘story’ on the ‘Sensorium’ is as un-alienating as can be. What Salter presents us with here concerns the creation process of small, physically enclosed, and mobile architectures that play with a wide range of sensory phenomena. And even if it is instantly admitted that the underlying research questions quickly turned the project into ‘a messy, fascinating, careening amalgam,’ the perception the participants in Displace singled out was precisely the sense of potential emanating from ‘intersensoriality’ (172). It is a significant insight, especially when complemented by Howes and Classen’s claim that ‘The ways we use our senses, and the ways we create and understand the sensory world, are shaped by culture’ (op. cit. 173). For, if anything, it makes the study of something so elusive as the sensorium culturally relevant – not in the least because it highlights the “entangled” nature of meaning making:
The process of sensuous ethnography creates a set of instabilities [that] originate not only in the difficult process of writing about the wily movement of things perceived and their fluctuating perceivers, but also in vividly attempting to evoke how the mechanical, chemical, electrical, and physical forces that our perception latches onto in the world “make sense” (176-7).
Aside from being a maverick thinker and daring artist, Chris Salter in Alien Agency also proves himself to be a great writer casually dropping lines like ‘Irreconcilable or incommensurable?’ and the occasional self-deprecation ‘So much for research at the border of the unknown’ (178). If anything, it contributes to the agency of estrangement and makes one’s engagement with this book so much more palatable. But it is a journey that the reader has to travel alone because the uncharacteristic outlook of Salter’s latest calls for a significant amount of cognitive input. Fortunately the author is fully aware of this and extends his sympathy through statements that echo said principle, like ‘the turbulent sensorial weather that we have struggled to choreograph’ (190) or ‘Felt sensations are generated by some of our most “theatrical” choices’ (231). Just as the art he describes is characterized by being always unique unprecedented, we thus come to affectively understand that, though materially mediated, meaning must remain alien even if agency is always possible.