Alien agency : experimental encounters with art in the making / Chris Salter ; afterword by Andrew Pickering.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Salter, Chris, 1967- author.

Pickering, Andrew, 1948- author of afterword.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Artificial life.

Experience.

Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.).

Technology--Philosophy.

Technology.

Tissue culture--Philosophy.

Tissue culture.

Senses and sensation.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (327 p.)

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"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 thse 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 assemlages that sidestep dichotomies between subjects and objects, human and nonhuman, mind and body, knowing and experiencing."

Contents:

Contents; Acknowledgments; Preface; Introduction; I Resonances; 1 Hearing Perspectives; 2 From Agency to Practice; 3 Green Belts in Goethe's City; 4 Stories Told of Sonic Reals; 5 Four Ears, or Listening as Making; 6 Can Architecture Hear?; 7 Hearing View; 8 Affects and Atmospheres; 9 Tuning; II Cellular Vitality; 1 A Living Machine?; 2 Suspicions of a Wet Kind; 3 Experiments in a Lab at the End of the World; 4 The Tissue Culture Point of View - Part I; 5 Techniques for Immortality; 6 The Tissue Culture Point of View - Part II; 7 Surface Tensions; 8 The Tissue Culture Point of View - Part III

9 A Tutorial on Muscle-Cell Energetics10 Where the Art Is . . .; 11 The Tacit Knowing of Tissue; 12 A Revealing School Seminar; 13 Goals and Purposes; 14 Tissue Culture Hands On; 15 Life's Triumph in the Dish; 16 Eight Failed Experiments in Substrate Sketching; 17 Reflections on Bare Life at the Bench; 18 Collagen Trials While the Clock Ticks; 19 Suspension; 20 Is Life in Bodies?; III Sensorium; 1 Limens; 2 Mediations of Sensation; 3 Three Tensions; 4 Four Seminars in Sensory Experience; 5 Translation and Enactment; 6 Atmospheres Unveiled; 7 Technologies of the Senses; 8 Seeding Alter

9 How to Invoke the Cosmos10 Experience Near-Far; 11 The Missing Sense; 12 The Conditions of Sensory Assemblage; 13 Displace; 14 "Death, Limbo, and then Heaven down the Hall"; 15 Is Sense in Culture?; Conclusion: Is the World a Laboratory?; Afterword; Notes; References; Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

ISBN:

0-262-32360-5

0-262-32359-1

OCLC:

904799950