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.

Philosophy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 311 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2015]

System Details:

text file

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:

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.

Notes:

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

ISBN:

9780262323598

0262323591

9780262028462

0262028468

OCLC:

904799950

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.