Public lecture by Christopher Salter (Concordia University, Montreal) What do artists working with science and technology do? My recently published book Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (MIT Press, 2015) explores how “researcher-creators” produce new performative assemblages that challenge how we experience the world and create, and simultaneously, destabilize new phenomena and our perception of such phenomena. How do the materials of art – the “stuff of the world” – behave and perform in ways beyond the creator's intent, becoming unknown and alien. How is it that researcher creators organize the conditions for new kinds of experimental, performative assemblies that sidestep entrenched dichotomies between subjects and objects, human and non-human, mind and body, knowing and experiencing. Without pretending that artistic processes and scientific research have the same intentions, this talk will ultimately focus on how the experiential and affective elements of artistic practice with techno-science actually ask a question that science asks as well: how do new things come into the world and what do they do?
 

 

Christopher Salter (b.1967, Beaumont) is an artist, Concordia University Research Chair in New Media and the Senses, and Co-Director of the Hexagram Network in Montreal. He studied philosophy, theatre and computer music at Emory and Stanford Universities. After collaborating with Peter Sellars and William Forsythe/Ballett Frankfurt, he co-founded and directed the art and research collective Sponge (1997–2003). His solo and collaborative work has been seen all over the world at such venues as the Venice Architecture Biennale (Venice), Laboral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industriel (Gijon, Spain), Ars Electronica (Linz), Transmediale (Berlin), EXIT Festival (Maison des Arts, Creteil-Paris), Elektra (Montréal), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), V2 (Rotterdam), SIGGRAPH 2001 (New Orleans) and the Exploratorium (San Francisco), among others. He is the author of Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (MIT Press, 2010) and Alien Agency (MIT Press, 2015).