PUBLIC TALK: SymbioticA Friday Seminar
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SymbioticA Friday Seminar : Free Friday seminar, open to all. |
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Alien Agencies:
Performance, Science and Experimental Practice
Speaker:
Chris Salter, PhD
Concordia University/Hexagram
Montréal, Québec
Canada
What is “performance” in a scientific context? Who or what is performing? How do we articulate such performative practices that take place in hybrid studio-lab environments such as SymbioticA? What kind of knowledge arises and why is it important? Early microstudies from scholars like Bruno Latour/Steve Woolgar, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Michael Lynch, Andrew Pickering and others exposed the ways that laboratories were sites for what Hans-Joerg Rheinberger labels the “local, technical, instrumental, institutional, social, epistemic and aesthetic/experiential aspects” of scientific practice. By examining the manner in which human scientists are intertwined with what Latour famously labeled the “non-humans” (such as instruments of observation and measurement or materials such as cells, particles, electrical charges, etc), many of these studies sought to “study science as it happens” in its performative context rather than as a fixed object. Now some thirty years later, what could the lessons of this pioneering work in laboratory ethnography offer new hybrid art-science practices, particularly in understanding how artists work with new performative materialities or what Andrew Pickering calls “material agencies?” Could the so-called “performative turn” in science studies offer new ways of doing laboratory ethnographies that acknowledge the peculiarities of the epistemic and experiential cultures of artistic practice.
Chris Salter is an artist, Director of the Hexagram Institute for Research-Creation in Media Art and Technology at Concordia University in Montréal and Associate Professor, in the Department of Design + Computation Arts (Concordia). He studied economics and philosophy and received his PhD in Theater Sciences and Computer Generated Sound from Stanford University. He collaborated with Peter Sellars and William Forsythe and co-founded the collective Sponge. Salter’s performances, installations and research has been presented at numerous festivals and conferences around the world, including the Venice Architecture Biennale, Ars Electronica, Exit Festival-MAC Creteil, V2, Elektra-Montréal, Dance Theater Workshop, Transmediale, Attakkalari India Biennial and many others. He is the author of Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (MIT Press, 2010).
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