09-10-2017

Notes from "Alien Agency - Experimental Encounters with Art in the making" Chris Salter

Boundary leaking, blurring in and out, the body and the room continue as a pattern across other participants. “ I loved the beginning because I couldn ’ t feel where my body ended and the space began ” ; “ as much as there was no visual information, in the dark you still see .   .   . you still see .   .   . I don ’ t know what you see .   .   . but you see something, you know like a black cloud. I would define it like that. ”

If these forces from without introduce sensorial transience in the visitors, they also shake the stable self, remove the ability to hold onto something in the world, obscure easily defined borders between subject and object, visible and felt, perceived and imagined

For otherness. “ I had begun as an artist, as one who would manipulate the elements of a reality into a work of art in the image of my creative integrity; I end by recording, as humbly and accurately as I can, the logics of a reality which had forced me to recognize its integrity and to abandon my manipulations ” (Maya Deren). 3

a sensory environment for one person at a time that explores the ability to perceptually detect the smallest changes in visual, tactile, and auditory stimuli.

Aristotle ’ s “ analogies among the separation of forms of sense appear increasingly uncertain ”not only in the “ perplexity ”of touch being “ not one sense but many ”but also in our age of cross-modal neuroscience and multisensory integration in which neurons in the superior colliculus of the brain actually have been proven to deal with more than one sense modality.

the fluctuating interplay between a sensing “ subject ”and “ things perceived ”by that subject; matter in the world that, due to its electromagnetic and vibratory nature and makeup, impacts the sensory receptors of human, animal, or vegetal. It goes without saying that this interplay is not altogether clear, because the encounter between perceiver and perceived is itself subject to flux and modulation.

the understanding that the human “ sensorium ”is a direct product of culture.

“ The ways we use our senses, and the ways we create and understand the sensory world, are shaped by culture. Perception is informed not only by the personal meaning a sensation has for us but also for the social value it carries. ”

the sensorial sufferers of “ dystoposthesia ”(the feeling of being forever out of place due to adverse reactions to everyday effluvia);

suggests that affect, technology, and anthropology are not as far removed from each other as we might think. “ The controllable items connected with the internal and external 176 Part III environment of a service facility — temperature, light, color, sound and aroma — that elicit an emotional and physiological reaction from customers ’[these items] .   .   . powerfully modulate patrons ’ ‘ experiential affect, ’not only helping to usher them to machines but to immerse them in the zone and keep them there. ”

the creation of signification is coming to grips with the fact that the immense richness of human sensation and imagination has only so much to do with the human but also with the dazzling material forces and affects circulating through the world.

The tension again between distance and absorption. Estrangement and perceptual destabilization. On the one hand, Brecht ’ s theory of verfremdung , of defamiliarization, proposes a critical distance between the spectator and the event. On the other, Artaud ’ s notion of cruelty aims for the opposite, “ an attack on the spectator ’ s sensibility on all sides. ”

I’m forever pulled between the tensions of immersion and artifice. To disorient the spectators while heightening how the world operates. Disorientation, defamiliarization marked by sensorial transformation

the “ thermal cosmology ”of the Tzotzil, Mayan descendants who make their home in the Chiapas region of Mexico, thermal images and symbols abound: “ our father heat ”(the sun), the colors of food (corn is hot whereas potatoes are cold), ceremonies in which heat is essential, healers ’careful attention to temperature changes in the body. The Tzotzil ’ s is a color-coded cosmos replete with 180 Part III rituals that emphasize the role of heat across cooking, language, symbolic forms: “ thermal symbolism .   .   . integrated into a multisensory symbolic system. ”

the discussion of sensation ’ s role in religion and spiritual practice — the play of things such as synesthesia and “ infrasensory signals. ” Sound becomes the dominant means to “ awe worshippers and exchange messages with the gods. amplified voices into spectral presences do not just represent the gods — “ they are the cult spirits”

Tuzin ’ s analysis also again brings up the tension between the pure experience of sound and vibration and the human cultural interpretation and framing of such sounds. “ The phenomenological anthropocentrism of almost all musical and sonic analysis, obsessed with individualized subjective feeling, denigrates the vibrational nexus at the altar of human audition, thereby neglecting the agency distributed around a vibrational encounter and ignoring the nonhuman participants of the nexus of experience. ”

auditory ‘ images ’are associated with a set of memories and experiences which become ‘ habitual ’in a given social and cultural environment

How could we make a room fluctuate at the border of the phantasmal?

Unrelenting vision can be compared to concentrated vision that heralds a shift in consciousness

Are we after the mysterium tremendum, something beyond cultural accounts of sensorial otherness that could leap over into producing affect that will be palpable, sensual, and meaningful outside of religious or even cultural experience?

“ ritualization ”suggests that ritual is performative — a repeated and formalized practice of particular actions within carefully determined times and places that constitute meaning as they unfold

To construct rituals is intriguing but very tricky territory. It brings to mind those terrible experiences of bad theater and performance art events in which suburban born and raised kids try to get “ primitive ”or galleries and warehouses where one enters to the sound of Tibetan bowls, the sight of rows of flickering votive candles, and the smell of incense, the kind that fills the air of new age bookstores. These kinds of “ orientalist ”(in Edward Said ’ s sense of the term) stagings are not only politically problematic in reinforcing stereotypes of exotic others but also aesthetically dubious.

The alienness is not only in the fact that we don ’ t really know what we are making; we also don ’ t know what these materials will do to us.

an attempt to “ put people into a certain time/space to procure an extraordinary experience. ”There has to be a kind of “ sacralization of space ” to enable such experience to occur.

A strong augmentation of one sense, like vibration at different intensities to give the awareness of touch in different manifestations. The other is to work with more than one sense and mingle them together, say touch and smell, so that they start to modulate each other and the borders between one and the other begin to blur.

But what is most striking is the fact that “ the sphere of hallucinations ”that the anthropologist describes “ is one of subjective interpretations in which the person projects a set of preestablished, stored material upon the wavering screen of shapes and colors. ”

The synesthetic sensory visions elicited by the drugs are both culturally specific and cut across the container of culture into the very neurophysiological wiring of the brain under the influence of psychedelic chemicals. The mythical dramaturgy experienced by the Tukano and Desana “ can be seen only be members of their society. But the repetitive luminous patterns perceived during the first stage of the toxic condition represent neurophysiologically an entirely different aspect of the experience. ”

Extremes of light and darkness, hot and cold occupy the hexagonal landscape or perhaps before the visitors encounter the hexagon — a black space preceding the intense color and sound saturation. Then, combinations of the senses such as darkness, scent, vibration, flashes of phosphene-like images in the air, similar to the ones that ReichelDolmatoff describes Desana men seeing during their rituals of self-transformation under the influence of the holy vine.

Our work is nothing but translation. Not mirrors or models but assemblages that might provoke sensations to occur. New visceral acts enabled through a technologically orchestrated event that rattles the body, vibrates the soul, and yet is far removed from the original source. What position do we occupy? Insiders, outsiders, or a hybrid of the two? The written account brought about by the struggle to describe the assemblage of conditions and materials that enable encounters between perceivers and the magical properties of techniques, of course, takes place at a distance. Affects operate on us from afar and, at the same time, collapse distance. These techniques of sensation that are part human sensorium and part instruments and apparatuses link up, exert their influence, and then run from us. They operate on the body and the senses, defying the neat stability to capture them in writing and, indeed, in the container of culture itself — almost effacing it. Is this the experience of an ethnographic encounter with the alien?

Just as perception is not necessarily

local but tends to affect and life doesn ’ t situate itself in bodies and organisms, Displace as a lived experience within an unfamiliar world suggests that culture is not contained in fixed symbols, in containers, in sense ratios, series, modalities, knowing . Culture emerges; it comes about through imaginative encounters with the evanescent, more than human world. This is what the artwork does. It functions as an assemblage of emergent perceptions and affects. What the public ’ s encounter with Displace shows is the very possibility of sensing and experiencing this formation.

How is it possible that things, stuff at a distance, at a remove, beyond us, not even human, can exert such powerful effects and affects on our bodies, souls, and world?

artists are making a different claim about the world — one that through acts of “ practical aesthetics ”(Jill Bennett) enacts concepts, manipulates materials, and enables the assemblage for publics to encounter. 4 This aesthetic, affective encounter is not to be underestimated; it is that which, as Guattari argued, “ may irreversibly mark the course of an existence .   .   . something which draws the subject towards his or her own recreation and reinvention. ”

Alienness provokes us to theorize culture anew; to recognize its temporal, emergent, dynamic being; not contained, elusive to capture and success. Agency, acts, behaviors cannot be described in words only but also in their temporal unfolding, their performances. 11 The artistic act makes the conditions possible to destabilize the known and reinvent it anew. In other words, in what I ’ ve attempted to tell, alienness may also help us rethink what it means to create an account of unruly experience, not only with human culture but also with that on the verge beyond us.