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 particula r 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.