I just purchased Chris Salter’s Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (MIT Press, March 2010). It is a massive undertaking and a book long overdue. In this ambitious project, Salter sets out to provide a historical overview of the intersections between technology and artistic performance in order to demonstrate the profound entanglement in the historical trajectories of both sets of practices and developments. Entangled seeks to address how technological developments have altered our making and perception of artistic performance and the socio-political, cultural and economic contexts of such developments (p. xiii). Furthermore, Salter understands the histories of new media arts, theater, and other stage-based artforms as divided in a tension between the technophilic and technophobic, and his investigation is an attempt to fill this gap.
Peter Sellars describes, in his Foreword to the book, Salter’s approach as radically inclusive. Indeed, Salter sets out to frame an impressively diverse range of practices as performance. Those practices include, but are not limited to, theatre, opera, scenography, architecture, video art, installations, environments, sonic arts, robotics, media arts, live and body art, expressions of popular culture such as music gigs, and more. Entangled consists of eight chapters, each focusing on a different form. This distinction is not designed to separate disciplinary trajectories though; instead, it challenges disciplinary boundaries through its fluid narrative that consistently foregrounds intersections, crossovers and common histories.
Through the framing of an expanded and diverse range of practices as performative, Salter seeks to shift our understanding of what constitutes performance practice today. Indeed, in the first paragraph of his introduction, Salter goes on to claim that “everything has become performative” (p. xxi). And it is, I think, this proposition that is one of this book’s most important contributions to contemporary thinking and praxis. Salter points at a shift in the zeitgeist that occurred at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, when the euphoria of the virtual was replaced with a reconsideration and re-foregrounding of the physical body and, with it, “embodiment, situatedness, presence, and materiality.” (ibid) As a result, claims Salter, “performance as practice, method, and worldview is becoming one of the major paradigms of the twenty-first century, not only in the arts but also the sciences.” (ibid) Following the work of Francisco Varela, as well as Jerome Butler, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson, Salter explains that what performance suggests as a worldview is that ‘reality’ is not pregiven (and thus cannot be represented), but rather “the world is enacted or actively performed anew.” (p. xxvi) Thus, approaching the world as ‘performative’, is approaching the world as a ‘reality’ that “emerges over time” and is “continually transformed through our history of interactions with it.” (p. xxvii)
In the main body of this work, Salter provides a wide and comprehensive survey of artistic practices starting from the end of the 19th and moving to the 21st century. Salter’s narrative opens with Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) and the opening of his Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Germany in 1876; it closes with British group Blast Theory’s pervasive games that seek to transform urban environments into augmented stages for performances that engage their audiences as “active shapers” (p. 348) of both the piece and their own experience. Salter narrates the story of artistic evolution across artforms in parallel with another story: that of technological developments from the mechanical to the computational; from photography to artificial life and biotechnologies. The account demonstrates throughout how those technological developments affected, informed, facilitated or initiated artistic practices. Occasionally –but not enough, I think– a third narrative comes into play, contextualizing both artistic and technological developments within their socioeconomic and cultural strata.