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Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. by Chris Salter. 2010. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 460 pp., 78 b/w illus., foreword by Peter Sellars, preface, acknowledgments, notes, glossary, references, name and subject indices. $40.00 cloth.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2012

Harmony Bench
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Abstract

Type
Book Reviews
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2011

Chris Salter's Entangled is the most recent in what seems like a flood of monographs addressing some dimension of new media or technology in/and/as performance. In the period between 2005 and 2010 alone, Matthew Causey, Steve Dixon, Gabriella Giannachi, Christopher Baugh, Johannes Birringer, Susan Broadhurst, Susan Kozel, Sue-Ellen Case, and Rita Raley,Footnote 1 among many others, published single-author books in this growing interdisciplinary field, which abuts theater and dance studies, visual and performance arts, performance studies, digital humanities, and philosophy. Salter explains in his introduction that performance “is becoming one of the major paradigms of the twenty-first century, not only in the arts but also in the sciences” (xxi). As such, performance has already begun to shape the discourses of science and technology in terms of “embodiment, situatedness, presence, and materiality” (xxi). We can therefore expect more scholarly work in this area, as performance becomes the measure of technological efficacy and the use of media and technology in performance becomes more and more mainstream.

Salter is a multimedia artist and assistant professor of design and computation arts at Concordia University. Although he situates Entangled in proximity to the field of performance studies,Footnote 2 he differentiates his project from other authors in that and affiliated disciplines, avoiding arenas of inquiry such as online communities and video games that have become familiar components in analyses of digital performance (xxxiv). Because his is a technological history of performance rather than an explicitly “performative” analysis of technology, Salter narrows the scope of his project by defining performance conservatively, even as he opens up the term to a broad range of practices, including scenography, architecture, projected images, and robotics, in addition to the more traditional performing arts of theater, music, and dance: “Although the work here spans diverse areas […] the common thread that links such a polyphony of practices together is their physical, real-time situatedness involving collective co-present spectating, witnessing, and/or participation within the framework of a spatiotemporal event” (xxxiv). In this regard, Salter's work is not so different from the above-mentioned authors writing in the area of digital performance. What might set Salter's project apart is his desire to correct the “technical sloppiness” he finds in analyses of technology in performance (xxxvi). Unfortunately, Salter does not utilize his technical knowledge to advance new readings or interpretations. Indeed, he states from the outset that he is not interested in a hermeneutics of technology and that he focuses instead on “what [technology] does, how it does it, and what the repercussions are across the artistic practices that utilize it” (xxxv). In Salter's text, this Deleuzian maneuver reduces technology to its functionality—Salter speculates very little on what technology does to or for performance or to us as performers and spectators. He does, however, provide an astute historicization of technological performance in the long twentieth century, tracing a disciplinary genealogy in each chapter that includes both past (bordering on mythic) and contemporary artists, as well as failed attempts, unrealized projects, and forgotten technologies.

In laying out a horizontal history of technology in performance, proceeding chronologically through each of scenography, architecture, projection, etc., looping back in time to layer these histories atop one another with each successive chapter, Salter attends more to the artists of whom he speaks than the field of which he speaks. He subtly gestures toward ongoing debates in performance studies [i.e., “Does the performer gradually become dematerialized by the electronic fog of the increasingly realistic digital image […] or have the architectonics of the projected image sufficiently overwhelmed the human body so that the screen itself now becomes the new site and body of performance?” (164); “Was the screen simply a surface upon which to cast the results of infinitely complex processes that took place on a stage without actors […]?” (179)], but he refrains from entertaining the questions with which he prompts his readers.Footnote 3 In effect, Salter refuses to place his book in conversation with contemporary texts or to account for the many other authors who have tried to theoretically and philosophically reconcile what he suggests are always already entangled: “Human and technical beings and processes are so intimately bound up in a conglomeration of relations that it makes it difficult, if not impossible to tease out separate essences for each” (xxxii). Salter thus manages to dis-entangle himself from prominent arguments and scholars, which allows him to proceed without the theoretical-philosophical baggage other authors carry forward—not the least of which is the ontological opposition of the live and the mediated. It also means that Salter covers much of the same territory as the baggage-laden authors with whom he does not engage, rehearsing a familiar and at this point tiresome canon.

But because Salter's book is so far-reaching, even readers who consider themselves well versed in the area of technology and performance will come across historical figures with whom they are less familiar or projects (especially unrealized projects) of which they were unaware. Those who are not so familiar with this field will no doubt benefit from Salter's forays across arts practices in his articulation of a more holistic understanding of technology's role in performance. For most readers, Salter will surprise and delight as much as he disappoints—an inevitability given a survey that gives readers too little because it attempts so much.

This volume is most valuable for students of media and technology, for whom it seems to have been primarily written. These readers are introduced to the contributions of performance and its major artists, and to technological advancement, without getting embroiled in intradisciplinary arguments. For students of performance, who may well need to understand the scholarly debates of their field in addition to knowing its artists and practices, I recommend Steve Dixon's Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation as a more thorough and more disciplinary focused text. In contrast to Dixon's book, Salter's sometimes reads like an apologia for performance, foregrounding exemplary work and artists as a claim for inclusion in a media arts curriculum.Footnote 4

The space that Salter makes for himself on the periphery of performance and technology scholarship, accompanied by his central position in its practice, does allow for some perspectives that are especially useful for dance scholars. In particular, I find Salter's emphases on scenography and choreography—terms that recur throughout the text whether or not Salter is talking about set design or dance (and which therefore recall the usage of these terms by scholars of performance from Judith Butler to Susan Leigh FosterFootnote 5)—fruitful as twin concepts to think through technology's transformation of performance. While other scholars of media and technology have turned to technogenesis (the co-evolution of humans and technologies)Footnote 6 or the performativity of mediaFootnote 7 to found their own arguments of corporeal-technological or liveness-mediation hybrids, Salter offers scenography and choreography (in addition to the dramatic and sonic) as registers through which these entanglements make themselves known. Salter does not call attention to these notable terminological companions, which establish properties of performances, bodies, and technologies independent of lofty and untenable ontological claims. In a move that links him most strongly with the intellectual tradition of performance studies, Salter allows these performance-derived terms to inflect encounters that are not confined to the stage, solidifying their possibility as defining frames for multi- and interdisciplinary analyses of technology. By using such terms in his technological narrative of performance history, Salter allows performance to shed light on technology and to refract into other discourses in a way that remains relevant to scholars of dance, theater, music, and performance.

Footnotes

1. See the Works Cited for the relevant texts. Though I confine myself to just a few books published since 2005, Philip Auslander's earlier but very influential book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, published in 1999, deserves special mention.

2. Salter outlines his relationship to performance studies in the Introduction, and the book includes chapters on the performativity of architecture and of screens, but the publisher has designated art/new media as the field in which the book sits. The author does not make explicit for which audience(s) he intends this book.

3. Salter breaks character at the end of chapter 6 to suggest that “this feigned, supposedly modern tension between the humanistic body and the dehumanized machine that has so occupied us may be, in reality, a fiction—a fabulous construction drawing a false line between poles that are always in the process of being blurred” (276; original emphasis). Though he characterizes the tension as “feigned” and “fabulous,” Salter offers no account for how we allowed ourselves to fall prey to a false opposition, nor does he fully commit to his own attempt to undermine that binary, which he says “may be a fiction” (276; emphasis added). Salter remains silent on what the consequences are for this fiction or its unmasking.

4. This does not mean that Salter refrains from the occasional criticism of performance, particularly dance-technology: Justifications for “temporal hiccups and burps in the network” that characterized dance-tech “appeared thin at best, covering up what was more likely to be substandard choreography dressed with technological sheen” (275). Although I do not disagree with Salter's suggestion that choreographic weakness may be an issue in dance technology, I do wonder why dance is singled out for critique in Salter's chapter “Bodies,” which evidences a significant change in authorial voice from the rest of the text.

5. In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” Judith Butler describes her project as “a consideration of the scenography and topography of [cultural] construction.” A “scenography,” she continues, “orchestrated by and as a matrix of power […]” (Reference Butler1993, 28). In response to Butler's theory of gender as performative, that is, as a cumulative effect of reiterated norms that fabricate an appearance of stable gendered identities and differences, Susan Leigh Foster (Reference Foster1998) posits choreography as a more accurate metaphor for gender construction in her essay “Choreographies of Gender.” Foster claims that in contradistinction to performance, which emphasizes unique iterations, choreography “presents a structuring of deep and enduring cultural values” that also “encompasses corporeal as well as verbal articulateness” (1998, 5).

6. Bernard Stiegler and Mark Hansen are among the authors promoting technogenesis as a framework for rethinking the body-technology binary, which N. Katherine Hayles has also recently taken up in her forthcoming work How We Think: Transforming Power and Digital Technologies (2011). See also Hayles's entry on “Cybernetics” in Critical Terms for Media Studies (2010).

7. See, for example, Philip Auslander's “The Performativity of Performance Documentation” (Reference Auslander2006).

References

Works Cited

Auslander, Philip. 2006. “The Performativity of Performance Documentation.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28(3): 110.Google Scholar
Auslander, Philip. 2008. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baugh, Christopher. 2005. Theatre Performance and Technology: The Development of Scenography in the Twentieth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Birringer, Johannes. 2008. Performance, Technology and Science. New York: PAJ Publications.Google Scholar
Broadhurst, Susan. 2007. Digital Practices: Aesthetic and Neuroaesthetic Approaches to Technology and Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Case, Sue-Ellen. 2006. Performing Science and the Virtual. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Causey, Matthew. 2009. Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Simulation to Embeddedness. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Dixon, Steve. 2007. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. Annotated edition. Cambridge: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foster, Susan Leigh. 1998. “Choreographies of Gender.” Signs 24(1) (August): 133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giannachi, Gabriella. 2004. Virtual Theatres: An Introduction. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayles, N. Katherine. 2010. “Cybernetics.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by Mitchell, W. J. T. and Hansen, Mark B. N., 145156. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
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Kozel, Susan. 2008. Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. Illustrated edition. Cambridge: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raley, Rita. 2009. Tactical Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar