Chris Salter
The place
La Bourse - Rops
Language
English
Hours and dates
- Oct 27 from 16:10 to 16:50
Chris Salter is Professor for Immersive Arts and Director of the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). He is also Professor Emeritus, Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal and former Co-Director of the Hexagram network for research-creation in arts, cultures and technology and Co-Founder of the Milieux Institute at Concordia. He studied philosophy and economics and completed his PhD in theatre studies with research in computer music Stanford University.
His artistic work has been seen all over the world at such venues as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Barbican Centre, Berliner Festspiele, Wiener Festwochen, ZKM, Kunstfest Weimar, Musée d’art Contemporain, Muffathalle, MUTEK, EXIT Festival and Place des Arts-Montreal, among many others. He is the author of Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance ( 2010), Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (2015) and Sensing Machines (2022), all from MIT Press.
The art, science and politics of immersion
In 1968, the Polish born curator Jascia Reichardt opened a landmark exhibition at the ICA in London entitled Cybernetic Serendipty in which all manner of sensor-augmented devices, objects and sculptures stood ready to usher art into a new technological age. Remarkably, while ever more complex sensors, algorithms and devices have steadily increased in the 54 years since Reichardt’s show, essentially the same goal has remained : using artificial sensing as an integral part of an artwork in order for the work to “make sense” about its “world” and respond to it. Yet, our human senses are needed to drive and feed ever-new immersive experiences by being increasingly “coupled” or linked to a simulated world, generated through machines.
This talk will careen through TeamLab’s immersive environments installed in the landfill islands of Tokyo, through the visions of artists in the 1960s to create new kinds of “reactive environments” and our now just emerging “metaverse” age of Extended Reality in order to give a critical historical and socio-technical picture of our present and future visions of art in the age of immersion.