Alien Agency : Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making [1 ed.] 9780262323598, 9780262028462

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Alien Agency

Alien Agency Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making

Chris Salter Afterword by Andrew Pickering

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected]. This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited, Hong Kong. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Salter, Chris, 1967– Alien agency : experimental encounters with art in the making / Chris Salter ; afterword by Andrew Pickering. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-02846-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Artificial life. 2. Experience. 3. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) 4. Technology—Philosophy. 5. Tissue culture—Philosophy. 6. Senses and sensation. I. Title. BD418.8.S25 2015 303.48'33—dc23 2014021817 10

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For my mother, Alice Salter (1929–2012)

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. —Bertolt Brecht

Contents

Acknowledgments Preface xi Introduction 1 I

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Resonances 19 1 Hearing Perspectives 21 2 From Agency to Practice 40 3 Green Belts in Goethe’s City 41 4 Stories Told of Sonic Reals 50 5 Four Ears, or Listening as Making 6 Can Architecture Hear? 62 7 Hearing View 65 8 Affects and Atmospheres 80 9 Tuning 83

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II Cellular Vitality 85 1 A Living Machine? 88 2 Suspicions of a Wet Kind 92 3 Experiments in a Lab at the End of the World 94 4 The Tissue Culture Point of View—Part I 107 5 Techniques for Immortality 113 6 The Tissue Culture Point of View—Part II 116 7 Surface Tensions 119 8 The Tissue Culture Point of View—Part III 121 9 A Tutorial on Muscle Cell Energetics 124 10 Where the Art Is . . . 126 11 The Tacit Knowing of Tissue 127 12 A Revealing School Seminar 136 13 Goals and Purposes 138

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14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Tissue Culture Hands On 141 Life’s Triumph in the Dish 150 Eight Failed Experiments in Substrate Sketching Reflections on Bare Life at the Bench 155 Collagen Trials While the Clock Ticks 157 Suspension 162 Is Life in Bodies? 163

III Sensorium 167 1 Limens 169 2 Mediations of Sensation 170 3 Three Tensions 176 4 Four Seminars in Sensory Experience 178 5 Translation and Enactment 188 6 Atmospheres Unveiled 190 7 Technologies of the Senses 193 8 Seeding Alter 195 9 How to Invoke the Cosmos 201 10 Experience Near-Far 210 11 The Missing Sense 211 12 The Conditions of Sensory Assemblage 214 13 Displace 225 14 “Death, Limbo, and then Heaven down the Hall” 15 Is Sense in Culture? 235 Conclusion: Is the World a Laboratory? Afterword by Andrew Pickering Notes 247 References 273 Index 297

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Acknowledgments

I thank all of my friends, colleagues, informers, collaborators, epistemic partners, partners in crime, editors, anonymous reviewers, and others without whom this book would never have seen the light of day: Alex Adrianssens, Marie-Luise Angerer, Sam Auinger, Marije Baalman, Adam Bencard, Jennifer Biddle, Elio Bidinost, Georgina Born, Brett Bergmann, Inge and Wulf Burger, Susan Buckley, Peter Cariani, Kathleen Caruso, Oron Catts, Chris Cobilis, Shannon Collis, Evelina Domnitch, Natalie Doonan, Michael M. J. Fischer, Dmitry Gelfand, Miranda Grounds, Orit Halpern, Jens Hauser, Stewart Hodgetts, David Howes, Lynn Hughes, Jhave Johnston, Katie Jung, Tom LaMarre, Tim Lenoir, Fernando Leppe, Takuro Mizuta Lippit, Werner Lorke, Florencia Marchetti, George Marcus, Maurizio Martenucci (TeZ), Brian Massumi, Jaclyn Meloche, Jake Moore, Sally Jane Norman, Bruce Odland, Sean Pepper, Andy Pickering, Sarah Pupo, Melinda Rankin, Joel Ryan, Remco Schuurbiers, Doug Sery, Harry Smoak, Henning Schmidgen, Thomas Söderqvist, Elizabeth Stephens, Jonathan Sterne, David Szanto, Alain Thibault, Robert Townes, Matthieu Tremblay, Gisele Trudel, Michel van Dartel, Haidee Wasson, Louise Whitely, Olof van Winden, Tobias Ziegler, and Ionat Zurr. Most of all, thanks to Anke for keeping me sane and lively. This book was made possible by grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Société et culture (FRQSC).

Preface

This book tells three stories of art in the making. It describes works that propose a radically different vision of the world—dynamic, temporally emergent, contingent, and performative. Two intertwined questions drive these stories. One is theoretical: How are humans and media coproduced in the act of making things? To answer this, I provide an account of how materials like sound, biological stuff, and sensory inputs such as touch, taste, and light used in technoscientifically driven art practice act beyond human intent. The second question is methodological: How does one write an account of practice with such materials? I’ve aimed to provide a template for depicting research-based artistic practices in the making that could be useful for others grappling with similar issues. This account manifests what Bruno Latour described as science in the making over ready-made science. Along the way, I derail anthropocentric worldviews while wrestling with the agency of media and technologies through the sweat of making things. In other words, this is a story from the trenches: the studio, the laboratory, the black box, and the street. Each of the three parts of Alien Agency asks a specific question: How do you record the unrecordable experience of sense and affect in the sounds of urban-breathing—the acoustic “life of the city” (part I)? How do you grow and keep alive muscle cells that move and can move by themselves outside of a body (part II)? How do you generate environments of light, vibration, sound, smell, and taste molecules in which it is possible to experience other cultural “ways of sensing” (part III)? But there is a much larger looming question with higher stakes that links the three stories together. How is it that artists and researcher-creators organize the conditions for experimental, performative assemblages to form and catalyze other ways of knowing and being in the world—assemblages that sidestep the tired dichotomies between subjects and objects, human and nonhuman, mind and body, knowing and experiencing? In other words, I will argue that the artist-researchers you will encounter in these pages are making a substantially different claim than other disciplines that are also interested in the vibrant materiality of the world beyond the human. These acts of

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making are not just another discursive contributor to ongoing debates about the vitality of a more than human world. They actually enact and perform the worlds they imagine. I am not an innocent bystander in these stories. I am an artist who has trained in economics, philosophy, theater, and computer-generated sound, but for this project I had to become something of an anthropologist. In the course of doing fieldwork over three years in laboratories, studios, and the streets of cities with artist-researchers, it quickly became apparent that a “participant-observer” approach, as is common in traditional ethnography, would not serve the practices I was studying. Because my “subjects” were so keen to involve my artistic abilities in their work, the anthropological distance between observing and participating quickly shrunk. This was “observant participation,” or “carnal sociology,” as Loïc Wacquant calls it. The book you hold is thus transversal, ricocheting between theory, diary, history, ethnography, and autobiography. In this sense, it participates in the tradition of dozens of artists, filmmakers, architects, writers, and other creators who have theorized and interrogated their own practices: Trinh T. Minh-ha, bell hooks, Bertolt Brecht, Gerhard Richter, Maya Deren, Paul Sharits, Bill Viola, Trevor Paglen, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and Stan Brakhage, to name only a few across many disciplines. My contribution to this lineage is to direct focus onto the material agencies that make the processes and products of artistic work possible and to wrestle with the experiential effects and affects these agencies hold for makers and publics. The question of material agency—what the world does rather than is—is my starting point. This debate, of course, is rooted in discoveries made almost thirty years ago in Science, Technology, and Society or science and technology studies (STS) and in the history, anthropology, and philosophy of science, that knowing the world and manipulating it are intimately entangled within social-technical-material conditions. This question of human-material entanglement now cuts across many disciplines: anthropology, STS, critical posthumanism in cultural studies, sociology, archeology, history, design, and art; it gains traction as we increasingly confront the limits of the anthropos. Although Alien Agency offers a study of a contemporary mode of experimental research-creation-based art production that is akin to the anthropology of scientific research and, in particular, the pioneering work centered on microstudies of laboratory practice, I want to explore the experiential and affective elements integral to artistic practice that also ask similar questions to those science asks: How do new things and experiences emerge into the world, and what do they do? As has long been acknowledged, the affective and experiential constitute an important part of experimental life, one that takes places not only in the laboratory but also in the studio or the streets of a city. What happens to the experimenter in the presence of some new phenomenon never before seen or imagined? How does it feel in your gut, bones, and body at the brink of a discovery? How do techniques and instruments enable behavior and performances of stuff? What is the experience of fumbling in the

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dark and failing to achieve what has been imagined? How do the intensity and behavior of processes that emerge both because of us and, simultaneously, autonomously function? How does the immense richness of human imagination and experience intertwine with the dazzling material effects and performances of the world beyond us? Now to method. To capture the affective and experiential practices that unfold in the three stories, to articulate the processes of making works that are performative, stir up unstable processes, and assemble sensations and affects that we encounter (and that encounter us) demands a way of writing that embodies those practices. The methods I use are plundered from a range of techniques: experimental ethnography, fictocriticism, insider and/or autoethnography, or what anthropologist Barbara Tedlock calls “narrative ethnography”—how the ethnographer’s (my) own experience combines with “ethnographic data, epistemological reflections on fieldwork participation, and cultural analysis.” These techniques follow from anthropologists, sociologists, feminist scholars, and others who are as deeply engaged with how they write as with what they write. As an artist, researcher, and scholar who makes things and exhibits them internationally, writes, teaches, and co-directs Hexagram, a major research center and network dedicated to research-creation in media art, design, technology and digital culture, most of my days are spent moving between different contexts, making links inside and outside the academy between people in very different fields who should know what the others are doing. Because this work crosses many different territories, I take a similar strategy in this book and organize it into two sections: an introduction that lays the necessary interdisciplinary, intellectual groundwork and then the three experimental empirical and ethnographic stories. I hope these stories delight, puzzle, attack your sensibilities, make you dizzy, and give you pleasure as you explore worlds that move from the sonic resonances of cities to the science fiction interior of a biology lab growing tissues to the complex process of researching-creating a performative installation influenced by anthropological accounts of sensorial otherness that turns our supposed five senses inside out. Alien agencies indeed. Montreal, Berlin, Perth, Sydney, Wilmington, Lombok, Amsterdam, 2010–2013

Introduction

I My eyes scan the skyline. The gleaming glass towers in the distance scrape the sky, while the river flows endlessly below, seemingly upward toward the horizon. A mysterious, far-off sound materializes. A timbre I strain to pick up. As I continue my steps on this hunk of concrete and iron, this bridge that spans the river, the drone grows in quiescent intensity. I struggle to describe it—a hypnotic, continuous sonance replete with microtextures and microtones: soaring, booming, wailing, jangling clamor, but all still somehow in the distance. The drone is omnipresent, acoustically omniscient, but other sounds come into the foreground. The drone is other, but it seems to couple with and amplify the city on the horizon. Sirens, aircraft, vehicles, voices are held in its sonic clutches. I realize I’ve been tricked. The city is not just a static image. What I see is not what I hear. The city actually sounds (figure I.1). II We stare dumbfounded into the refrigerator-like box before us. Its contents unveil a scenography worthy of Grand Guignol: laboratory glassware filled with blood-red liquids, a peristaltic pump, circuits of plastic tubing, a gleaming, perforated metal floor. A spherically shaped glass container with a red stopper and a thin white cable lie in the center of the box. I try and make out what appears to be a tiny mass inside. A perplexing thing that blurs the border between a flat, 2D surface and a 3D form, its exterior a gelatinous, wet, and bulbous bulk, as if a thin, mutant fungus had grown over the cut-out shape. Appearance defies being. A minute but continuous series of drops of the reddish fluid fall from the top of the glass sphere’s interior. The rhythm is almost mechanical—a kind of Chinese water torture descending upon the tiny thing held inside. The liquid saturates the mass, collecting in the villi-like texture that constitutes its shape. The

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Figure I.1 Frankfurt cityscape. October 2011. Photo by Anke Burger.

visitors lean further in, glancing, gazing to see if this thing could almost be breathing, moving, alive (figure I.2). III The pulsing slowly begins somewhere in the room, but its source is erased by the haze. The flickering is, at first, gradual. I look into the void. The bodies around me become blasting white shapes, no longer corporeal forms but outlines, and then, just as suddenly, flashing, brilliant patterns. Kaleidoscopic images constituted of squiggles, whorls, crossing lines, stars. The flickering increases. Different frequencies pulsing, cutting out, canceling, interfering with each other. More stars, spinning lines, pulsating forms. Then, sudden swells of color: blue, red, green, yellow, white, all white. My body is overwhelmed. The refresh rate of my eyes interferes with the flicker in the room. Pulse races, eyes shut, but the fluctuating light remains. I no longer know it. I no longer know what it’s doing. What instruments produce these phantasms? Is it in my eyes, my brain, or the world I’m thrown into? What does the room do to me as it recedes into memory, losing all dimensions? Do I doubt my visions? Is there really

Introduction

Figure I.2 Inside the incubator, SymbioticA. April 2012. Photo by Chris Salter.

Figure I.3 Displace, TodaysArt 2012. September 2012. Photo by Anke Burger.

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nothing there? No object, no subject? Just a single field of vibrating, palpitating, fluctuating nothingness (figure I.3). I think I know the world. What I’m working with. That computer, that sensor, that clump of cells, that strobe light. But this could be an illusion. Once we begin to shape and manipulate these things, this stuff, watching it perform becomes unknown, surprising, alien. The alien is strange, unlike one’s own, distanced, outside of us. It is that which not only descends from extraterrestrial skies but also moves out of our control, defying logic, rationality, reason. It behaves as it will. When we encounter the world’s vivacity, does it really care about us? Three artistic works. Three experiences. Three kinds of matter and its actions: the vibrations and frequencies produced by the organism of the city that shift our listening; the micromovements of cells kept alive by the technical milieu of a glass flask and a peristaltic pump that leave us unsettled; the pulsing and flickering of LEDs that produce hallucinations in those who gaze upon them.1 This book is a story of how these encounters, these artistic works, come to be. It describes three projects in the making based on empirical fieldwork I conducted within specific studio-laboratory settings between 2010 and 2013.2 Each of the three studies is organized around a central set of materials and material practices: (1) sound, (2) tissue cultured cells, and (3) sensorial matter, such as light, vibration, and chemical, mechanical, or electrical stimuli that we render as taste, smell, touch, temperature, and other forms. The three encounters are linked in another way. They describe experiences constituted by artist-researchers wrestling with the dynamics and flows, the “agencies” and processes of a technically saturated world that is always at a threshold—one just beyond us, more than human. “Matter-forces” rather than matter-form, write Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, a partially created world of artifice in constant flux and transformation.3 But something strange seems to be happening here. How is it possible that 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?4 Experiences that words struggle to render . . . This question doesn’t come out of nowhere. It is situated in a larger, almost seismic shift that is taking place across many disciplines, practices, and sites: the university and the museum, the festival, the scientific laboratory, and the street. The question is being asked by anthropologists, human geographers, science-studies scholars and historians, ecologists, politicians, artists, and designers, to name a few. It frames a valiant and seemingly radical project: to throw off the yoke of a purely human-centric, “human-exceptionalist” worldview and turn toward the actions and behaviors of “nonhuman” objects, things, processes, and forces.5 “Vibrancy,” “agency,” “material vitalism,” and the “matter-flows” of nonhuman bodies and things is the new lingua franca that replaces such worn out words as “discourse,” “textuality,” “language,” and “meaning.” In this new world, scallops and data,

Introduction

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electrical power grids and microbial dust, and the weather and machines have become our objects of analysis and production. We are busy unearthing and peering into their hidden powers and forces, anxious to bestow on them responsibility and agency. No longer inert, the stuff of the world behaves and performs beyond us. A rapid-fire tour of the scholarly landscape presents the evidence. Philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour asks who will speak for these nonhuman “actants.” Feminist scholar Karen Barad argues for the “posthuman performativity” of matter. Sociologist of science Andrew Pickering speaks of “ontological theater” and “performative ontologies.” Political scientist Jane Bennett describes a “vital materiality” and “the force of things.”6 Anthropologists, who we foolishly assumed were mainly interested in humandriven culture, now speak of “multispecies ethnographies” focused on “living water,” fungi, and bacteria. Even the natural sciences have gotten into the act. In 2008, Nature dedicated a whole issue to the microbiome: “‘Who are we?’ The ‘we’ refers to the wild profusion of bacteria, fungi and viruses that colonize the human body. These unseen passengers number in the trillions.”7 Human indeed. But my scholarly colleagues are not the only ones caught up in this postanthropocentric frenzy. The art world has also jumped in. Exhibitions and festivals increasingly challenge the ecological, biological, and sensorial borders between humans and other entities. Audiences now encounter tissue cultured living sculptures; the fluid dynamics of ferrofluids, light particles, or hydrogenated bubbles; lasers animating emissions from power plants; “grown” furniture made of fungi and quivering architectures of gelatin; the behavior of cymatic phenomena; machines that digest food and produce feces; and theatrical performances consisting of moving lights or stroboscopically lit fog with nary a human body at the center of attention.8 I describe these strange, alien-sounding artworks for a reason—one that marks the crux of this book. Thinking issues of materiality, agency, and vibrancy through words is important, but we also need to be thrown into a lived, bodily, experiential encounter with the material torrent of the world. Such an encounter is the very stuff of artistic practice. What then would it mean to rethink these high-stakes questions about agency, materiality, and stuff from the point of view of making things? From the position of what we term research-creation practice, in which the split between mind-body, epistemology-ontology, human-nonhuman are blurred, messed up, and mixed together?9 The central questions of this book follow from this research-creation perspective. How do artist-researchers develop strategies, dramaturgies, and conditions for the assemblage and choreography of experience and affects between the human and other in order to generate “fields of possible ‘far off balances’ of everyday life” (Félix Guattari)?10 What is it that artists do with pliable, responsive matter in those secluded studio-laboratories-black boxes and public sites? How do they manipulate materials (and how do materials manipulate them)? What significance does working with and

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understanding matter as lively and performative hold for artistic practice, for makers and publics? “Practice” here is the operative word. It will continually act as the litmus test to investigate whether ontological conceptions of material agency and the vitality of the material world hold up in the workaday life, “shoptalk” and “technical work” of the bench, the studio, the lab.11 If so, can we then create productive bridges among some of the most interesting current work in science and technology studies, anthropology, performance studies, and technoscientifically inflected art practice, from which we identify broadly shared concerns with performance, agency, and materiality as unifying threads, despite different cultures of knowledge? Although the three stories that unfold here are different, they have one thing in common: They are all deeply embroiled and enabled through technoscience. The Belgian philosopher Gilbert Hottois coined the word “technoscience” in the late 1970s to describe scientific practices that are directly intertwined in a technological setting and that are technologically driven: “Contemporary scientific research in which technology (the technological space and time surrounding us everywhere) is the ‘natural milieu’ of development as well as the prime mover.”12 Technology in scientific practice is thus seen as both a medium (milieu) and a driving force in its development. My approach to technology here avoids the antitechnical bias that embodies “the false alternative of anthropocentrism and technocentrism” (Bernard Stiegler)—a reduction to the dichotomy between the human versus the technical.13 In fact, the framework of technoscience radically influences the ways in which contemporary artist-researchers working with biotechnical, computational, and dynamic-responsive materials actually conceive and make things. In contrast to other artistic genres that also explore the plasticity and transformability of materials, biotechnical, computational, and responsive techniques and methods perform and make a different world. They wholeheartedly blur and hybridize distinctions between organic and nonorganic, living and nonliving, and generate complex amalgams of technical-social-cultural-material-semiotic actions and objects (Donna Haraway)—distinctions that constitute the content, context, and reception of artistic work within technical culture and, simultaneously, enable it, make it possible to actually take place. Have technoscience and technoculture then increased the urgency of understanding a world beyond the human—the “gestures towards the strange ability of ordinary, manmade items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience” (Jane Bennett)?14 How We Became Nonhuman A necessary detour arises. I pause the flow of the narrative to briefly provide some historical and intellectual background to our journey. It seems that in this new life of

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things being sketched out, objects and stuff become performative and possess agency and powers; that is, they become operative and, one might say, autonomous beyond the initial conditions in which they were deployed—as actors in a complex ecology of intertwined relations.15 Of course this idea of the agency of the nonhuman world isn’t particularly new.16 It comes from a range of different intellectual and philosophical contexts and traditions,17 many of which have been conflated into the contemporary term “new materialism.”18 As Timothy Lenoir has asserted, however, contemporary interest in the agency of things and stuff stems from long-standing arguments in the philosophy of science over how we understand the nature of reality itself.19 Is physical reality simply given in nature and scientists just “discover” it (naïve realism), or is it socially influenced and constructed through practices, conceptual paradigms, ideological positions, institutional schemes, and so on, shaped by what the Polish immunologist Ludwik Fleck termed “thought communities”?20 In particular, this leveling of human-thing relationships reaches its apex in the work of the so-called Mines school (the triumvirate of Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and the English sociologist John Law), resulting in the development of what Callon termed “the sociology of translation” but more popularly has become known as actor–network theory (ANT).21 One key origin to which we can trace the obsessive leveling of human and nonhuman is the appearance of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s pioneering Laboratory Life, a 1975 ethnographic study of Roger Guillemin’s neuroendocrinology laboratory at the Salk Institute, University of California, San Diego. Within their “monograph of ethnographic investigation of one specific group of scientists,” Latour and Woolgar sought to demonstrate the shift that had occurred in the understanding of science as a theoretical discipline to one in which material practice could constitute the central domain of scientific knowing.22 Latour’s now legendary conclusion to his field work was a view that science is less a project of pregiven representations that can be conveniently packaged into what we call knowledge and more an entire system of apparatuses (machines, instruments, and infrastructures) that are partially responsible for facilitating human scientists’ production of knowledge and facts. Science as an activity “is not about nature” but rather a “fierce fight to construct reality. The laboratory is the workplace and the set of productive forces, which makes construction possible.”23 Starting in the mid-1980s and principally due to Latour’s diligence, one branch of science and technology studies began to pioneer work focused on the actual material acts and practices of science—that is, what it is that scientists actually do rather than the great historical narratives of genius men inventing scientific theories that would bear their names for eternity.24 Although this differed from another “practicebased turn,” the practice movement in anthropology, STS’s focus on scientific practice did share some similar characteristics, such as the emphasis on action within

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larger sociotechnical systems that both enabled and constrained knowledge-making activities.25 What caused STS to part ways with the anthropological notion of practice, however, was its growing interest in the manner in which action could be shared between human scientists and machines, apparatuses, and instruments. Such devices not only enabled experimental procedures to take place but, as the French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard articulated, were partially responsible for bringing scientific phenomena into being. With the impact of Latour and Woolgar’s work through their emphasis on material practice as key to a new “anthropology of science,” it came as no surprise that the laboratory itself soon became an object of intense inquiry among philosophers, sociologists, ethnographers, anthropologists, and even trained scientists. In the 1970s and 1980s, microstudies of laboratories proliferated from, among others, Latour and Woolgar, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Michael Lynch, Sharon Traweek, Andrew Pickering, Joan Fujimura, and Peter Galison, particularly focusing on the shift from scientific knowledge to science as a cultural practice.26 If these studies of scientific practice began to embrace what physicist Peter Galison termed “the material culture of the laboratory,” the manner in which “the machines of physics . . . lowly instruments . . . laboratory machines can command our attention if they are understood as dense with meaning, not only laden with their direct functions, but also embodying strategies of demonstration, work relationships in the laboratory and material and symbolic connections,” it then seemed inevitable that other things besides human scientists would get ushered into the STS discourse.27 In the shift of focus to action and material conditions in science, not only notions of the nonhuman entered the scientific laboratory but also accounts of their performances. Here is where STS moves beyond the earlier performative turns that took place in anthropology and sociology in the 1970s and cultural studies in the 1990s.28 In what Andrew Pickering later labeled the “performative idiom” of scientific practice, the concept of performance is one that departs from the idea that science produces representational forms of knowledge that appear as correspondences or mirrors to reality; it instead seeks to grapple with other kinds of nonhuman material agencies that produce those realities. According to Pickering: “Matter has agency too, precisely in the sense that its actions can also make a difference—in respect of human scientists, for example (or all of us in our daily lives). Here I am referring to such actions that make a difference as performances—performances are what agents do, whether human or nonhuman. My conviction is that we need to move to a performative (rather than representational) idiom for studying and reflecting on science (and on being in general).”29 Ironically, the word performance appears to have quickly trumped the word action; it is continually used in STS in three distinct but complementary ways.30 First, the

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concept describes the actions of human scientists in their experimental work within the confines of the laboratory. Scientists “perform” experiments—that is, they directly manipulate and transform materials through instruments and apparatuses in real time, like critical props in a stage drama. Second, at the heart of performance within the scientific domain lie the material acts and assemblages that circulate among scientists and their instruments, procedures, and machines in order to bring about and shape scientific truth. This is exemplified in the statement at the conclusion of Laboratory Life that science not only expresses truths about existing things (“informing”) but also performs by way of material actions that bring into being or change the object being investigated.31 Sociologist Michel Callon also picks up this coproduction thread when he states that scientific theories are performative in that they construct reality, as opposed to merely describing it. In shifting to the discipline of economics, for example, Callon describes the “dismal science” as performative; its supposedly “objective,” descriptive statements and models bring about specific world changes.32 But he expands the notion of “statements” (enunciations) beyond linguistically centered performatives (such as self-fulfilling prophecies or prescriptive statements) and toward what he names sociotechnical agencements. Using a term pilfered from Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of agencement implies both agency (which we will have much more to say about soon) and arrangement, the ordering or placement of heterogeneous things in a mesh of relations.33 The idea that heterogeneous assemblages such as equations, silicon, and other material forces that compose social-technical agencements equally participate in the process of performation that Callon describes brings me to the third—and, perhaps, most radical—use of performance (at least for our purposes in this book) in STS contexts: the attribution of performative acts to materials, things, substances, and processes. If only by way of its interest in how scientists construct the real, STS has uncannily close relations to other theories of thoroughly human-centric performance—for example, Judith Butler’s notion of performativity as an iterative, temporal process that produces the very effects that it names. But such theories of performance quickly depart from performance theory’s chief focus on the human at the center of the stage.34 Nonhumans can participate in performative acts as completely as humans can. Through their performances, as Pickering notes, the weather, fires, the early bubble chambers of particle physics, the garage-made homeostats and robotic tortoises of British cyberneticians such as W. Ross Ashby and W. Grey Walter, respectively, and other kinds of machines, act on and alter the material world.35 It appears that putting humans and nonhumans on the same ontological footing would demonstrate the deep interest in the actions of a world that is lively, forever in transformation and flux. Indeed, “there is no thinkable social life,” as Latour and Callon pointedly state, “without the participation—in all the meanings of the word—of nonhumans, and especially machines and artifacts.”36

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The nonhumans finally take command. Science and knowledge is also about material stuff and how it transmits power and affects to the world.37 “Actor networks” extend beyond living entities found in nature (such as Callon’s scallops or bacteria in Latour’s account of Louis Pasteur) and into the realm of everyday objects (such as doors and concrete speed bumps nicknamed “sleeping policemen” in French). More importantly such networks encompass technological artifacts like computers, transport systems, computer software, inscription devices in laboratories, and multiple other culturally construed technical objects that one would be hard-pressed to attribute “life” to but that are nevertheless “enrolled” as key actants in the symmetrical universe that ANT spins out.38 Indeed, as Latour and Callon argue, the development of a whole battery of strange terms such as actant, actor-network, translation, enrollment, and others is designed exactly to sidestep the tendency to fall into the human-centered authority granted by language in words such as “actor,” “social relations,” “interaction,” “discovery,” etc.39 Accounts of the Unruly The detour is over. Back to art, affect, and experience. The histories, theories, and arguments outlined to this point are necessary background for grasping some of the core characteristics in the current materialist shift taking place in socio-political-technicalecological practices: the breaking of the binaries between life-matter and nature-culture; the acknowledgment of the forces inherent in objects and processes; decentering or eliminating human exceptionalist ontologies; and, ultimately, developing a political framework that collapses the “great divide” between nature and society by taking into consideration what Latour has called “the parliament of things.”40 But these theories still tell us little about what the repercussions due to such an ontological leveling between human and nonhuman on and in practice could be; and if these repercussions arise, how are they played out and staged, and what affects do they produce? Before going further, I need to make a qualification. Despite my strong focus on material action, I do not want to conveniently defer all rights onto the nonhuman in order to shirk from human responsibility. Here, I follow the anthropologist Michael M. J. Fischer when he states: Although the “individual as ethical agent . . . is now configured within technoscientific systems, assemblages and ecologies that complicate, implicate, embed, co-opt and leverage the individual and although I value the urgings of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway to consider nonhuman agents and cyborgian machine-human hybrids so as to not blinker us with archaic anthropocentric perspectives and to focus on the assemblages and systems that embed and transform human agency, I am unwilling to give up individual ethical agency and struggle, even when such agency needs to be thought of in new ways.41

Introduction

11

In other words, it is critical that there be an ethical resonance established between human perceivers and non.42 This connection, at times, will appear symmetrical, and, at other times, it will not, just like the similar oscillation between reflecting and material production. The fact that Alien Agency is empirically based work might, at first, sound strange. What kind of empirical techniques can one use to study such a complex practice as art making, which is usually understood to be highly human-centric, subjective, driven by individual genius, and defiant of any systematic methods? How can we do empirical, observational work in partnership with nonhuman things that, despite Latour’s plea, don’t really talk or speak? Of course, since the early twentieth century, anthropology has long used such methods of fieldwork-based observation, reflection, and analysis to deal with the entangling between human experience and other, more-than-human powers and entities, such as magic, enchanted objects, phantasms, rituals, and deities.43 The discussions of material powers shot through things, objects and forces that seem to be the territory of the new materialist turn, have in fact always lurked in the shadows of anthropological accounts. The seemingly irresolvable tension between firsthand experience of the culturally stamped entangling of humans, things, and forces and the writing up of that experience constitutes, as James Clifford argued in the writing culture debates of the 1990s, the very substance of anthropological writing. In his path-breaking Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco published in 1977, for example, the American anthropologist Paul Rabinow began a trend (later occupied by a number of anthropological works) to move anthropological inquiry away from the interpretive reading of culture as a text (Clifford Geertz) and toward what later would be known as the reflexive turn—the positioning of the anthropologist within the situation s/he was studying.44 It goes without saying that the objective-observer stance in relationship to ethnographic writing has had its fair share of criticism.45 Ever since Malinowski developed the concept of participant-observation with his trips to the Western Pacific, emphasizing an oscillation between being embedded in a culture and, at the same time, having a scientific view on that culture, the idea of an objective observer at a distance has been subject to vehement critique.46 Ethnographic writing is an altogether “messy” and “qualitative” enterprise that has always had to grapple with transforming “unruly experience” into “an authoritative written account” (James Clifford).47 Moreover, the very notion of “participant” already implies that objective analysis from a distanced “view from nowhere” is highly problematic; the only way one can truly experience and then conduct anthropology is through a corporeally engaged experience with the subject-object of knowing. In this way, participant observation moves to what Loïc Wacquant (following Pierre Bourdieu) calls “observant participation.”48

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Introduction

I claim that Alien Agency is partly ethnographic in that it subscribes to the definition of ethnography given by anthropologists George Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer: “An empirical process involving close observation, recording and engaging with the daily life of (another) culture through fieldwork which results in a written account of that culture in descriptive detail.”49 The ethnographic work in Alien Agency takes as its departure point the long history of experimental ethnographic traditions in anthropology as well as in sociology but also veers from the anthropological and, even more specifically, accounts of material practice in STS’s ethnographic studies of laboratories and scientific practice in several very specific ways.50 First, Alien Agency’s ethnographic approach could qualify under what Marcus describes as “multisited,” not only in that the fieldwork takes place among different sites and is comparative, but because of the following: Multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions and juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography . . . the object of study may itself not been known before but emerges based on the links and associations assembled.51

The work that unfolds across these pages involves numerous actors (human and non), producers and receivers, artists and institutional frameworks, machines and forces all bundled together by the sociotechnical-aesthetic prerogatives and constraints of the contexts themselves. Moreover, it involves tracing things as they circulate through these different contexts, media, locations, sites of activities, and the experiential situation of the participants. In fact, as Marcus claims, “In conducting multi-sited research, one finds oneself with all sorts of cross cutting and contradictory personal commitments. These conflicts are resolved, perhaps ambivalently, not by refuge in being a detached anthropological scholar, but in being a sort of ethnographer-activist.”52 Second, Alien Agency departs from the traditional notion of Malinowskian “participant observation,” instead borrowing from several traditions in experimental or “gonzo” ethnography (Michael Taussig), including the recent tradition of “autoethnography.”53 A word coined by anthropologist David Hayano in the 1970s to describe ethnographic processes by which anthropologists wrote accounts of their own people and compounded this by direct involvement and intimacy, autoethnography now refers to a whole series of ethnographic genres of writing that “describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience” (Carolyn Ellis).54 But there is another ground on which to use such hybrid, experimental methods. As an artist, I am already an insider, despite the fact that two of the three projects I have studied are not initiated by me. The projects in Alien Agency, however, all involve my own positioning in different roles (observant participant, direct collaborator, initiating artist) with my so-called research participants.55 The insider point of view makes it more

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possible to surmount the epistemological barriers to entry that originally beset ethnographers of laboratory practices who entered unfamiliar knowledge cultures and dealt with problems of technical vocabularies and highly specialized procedures, structures of heterogeneous working methods, and diverse communication systems. Although the processes unveiled in the book may seem alien to both the creators and publics, my position as implicated and embroiled in them is not. I am no stranger here.56 Meeting the Alien through Practice Finally, a word about context. In Alien Agency, artistic practice, its particularities, and its resulting works are the ethnographic study object itself. The argument I make is that the artist-creators (including myself) you will encounter are making a different type of claim over the world, producing, through aesthetic experiences, pure affective and effective differences.57 But what are the stakes of this claim? And why should we care? As art making linked with technoscience becomes ever more entangled within complex political-social-economic-cultural agendas and increasingly institutionally framed as “research” in the academy through a battery of terms such as “practice-based or practice-led research” (UK and Australia), “artistic research” (Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland), “research-creation” (Canada), and the like, an international community is asking a similar set of questions: How does art making produce knowledge, or if it does not, then how is artistic work research in the institution’s eyes? How is it to be evaluated and compared to other knowledge-making disciplines that primarily use text and language? What is unique and different in comparison to the kind of knowledge produced in the humanities and social sciences? How are students to be mentored? How does one maintain artistic autonomy within the systems of constraint constructed by research prerogatives and structures?58 These questions seem to be bureaucratic modes of governmentality and norms that do not capture what it is that artists do. After all, most artists do not position their work as making new knowledge—a core principle of research. They talk of experiences, events, intensities, affects. Artists do not necessarily start with a research question; art practice is instead a “question generating machine” (Rheinberger).59 Artists work “to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another: to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations. A method is needed, and this varies with every artist and forms part of the work” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari).60 Moreover, such epistemological frames for research seem to ignore something fundamental that is self-evident in practice but rare in theory-laden accounts: the fact that making things is essentially not an altogether rational but most certainly an unpredictable activity not necessarily bound to systematic models or logical chains of decision making; saying “it works” is to admit that accidents, failures, misunderstood situations, resource limitations, and misused techniques are essential elements of art in the

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Introduction

making. Like historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s argument that research is always on the border of the known and this unknown entirely depends on the way its experimental apparatus is set up, we can say that art making, like scientific research, enables futures that cannot be completely predictable in advance.61 Within the stories of practice that make up Alien Agency, I want to argue that research-creation and its resulting artistic outcomes are similar to scientific experimentation, but not in the manner of copying or representing it. Experimentation takes its materials or entities as active, dynamic, and changeable, rather than passive, inert, and immutable. Moreover, experimental life transforms these materials into agents or actants that have actual effects in the world. Experimentation is at once description and invention. Its “truths” and claims on the world are judged by its effects: what it makes “with” and “through” its material agencies. Experimentation, like Rheinberger says, is a matter of setting up the experimental situation, the initial conditions that allow for multiple, unforeseen outcomes. Experimentation is a process by which things come to be. Following Natasha Myers and Joe Dumit, just as scientists are “continually reconfigured by their instruments and data within responsive media,” artists too follow a similar path. Their own bodies and experiences “are at stake” in terms of what Myers and Dumit call “affective entanglements.” Here, all kinds of bodies, phenomena, instruments, and affects are in continual formation, not already configured as pregiven subjects or objects.62 The unforeseen, the unpredictable, the not yet there, the virtual: these are the aliens that we will encounter on the journey that is about to take place. Alien Agency thus proposes a reflexive insider exploration of both practice and a method to capture that practice. It explores what scholars, researchers, administrators, curators, funders, and policy makers (and even some artists) desperately seek to know about how researcher-creators engaged with technoscientific-cultural processes actually work, what it is that they produce, how such work and experience circulates among different constituencies, and what affects it produces in the public encounter. Is it possible that other methods might emerge from practice rather than be applied from a priori frameworks from outside that are not indigenous to that particular practice? Is it possible to be rigorous using experimental techniques to capture making in action, particularly in writing and after the event? The fact that this work you are reading details projects that have to be experienced in a compelling, albeit written, form is the contradiction and tension that any account of “unruly experience” has to deal with. Structure of the Journey The studies that follow are structured in three large parts (“Resonances,” “Cellular Vitality,” and “Sensorium”), each with a number of smaller chapters that alternate between first- and third-person ethnographic accounts and relevant theoretical and

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historical interludes. The framework, voice, and style of each of the three studies vary, sometimes considerably. In part I, “Resonances,” I dive into the world of internationally recognized sound artists Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, collectively known as O+A. O+A have made a name for themselves with the production of sound installations in public spaces around the world for more than twenty years. Termed the “hearing perspective,” their research and artwork involves the real-time transformation of sound in mostly urban spaces through the use of a set of custom-designed instruments: “tuning tubes” (PVC pipes cut to specific lengths that correspond to certain frequencies occurring in an environment), microphones, filtering apparatuses, and concrete enclosures housing loudspeakers, all with specific attention to the material-architectural characteristics of the urban sites in which these instruments are deployed. In particular, O+A use an apparatus described by Hermann von Helmholtz (the socalled Helmholtz resonator) to capture, filter, and manipulate the behavior of audible and inaudible frequencies in the urban sound environment and project these retuned frequencies back into that same environment in real time. Sounds are thus amplified inside the tuning tubes and processed to reveal their acoustically hidden microactions and performances in urban space. Sound and its response-reaction to the architectural dynamics of urban space is a particularly relevant material to explore, not only because it helps extend discussions of the nonhuman beyond the realm of organic matter, but also because it operates transversally over different material, physical, spatial, and perceptual registers. I follow O+A’s work on several projects over a period of one and a half years, beginning in late October 2011 with the opening of their outdoor sound installation Sonic Vista, a project commissioned for the GrünGürtel (Green Belt) ecological zone in Frankfurt, Germany. My study continues by accompanying O+A on trips for sound-scavenging and recording in Frankfurt, Berlin, and the countryside near Zürich between 2011 and 2013. Part II, “Cellular Vitality,” switches locations and scales. It plunges us into the science fiction–esque landscape and laboratories of contemporary art and design practice that employ biologically based materials. I track the early development of Tissue-Engineered Muscle Actuators (TEMA), a complex, fascinating, and still ongoing multiyear research project initiated by and in collaboration with Ionat Zurr at SymbioticA, the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts at the University of Western Australia in Perth. TEMA involves the creation of a hybrid, “semiliving” machine in order to conceptually and aesthetically explore the fragile borders between life and nonlife, machine and organism. The machine consists of a bundle of tissue cultured skeletal mouse muscle cells from the C2C12 cell line that are grown and organized within a custom-designed technological environment called a bioreactor.

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Introduction

Sensors that are outfitted into the bioreactor measure the force and displacement (strain) of the tiny contractions of the engineered muscle and serve to transduce and amplify the movement of the muscle into the scale of human perception through sound and light within an exhibition environment. The account here is a first in revealing the workaday practices of SymbioticA in action, and it follows the TEMA project from its initial conceptualization stages to the development of several prototypes two years later. Part III, “Sensorium,” details the development of Mediations of Sensation/Displace (MoS/Displace), a multistaged research-creation project initiated by me; David Howes, a professor of anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal and one of the international leaders in the movement known as the “anthropology of the senses”; and a team of artists, designers, and graduate students. The anthropology of the senses focuses on how the human senses are distinguished, ranked, mixed, deployed, and enjoyed in different cultures. MoS attempts to construct an interface between such sensory anthropology and history and the design, creation, and evaluation of technologically based environments that employ multiple human senses: sight, audition, tasting, smelling, proprioception, and more. I trace the entire process of making Displace, a large-scale installation and one of the artistic outcomes of the research. My story tracks the project from its inception to design and implementation in its first initial context: a research version that was presented as part of the peer-reviewed “Inno-vents” program of the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting that took place in Montreal in November 2011.63 As described in the publicity, groups of visitors progress through a series of physical environments that intermingle olfactory, gustatory, visual, sonic, haptic, and proprioceptive stimuli. At first, these sensory modalities are separated from each other, but they grow over time to convoke intense, almost hallucinatory sensations that merge to the point of saturation. According to Howes, Displace is partly conceived as a kind of “gymnasium of the senses” designed as a sensory workout environment to increase sensorial acuity for anthropologists before entering into the naturalistic setting of fieldwork.64 The initial installation involved audiences of both anthropologists and the general public. Because the public was collectively interviewed by sensory anthropologists about their sensory experience, my account works as a reflexive ethnography within an ethnography, partially studying the process of anthropological tension between proximity and distance within an event using multiple unstable media (smell, taste, vibration, light, sound, and the physical arrangement of space) and the human response to such an event. Because this is the only project among the three that has been directly initiated by me, I attempt to develop techniques to distance my own position in the work. This by

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no means suggests that the account is any less experientially driven than the others. Rather, I attempt to convey the practices and experience of the entire team of collaborators as the project unfolds. In this rollercoaster of an adventure that follows, I thus hope to shed light on the ways in which art practice and its resulting “products” demonstrate how artistresearchers are engaged in orchestrating dynamic material acts and performances into being and how these material performances mark and transform the world.

I

Resonances

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Part I

Figure 1.1 O+A, Sonic Vista, Deutschherrnbrücke, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. October 2011. Photo by Anke Burger.

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I want to thank everyone for making it possible for us to work in this fantastic site. It’s a wonderful spot and it allows us to achieve a long-term dream and that dream is to make a special spot to listen to a city. There are many special spots where you see them marked with little cameras, I should stand here and take this picture but there are no such spots to listen to your city. So what does it mean to put sonic and vista together. Well, in our modern culture, our ears and our eyes are all split up. Fragmented in a million pieces. Each one has a different marketing department. Each one has different advertisements. Our senses get really split up and fragmented. We put sonic and vista together because we want to pull those senses together in one human feeling and mark that spot right up there as a place where you can really hear and see your city. Well what can you hear when you really listen to a city? You can hear lots of things you can’t see. You can hear the power of the city. You can hear how much diesel it takes to move a train. You can hear it before you can see it. You can hear the birds you can’t see. You can hear how much power it takes to fly a jumbo jet. You can hear all of the reflections from that jet off the walls of the city. You can hear the whole bowl of the space of the city. And this is nice. It’s nice to able to think then, to pause, to meditate on what you hear about a city. Because it pulls the whole city to you. —Bruce Odland, Opening speech for the installation Sonic Vista, Frankfurt, Germany, October 2011

1 Hearing Perspectives A Sonic Vista 2011. A glorious early fall day in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The temperature nears 25 degrees Celsius as the intense sunlight falls onto the dappled, slowly changing leaves. We walk down the pedestrian footpath of the Schaumainkai, the long street skirting the quays of the Main River. The autumnal birds sing out in full force. Mellifluously massed melodies drift from the trees, quickly diffused in the urban susurration. Before us, spanning the Main, lies a steel, tied-arch railroad bridge. On the opposite shore, a construction site betrays the seemingly placid scenography—a massive area outfitted with cranes, half-finished edifices, incomplete concrete nooks, and partially steel-strengthened crannies—a site whose visual appearance provokes gasps of awe and a sense of import. But at this moment, the cranes are in suspended animation (figure 1.2). As the bridge comes closer into view, a white Deutsche Bahn Inter City Express (ICE) train crosses the structure, producing a thundering but distantly muffled roar. Vision contradicts audition. The sleek, aerodynamic body of the ICE passes over the rust-laden bridge—a visual clash of centuries. Later, walking on that bridge, my acoustic wide shot experienced from a distance gives way to a near-field close up.1 As I slowly make my way across the thin stretch of territory reserved for pedestrians traversing the hulking structure, a new train approaches from the bridge’s northern end. With my ears now situated in the near field and my back to the track, the muddy thunder reveals more complex frequency details. I hear what is coming without

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Part I

Figure 1.2 European Central Bank construction site, next to Sonic Vista installation. Photo by Anke Burger.

throwing a glance toward the rumbling, oncoming inhabitant. The bridge begins to tremble, the lower-frequency forces of the Earth in movement gradually increasing in sonic intensity. The roar of Doppler-shifted pink noise mixes with the filigree of upper harmonics from clattering metal and steel. A rush of mechanically generated wind invisibly rams my body. The air moved by 3000 tons of vitesse. The acoustic vista is masked. As the rattling sonic boom fades, I focus on the glistening Main River flowing toward the horizon, the gleaming skyscrapers of the city of Frankfurt. A strange disjunction— an ear/eye gaze stranded between static glass towers far away and the near-field proximity of the bridge. The frozen construction site to the right, its colossal cranes halted, silenced in mid-motion. Oscillating sensorial perspectives. Looking directly below into the bluish water, the distant, motionless view begins to shift, undulate, transform. Wave upon wave, vibration spreading on the surface. Another train. Repeat scene. Does this new train’s sonic character alter the otherwise frozen backdrop? As it passes behind me, I sense where this locomotive machine is in time and space—its amplitude at peak as the midsection “Bord Bistro” of the train passes by, soon to vanish in the distance (figure 1.3). The ear

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Figure 1.3 ICE train passing over Deutschherrnbrücke, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Photo by Anke Burger

experiences faster than the eye. Before I can draw the recorder out of my bag, the train’s sonancy has long faded. Sound Matter(s) . . . Sound is far from abstract for me. It is a material I know intimately, having worked with it for more than thirty-five years across all formats and situations, from the acoustic and electronic to the recorded and the live—in the theater, in dance, “adding value” to images (Michel Chion), as interactive stuff in performative installations and environments shaped by public actions and perceptions.2 Sound is confounding and contradictory. Profoundly physical yet invisible; labeled immaterial but capable of shattering substances and rattling structures. Vision is often thought to be concrete, whereas the aural is relegated to the domain of the abstract. Yet, how can something be abstract that enthralls and surrounds us, having a tangible and tactile impact even while it is visually imperceptible? Transience and impermanence. As soon as something sounds, its vibrations are already on the verge of death and disappearance. As ephemeral, performative matter, sound frustrates mere description through language. It demands to be directly

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Part I

experienced by, in, and through bodies. Sound is something “urgent, unique, uninformed about history and theory, beyond the imagination, central to a sphere without surface, its becoming is unimpeded, energetically broadcast” (John Cage).3 Made possible through characteristics classified by acousticians, musicologists, and musicians as duration, pitch, amplitude, frequency, dynamics, and timbre, sound’s behavior and transformation become its content and expression, simultaneously. John Cage, perhaps the quintessential twentieth-century artist who sought to free sound from its academic anchors, already argued in his 1962 treatise “Silence” that “the composer must give up the desire to control sound, clear his mind of music, and set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments.” Sound “is occupied with the performance of its own characteristics” rather than being a likeness or stand-in for something else.4 The world outside of us sounds. The snap of a tree branch caused by a sudden gale force wind. The white noise crash of waves from a churning ocean. The gurgling raga of a thin stream of water rolling over pebbles lodged in a brook. All of these conditions produce disturbances in mediums: waves, vibrations, forces. But actions originating in, initiated by, enabled through human knowledge and intentions like the hollow and painful buzzing of leaf blowers, the sudden launch and grinding of rusted gears, the whack of a hand against a lacquered surface also produce the same waves and vibrations. Berkeley’s tree falling in the forest does not go unheard. It produces vibrations, effects that something hears and feels—a change of state, a shift in the world that cannot run in reverse. Tracing back. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, sound slowly has come into its own as a form of knowing and experience in art and academia. The dominance of visuality was in eclipse, and art histories of the auditory, such as Douglas Kahn’s Noise Water Meat and Wireless Imagination, appeared. Now, some twenty years later, sound is all the rage, drawing the ears of scholars and researchers under the rubrics of “sound studies.” Attempting to remedy what Kahn called “the deaf century,” this interdisciplinary nexus composed of cultural historians, sociologists, anthropologists, science-studies scholars, and others has sought to articulate the sometimes indescribable, often underrated, and usually ignored acoustic universe.5 Under the mighty and modulative powers of the digital, sound increasingly arrives at almost alchemical states, converting from pressure to waves to digits and back again. As perception has become increasingly technologized and the subject of study, sound as sensory and sociotechnical phenomena has thus been enrolled. As science and technology studies scholars Trevor Pinch and Karen Bijsterveld argue, “sound studies has a focus on the materiality of sound, its embeddedness not only in history, society and culture, but also in science and technology and its machines and ways of knowing and interacting.”6 Yet, working with and manipulating sound and reading about it are two different animals. If sound studies focuses on how we come to know sound through its

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social-cultural-technical-economic manifestations, what is it about the auditory’s own unique material and energetic propensity that makes it so difficult to describe?7 This includes not only the act of perception but also a sound’s phenomenal makeup—its unimpeded, urgent uniqueness as it ricochets and collides with the stratum of cities, its attenuation and amplification at the borders of barriers, corners, holes in surfaces. It is time to attend to sound’s material actions and behaviors of and on the world, its affects beyond mere inscription. As Kahn perceptively writes in his follow up to Noise Water Meat entitled Earth Sound Earth Signal, sound studies has (too) long been under the influence of media studies and, particularly, Friedrich Kittler’s central concept that the history of media and its technologies is one of writing and recording—media as inscription rather than energetics.8 “But to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for theories or placeholders for human sentiments” (Cage).9 In this sense, sound is a perfect material to engage the discussion of material agency head on—to grapple with the oscillations between external matter as a force in itself and a perceptual encounter with it. “Histories of science and technology should be histories of couplings between the human and the artefact” (Ian Hacking).10 Not only subjects or objects but a merge of both. Resonance, or the World-Intensification Experience Because sound plays such a critical role in my own work, the question of how to enable these profound couplings between the dynamic acoustic field and the auditory apparatuses of different life forms is one of profound urgency. But how do other artists arrange and work with sound as a material and energetic act? This is the question I’ve set out to explore with sound artists and composers Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, collectively known as O+A. The choice of these artists is neither accidental nor innocent. I’ve known both for over twenty years, first meeting Odland in San Francisco in 1992. At the time, he was responsible for the music and sound design for a wild production of John Webster’s seventeenth-century revenge tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, in which I was serving as an assistant director for the radical American theater director Robert Woodruff. Bruce Odland is an artist who listens before he looks. He finds music in unexpected places—inside an ancient Roman amphora, on the Brooklyn Bridge, in ringing rocks, water tanks, traffic and forest fires. He has become known for large-scale sound installations in historical public monuments: Trajan’s Forum in Rome, a Japanese garden in Los Angeles, a secret police tunnel under East Berlin, in a castle on the banks of the Danube. Recently he resonated the whole city of Salzburg for the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death. His goal is to tune the world.11

As a burgeoning artist and scholar already seeking an expanded artistic role for the auditory in theater performance practice, Odland’s bio and way of working intrigued and profoundly influenced me to start listening differently. At the time, I was studying

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Part I

computer-generated sound at the laboratories of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford, laboriously eeking out hermetic- and sterilesounding bleeps and burps from the powerful DSP engines of the center’s new NeXT computers. My encounter with Odland’s attention to the sonic dimensions of an always vibrating world and what compositional structures could be revealed from it using technologies such as microphones, recording devices, software and hardware, and reinforcement systems such as unusual speaker configurations struck me as a noteworthy reality beyond CCRMA’s engineering mentality. This was something to pay attention to. I met Bruce’s artistic partner Sam Auinger a few months later in New York City. The three of us saw a lot of each other over the summer of 1992 as I worked as an assistant to theater and opera director Peter Sellars on a modernized adaptation of Aeschylus’s The Persians, staged at the Salzburg Festival in Salzburg, Austria. O+A designed the sound environment for Sellars’s adaptation of Aeschlyus’s searing fifth-century play, which details the Persian defeat at the hands of the Greeks during the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE. Sellars updated the play to the 1992 Gulf War, harnessing O+A’s fiery, disturbing acoustic scenography12 of electronically filtered auricular spaces: the grinding, shrill whistles of the blast furnaces inside the Voestalpine steel mill in Linz, comb-filtered resonances of the Mönchsberg tunnel in Salzburg, the voices of the performers modified live by vocoders and harmonizers. For the sound design, O+A made explicit use of what the composers term an “alphabet of sounds”: an alphabetized archive of field recordings from different international locations. But O+A describe their sonic lexicon as something more. “We learn to draw a meaning out of the sound surroundings by being aware of them, listening to them, investigating them, recognizing them and trying to see them as language. If we have made progress, we collect letters from this alphabet of sounds and develop tools to change our surroundings with them.”13 Work during The Persians also introduced me to what O+A call the “hearing perspective.” These are artists who “trust their ears before their eyes,” the hearing perspective being one of trying to decipher what information and meaning is offered to us through the acoustic environment. Auinger, who grew up on a large farm outside of Linz, Austria, articulates a childhood “completely run on audible information.” The goose tells the weather; the identity of someone is based on listening to her steps. The acoustic coded and decoded: All sounds have meaning. As I would soon find out, O+A ask essential questions about the makeup of the acoustic world we coproduce, are immersed in, and yet so patently ignore: questions motivated by acoustic, material situations we will encounter during our adventures together that almost border on the absurd. The wasted acoustic energy, the externalities produced by cars, air conditioners, trains, and passing airplanes runs amok in the world, enacting bizarre scenes of fragmentation, juxtaposition, and contradiction.14

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These are acts we are oblivious to. How is it possible to have a world in which the songs of birds and the roar of fossil fuel–fed traffic coexist; where the microsounds of melting glacial ice go hand in hand with the periodic whop whop whop whop of a helicopter filled with photo-snapping Indian tourists at a height of 3,471 meters in the Swiss Alps? Could it be that this particular sonic quality, this whop whop whop whop of the helicopter’s rotors, comes about because the acoustic reflections produced by this machine surprisingly interact with the surrounding rock face of the Alps, bouncing them back and forth? Or the fact that Bell Textron engineers never thought through the possible material conditions with which their machine would interact and what the consequences for the world might be due to their design? What do these situations tell us about the acoustic culture that we produce and inhabit? What social, technical, political, economic, cultural, and physical conditions and practices have made it possible? With this last question, I want to disarm a dichotomy: a historically perpetuated one between an unadulterated, Eden-like natural “soundscape” (as composer R. Murray Schafer famously termed it) and a postnatural one brought on by the industrial and postindustrial era, a “scape” characterized by the presence of unwanted sounds usually classified as “noise.” Noise pollution results when man does not listen carefully. Noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore. Noise pollution today is being resisted by noise abatement. This is a negative approach. We must seek a way to make environmental acoustics a positive study program. Which sounds do we want to preserve, encourage and multiply? When we know this, the boring or destructive sounds will be conspicuous enough and we will know why we must eliminate them.15

In an acoustics context, noise has really nothing to do with aesthetic value judgments; it is simply a nonperiodic sequence of vibrations in time, equal energy spread across the frequency spectrum, or as the German polymath Hermann von Helmholtz defined it, “relentlessly alternating sounds .  .  . the irregularly alternating sensation of the ear in the case of noises leads us to conclude that for these the vibration of the air must also change irregularly.”16 Unlike Schafer and other “acoustic ecologists,” O+A make no aural value judgment over what sounds are pleasing versus what are not.17 All of the intended sounds of modernity in the guise of music or “the vast charged hum of the economy” coexist with the unintentional, the unwanted, that which disturbs the mix. “The unintended hums and buzzes, the energy lost as sound vibrations as we burn fossil fuels and turn them into every aspect of modern life.”18 Talking with O+A reveals a life-world of vibrating matter, energy-influenced oscillation. “If you tune yourself to active listening, there is such beauty there and you then go into things like probes and recorders and similar and you can drop further and further into these melodies and harmonies that are generated from things that people

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think of as white noise, like a stream. It’s not white noise, it’s talking. And I thought, this is something to share” (Odland). For these artists, the ecology of the acoustic environment is not just that which vibrates at specific frequencies (the source) but also what modulates and transforms their behavior: the glass and steel architectures of skyscrapers and the flabby muscle of the ear’s pinnae producing acoustic shadows; the thicket of a grove of trees that swallows sound; the swelling flow of the tides; the cocoons of transport. In the world, there is no unadulterated, pure path from vibration to the organ of the ear. Sound cannot be separated from site, context, or entity. This worldview is already evident from the pair’s first collaboration, Odland’s Riverworks originally performed in Aspen, Colorado, on the site of the rushing Roaring Forks River at the height of spring thaw. Invited to the 1987 Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria,19 with its thematic focus on “Der Freie Klang” (“The Liberated Sound”), Odland in his first collaboration with Auinger submerged “strange gear” such as sticks and branches from Colorado, an electric guitar with a tailpin and a shark hook, a Chinese cymbal, gongs, and other detritus into the Danube River. Fishing for sounds in the Danube. Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer displaced to Austrian shores. By way of its currents and eddies, the river played the strings mounted on Odland’s dangling, bobbing, ramshackle objects outfitted with hydrophones in the water, turning them into the sounds of Gyoto monks, mourning mothers, liquid lullabies. Energetically broadcast to a tree filled with whimsical objects, a snarl of electrical decoy cables wound around its branches that dead end “to confuse the technical Austrian mind” and homemade clay-ceramic speakers, the water turned “alive with its own rhythms, resonances” (figure 1.4). Story-catalyzing sounds on a riverbank that had long ceased to be a public gathering place due to the Danube’s canalization through the massive Hermann Göring steelworks (now the aforementioned Voestalpine) near Linz during the Second World War. With the press announcement of Riverworks at the time, fishermen arrived, suspiciously wanting to know what “fishing for sounds” means. Yet, they quickly became intrigued by a Chinese gong hung on a fishing pole and carried downstream by the water producing odd burbling sounds; older people recalled summer days floating on the Danube before the river’s industrialization; the harbor master from the water police along with other passersby again sensed the Danube’s flow—“hearing the readout of the water at human scale.” All of the life stories put on hold due to the Danube’s World War II canalization suddenly became reanimated through the aliveness of the river, captured and rebroadcast through transistors, capacitors, and wires.20 For Auinger, brought together with Odland by the Ars Electronica festival’s artistic director Gottfried Hattinger, who thought the two might be kindred spirits, what was essential in their subsequent collaboration was Odland’s willingness to react spontaneously to the different conditions presented by the environment. Stretching between

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Figure 1.4 Riverworks, Bruce Odland, Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria. 1987. Photo by Bruce Odland.

the upper Hudson River in New York and Linz and Berlin, O+A’s “transatlantic band” has now lasted over twenty-five years. Since Riverworks, O+A have become known in international sound and visual art circles for their large-scale “tube-and-cube” projects in public spaces that “reduce the city’s roar to its harmonic proportions” (Odland). Creating installations that involve the real time “ambient transformation” of the urban sonic environment, the two have designed and perfected a specific kind of technical apparatus over twenty years: a complex instrument centered on what Odland calls a “tuning tube”—essentially a PVC or metal pipe open at both ends whose length and width determines the specific harmonic overtone series and its ratios that are activated when the surrounding sounds enter the tube (figure 1.5).21 Like a didgeridoo animated by the city, the undifferentiated vibratory rush of the world passing through the tube is transformed into harmonic relationships captured by microphones installed at specific harmonic nodes throughout the length of the object. Similar to the functioning of an organ pipe, low-frequency sounds, like the earth-moving rumbles produced by buses or passing trucks, activate the so-called fundamental or prime partial tone along with the next overtones in the harmonic series. The screech

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Figure 1.5 O+A, Sonic Vista, tuning tube under the bridge, Frankfurt. October 2011. Photo by Anke Burger.

of car brakes, bird songs, wailing sirens, or murmuring voices from lunchtime passersby activates the higher overtones or upper partials in the series, again based on the harmonic proportions in relationship to the tube’s length (figure 1.6). The city’s din is transformed into audible harmonics, all in real time.22 But this urban symphony of the tuned city would fall onto only microphone ears were it not for the second element of the instrument: the so-called cube part of this oppidan listening-sounding machine. The “cube” is, in reality, a 50 × 50 × 50 cm, 75 kg reinforced concrete object sitting 6 cm off the ground on steel feet, and open at the bottom (figure 1.7). Although the cube’s features are weather and theft proof, the key to the object is the material, mounting pattern, and diffusion characteristics of the speaker housed inside the container. A standard 25–30 cm speaker is hung upside down within the enclosure, bouncing sound off the concrete surface below it and thus activating a zone of pressure that radiates outwards, hemispherically, in all directions. Due to the manner in which the pressure zone activated by the speaker operates, the listener who nears the cube or sits directly on top of it thus experiences a field of sound rather than the point-source effect common to most loudspeakers.23

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Figure 1.6 O+A, “Real-Time Ambient Sound Transformation for Architectural Barriers,” unpublished patent application. 1999. Courtesy of Bruce Odland.

Figure 1.7 Bruce Odland, cube speaker, “Tonic,” Los Angeles. Photo by Bruce Odland.

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What O+A seek in their real-time instrument is the fundamental principle of sympathetic vibration, more commonly known as resonance. Called “modernity’s second science” (Veit Erlmann), all material things, from electronic circuits and the steel girders of buildings to the interior of rooms and cavities of human and animal bodies, have their own resonances or resonant frequencies. When stimulated by an outside vibration of the same frequency, such objects begin to sympathetically couple or resonate with the oscillating forces outside of them, building up a cycle of intense feedback between object and world.24 In much recent theorizing, resonance has taken on multiple significations: as physical and psychological phenomena, a phenomenological marker for the breakdown between the binary opposition of subject and object, inner and outer worlds and conditions embodying the very material basis of perception.25 Yet, O+A’s work does not just use resonance as a metaphor for the expression of post-Enlightenment cultural paradigms. They use it as experienced matter, and in this sense O+A’s late–twentiethcentury real-time tuning instrument partially owes its debt and origin to Hermann von Helmholtz’s material experiments some 130 years before. Helmholtz’s 1862 work On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music sought to unify “the horizons of physics, philosophy and art,” bridging physical and physiological/psychological acoustics, musical science, and aesthetics. In an effort to mechanically prove the physical existence of Jean Baptiste Fourier’s ideal mathematical argument that any complex tone can be broken down into the sum of a series of simple sinusoidal waves, Helmholtz turned to physical objects—Ernst Chladni’s sound “figures,” in which vibrations at specific frequencies produced visual traces in thin sand layered over metal plates, as well as the strings of pianos, and membranecovered vessels—to analyze the specific musical tones produced by the process of sympathetic resonance.26 “A stretched membrane will not only be set in vibration by musical tones of the same pitch as its proper tone (fundamental) but also by such musical tones as contain the proper tone of the membrane among its upper partial tones” (Helmholtz).27 Appropriately dubbed Helmholtz resonators, these objects consisted of specially crafted hollow glass or metal spheres and tubes with openings at both ends (abandoning the stretched membrane for reasons we shall soon see); one end of the tube was inserted into the ear (figure 1.8). Similar to blowing across the top of a bottle, as the mass of air inside the resonator is elastic, the external force excites the mass inside, causing it to act like a spring system set into oscillation.28 If the excitation frequency from without couples with the natural frequency of the resonator within, the air inside begins to oscillate at the same frequency in unison. The frequency that shatters the glass—“. . . that great jazz note. That destroyed. The Walls of Jericho” (The Clash). There are three radical things about Helmholtz’s devices. The first is that the resonator achieves its maximum effect when one end coated with soft wax is placed in the ear.

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Figure 1.8 Helmholtz Resonators. From Helmholtz 1954.

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Suddenly, the eardrum, the famous “tympanic membrane,” acts to replace the artificial membrane at the end of the resonator—the ear as part and parcel of the machine.29 The second characteristic is that the phenomena produced, the vibration of the fundamental and upper harmonic partials, is entirely conditioned by the shape, size, and material constitution of the resonator. If there is any doubt to this statement, one only has to examine the second appendix of On the Sensations of Tone to discover Helmholtz’s painstakingly detailed lists that match specific pitches with varying sizes and shapes of resonators.30 Most radically with his resonating vessels, however, Helmholtz demonstrated that an object external to the ear could produce material phenomena that had previously been described solely in mathematical-theoretical terms—“compound vibrations .  .  . found in the nature of the thing itself.” The abstraction of mathematics explodes and expands under the actual material actions experienced. Theory transduced to matter through the performance and processes of the instrument. O+A’s harmonic transformation of the world’s vibrations is embodied in the cryptic and contradictory sounding titles of their installations—works that Heidi Grundmann appropriately called “world intensification experiences”: R1, R2, R3, MaxRES, Traffic Mantra, Motet R, Living Harmonies, Elevated Harmonies, Harmonic Bridge, Sonic Vista, Hearing View, Space Is the Place. But why resonance? Resonance sticks on something—it lingers. An idea, a thought resonates. The initial impulse goes away, but something remains. Like Helmholtz’s use of a device to experientially solve a mathematical query, O+A’s work similarly stems from an encounter with the resonances of the world through techniques. Their artwork and practice is not one of subjects forcing a priori plans and compositions on the world. They instead act partially as perceptual filters in cooperation with their instruments, listening and responding to the flow of conditions as they occur. Working with the solar artist Peter Erskine on the installation Secrets of the Sun at Trajan’s Forum in Rome in 1992, the two composers brutally encountered the cognitive dissonance of modernity: the ear/eye split close up. The architecture of the second-century ACE Forum is overwhelmed by the acoustic bombardment produced by vehicles on the Via IV Novembre: “a band shell for amplifying Fiats and Vespas,” or as Auinger more coarsely states, “wonderful architecture, bullshit sound.” Whether to “come up with a feel-good aerosol sound spray or learn to use our given modern soundscape—traffic” motivates intense listening at the site and heightened attention to the remaining fragments and objects with in Apollodorus’s ancient monument.31 Miraculously, O+A heard something that transforms the roar of Italian auto engineering: ancient amphora, Bronze Age–descended vases that vibrate and resonate the passing traffic, transforming it into “a musically filtered version of urban

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Figure 1.9 O+A, amphora with microphone, Traffic Mantra, Rome. 1992. Photo by O+A.

noise” (figure 1.9). The amphora suddenly experienced as Helmholtz resonators provided the composers with two things: what Auinger calls the “head blowing” idea of “having access to real time material” but also, most important, the concept that a resonator is also a filter—it removes and transforms what enters into it through delays in time. Resonance is hearing time and space. If you hear without resonance, you hear only time, you don’t hear the space. If you hear it without memory, you don’t even hear time. It’s just an impulse. In other words, the room remembers the voices that are in it because of the physics of sound. There is a re-sounding going on. It’s not a standing wave .  .  . it’s an indication of the energy sources present and how they are interacting . . . the temporary memory of the energy put into the system. (Odland)

It is easy to see why composers from Alvin Lucier to Brian Eno, who historically have been interested in the behavior of waveforms and frequencies made audible and performative by their interaction with the conditions around them, have been drawn to resonance as a concept, material, and temporally unfolding phenomenon. Already in the late 1960s, Lucier, musical avant-gardist extraordinaire and friend of Cage, was experimenting not only with the creation of sounds through more than electronic means (radio and brain waves or other bursts of electromagnetic energy) but also the composition and mutation of such sounds through their interaction with specific spaces.

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“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed” goes Lucier’s eponymously named 1970 performance. What happens in the room “depends on the physical dimensions of the room and what wavelengths fit it” argued Lucier, leading his former students, such as Douglas Kahn, to describe resonances not only as tools of immersion but also as “propagation.”32 Like all artists, O+A follow existing traditions, practices, and even norms while attempting to transcend them; their own work is set apart from other resonance explorers through the sheer amount of projects and physical sites and the continual refinement of resonance as a materially experiential phenomenon within such sites over two decades. Once described by the French press as “sonic alchemists,” O+A pay attention to sound’s materiality as it becomes amplified and transformed through technoscientific instruments and practices. The world continues to vibrate. Reflections on/in the Vibrating World I am in Frankfurt for the opening of O+A’s latest work, a quasipermanent (running over three years) installation entitled Sonic Vista, supported by the so-called GrünGürtel (Green Belt) initiative and installed on the hulking Deutschherrnbrücke which traverses the Main River. Originally built between 1911 and 1913 as part of the construction of the Frankfurt East Harbor area, the bridge was subsequently destroyed and rebuilt after World War II. Now owned by the German state railways, the bridge links the densely populated Sachsenhausen and Bornheim areas of the city and is also a key connection between the different territories of the GrünGürtel, a 70 km, 8,000 hectare belt established in 1991 to preserve and protect a municipal green area within the city limits (figure 1.10). O+A have been invited “to thematize the auditive dimensions of the urban space of Frankfurt” in order to bring “a conscious expansion of the hearing dimension” to the GrünGürtel area.33 At first, the project resembles previous O+A resonance installations in terms of its central component: two tuning tubes affixed at both ends of the bridge underneath, one cut to the length of 6 m, producing a low B as the fundamental, the other cut to 4 m and producing a low F#. In Sonic Vista, however, the cube is gone, replaced by two blue- and red-colored polyethylene spheres hanging off the bridge parallel to each other some 15 m high and 10 m apart. Developed in collaboration with physicist and designer Werner Lorke and Bose acoustician Kevin Bastyr, the spheres contain the speaker elements, enabling the diffusion of sound in a 180-degree spread with few diffraction artifacts and almost equal loudness contours across their long physical distance.34

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Figure 1.10 Site of Sonic Vista, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. October 2011.

Unlike other O+A resonance installations, however, Sonic Vista creates a different perceptual effect on the listener. Whereas the tamboura-like drones of the resonating tubes and the sounds filtered through them become the listening environment, the two keys spatially split apart by the two spherical speakers hanging on the bridge become something more than filters. The sound of the tubes is, in fact, a sonic red herring; in musical terms, it becomes a figured bass, a cantus firmus for the microsonic details of life in the city of Frankfurt.35 Traversing the bridge after the opening speeches from politicians, city officials, and Bruce and Sam (figure 1.11). Thanks all around—the city infrastructure, the Deutsche Bahn, and other enablers of the project go out to the crowd, who want no more than to run to the bridge and experience the urban conditions that O+A have made audible. The crowd swarms the structure, cameras out to capture the view, chattering away beneath the red and blue spheres—the usual response during a vernissage of sound-related artwork. Where I walk, a crystal-clear acoustic vista of the city, suspended above the water, while hearing shapes trace trajectories in time

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Figure 1.11 Opening day of Sonic Vista, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. October 1, 2011. Photos by Anke Burger.

and space: the glissando-like sonic trail of an overhead jet; dense clusters of birds amassed in the trees on the left riverbank; distant cars on the roads skirting the Main. As I move towards the resonators, I simultaneously look at the city in the distance, while the sound environment gradually shifts, the drone appearing in this urban mix—the world now filtered, shifted, modulated by itself. Sonic Vista’s sound environment is different from earlier O+A works, because the city becomes all the more pronounced. Overtone phrases excited by the tube glide above the constantly flowing fundamental tone. A plane’s parabolic sound trail picked up by the tubes momentarily clips the drone in the blue speaker, overloading the sound with the infrasonic moans of air transport. Tiny staccato sforzando notes get punched out of the mix, perhaps the result of an auto’s brusque encounter with a speed bump on the other shore. A sudden cooing noise echoes through the two frequencies being broadcast from the spheres—pigeons nesting under the bridge’s well-worn geometry of steel beams and supports. Standing and listening to this sonic admixture, Bruce musically mimics to technical director Werner a sound that he heard two days ago, but which now is no longer present. Shuuuung king. Shuuuung king: the sound of a pile driver at the massive construction

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site of the future European Central Bank on the opposite side rings through the air, heard first on the bridge and then milliseconds later at the actual site.36 A sonic doppelganger. These spherical objects succeed in changing the dramaturgy of the bridge: its appearance, history, and memory. New stories surface. People listening to the world. I stop and ask them to describe it. Do they hear Frankfurt differently or do they for the first time really hear Frankfurt? Some state they hear the same thing as usual, yet the sound is defamiliarized. “This must be because of the technology that what I normally hear sounds so strange. It sounds so different than normal . . . a little like music . . . a didgeridoo.” With the drones continuing, rising and falling as the city’s timbres flow into the tube, I ask another question to these attentive listeners. Does the view of Frankfurt from the bridge appear different? “Yes. Definitely. I’m usually here . . . I live near here. But I find suddenly there is a kind of city music in the background. It’s really inspiring that I can see in another way.” Another question. What about this momentary experience? What do you hear right now? This time there is no hesitation; the answer comes swiftly and decisively. “On the one hand, airplanes. Like some old Raisin Bombers! (Laughs.) And on the other hand, a didgeridoo—that’s what is producing this tone. Some outer space sounds—the universe. Also, a little like being underwater . . . voices. Like someone is underwater with that blubbering sound. But at night it’s a different thing. I was here last night and it was far more mystical. You concentrate more on the sound than what you see. I think that the image and the sound are independent of each other and I’ll tell you why. This sound we are hearing. It’s very lively. But the image we see of the city is static—it works almost against the sound. And, at the same time, this continual city noise . . . it’s almost the opposite.” The use of the word lebendig, lively, prompts me to ask another question to this eager listener. Why do you use this word lebendig? What does it say? “Because it’s all moving. Through these different frequencies, they have movement within them. Movement here makes it lively.” Underwater. Outer space. The Universe. Through their resonating machine, O+A awaken perception to the sounds of the spheres or, at the very least, to the sounds of a city normally ignored and filtered out by its inhabitants. I pause, watching and listening to the crowd on the bridge in the blazing fall sun, until I hear in my right ear that all too familiar sound. The structure begins to clatter as still unheard vibrations shake the footway and our bodies. Vibrations sounding. I turn away from the bridge, once again glancing out at the city of Frankfurt, this time underscored by its self-generated real-time accompaniment. My ear positioned between the two spheres, the harmonic drones themselves begin to saturate with timbres, thickening almost to the point of distortion. Just as soon, a fleeting moment of intensity followed by masking and disappearance as the train once again passes behind.

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2 From Agency to Practice What significance does working with and experiencing matter and energy’s “agency” hold for practice, for artists and researchers like O+A? In enlisting the notion of material agency, that stuff does things that have actual effects on the world, the archaeologist Lambros Malafouris focuses on one of the most primal creative acts of working with materials: pottery making. Within the process, the clay on the wheel should be considered neither some external object of the potter’s intentional mental states nor a hunk of inert stuff but co-constitutive components of the overall pottery experience. There is a continual interplay between the potter and the wheel/clay not because there are locked in, preinscribed actions to be expressed in either entity but because the spatiotemporal dynamics of the situation and the environment bring forth and enable certain actions. The spinning rotor of the clay wheel, the thickness, wetness, and age of the clay, the hands of the sculptor, the degree of light in the room all exert pull on each other, shifting in intensity, influencing and shaping the level of “material engagement” that transpires between the sculptor and the “matter” at hand in a process of temporal evolution.37 This concept of material engagement is powerful. It suggests that agency is not located in objects or things but situated in practice; it is “the flow of activity itself.”38 “Agency is in constant flux, an in-between state that constantly violates and transgresses the physical boundaries of the elements that constitute it.”39 It seeps across the stuff of the world, unbounded, not subjected to containment within rigidly defined categories such as subject or object, human or animal. Focusing on actions and practices with matter and energy in the world brings me back to performance. To say sonic matter “performs” suggests dynamism, variation over time—a challenge to the fixity of ontological categorization due to the shifting of conditions outside our immediate control and perception. In working with sound, one quickly realizes its malleability, continual interplay, and flux. Odland describes such movement in his listening to things like ringing rocks, harmonies in fire and water, or acoustic transformations through ancient architectures such as the Pueblo site of Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico: “It’s all vibrating with a vital force. Whether it was fabricated by machine or fell from the side of a mountain underneath the erosion of water. All that stuff is moving in different scales and times and it’s moving with what I believe is some sort of vitality. And that’s the vitality that is perceptible (as sound) when one decides to pay attention to the vibration around oneself.” Auinger chimes in: “Vital is really everything that vibrates and moves and then it is a question of the resolution. This is why I like this analogy from an English physicist who said ‘everything is energy’ and to imagine what a subject could be, he came up

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with this analogy which said ‘there is this huge sea and a subject is maybe a wave.’ So you are part of the same continuum, the same temporal shape.” I clap and listen to the reflections bouncing off the walls, ceiling, and objects in a room. I try and gauge how long they sound—how the cement, steel, glass in the space encourage quick dissipation or sustained action. If I move my head, the sound changes. If I move my body, the sound shifts again, not only from my point of view but also from the sound’s perspective. I invade the space of its trajectories, block its movements, disrupt its order, and add energy to its entropic dissolution. It passes through me as vibrations, flowing around or over me. The ear/body moves with the sound and thus with the room. Iteratively produced and known—a posteriori, not predesigned. For those of us working with the material of sound, to think of agency as a flow, enmeshed and changing with other entities, is critical precisely because it is our engagement with and manipulation and transformation of that very material world offered up for perceivers, for audiences, that marks the core of the aesthetic act. Auinger tells me in one of our countless discussions: “Where people have the most problems is that actually listening into the environment, the surplus of information is in how things interconnect. Then interwoven into this is the aesthetic dimension. And this aesthetic dimension, what we’ve definitely learned from art in the twentieth century has definitely to do with how much you go into it as a perceiver. How much you engage with it.” Give and take with the matter at hand. 3 Green Belts in Goethe’s City Mess-Up Factors in the Urban Instrumentarium The drones rise over the vista, magnifying the sonic organism in the distance. A two-tone chord resounds at the center of the bridge, generated by thousands of wayward sounds from an urban corridor ignored, unnoticed, of sources unseen: birds, pigeons, bicycle bells normally lost in the sea of traffic, a child’s squeal, the passing tempest of trucks, falling pitches of low-lying aircraft. Acousmatic transformation. But are you getting the same impression when you hear with your ears as what you see with your eyes? The Deutschherrnbrücke, O+A’s chosen site for Sonic Vista, at first seems a nexus of contradictions. Linking the monumental building site of the future power zone of Europe (the European Central Bank headquarters), the rapidly redeveloping Osthafen (East Harbor) area, and the large Stadtwald (city forest) to the south, the site forms an audio-visual panorama of Frankfurt where near and wide acoustic fields intersect. In the wide or far field, the ear can extend over 5 km across the city, detecting auditory acts in an elongated hearing sphere that all but thwarts vision’s limited path:

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details on the far river banks, a softened screech of bus brakes, the impending descent from the engines of airplanes that tear up the sky from behind. Unlike the eyes, the skin, the nose, or the mouth, the ear is the only sensory apparatus in the Aristotelean five-sense organ schema that can extend, distribute perception across spatio-temporal distances. In its creeping 15–25 frame slowness, vision, that primary sense, cannot reach around buildings, zone in under the floorboards, travel across space.40 From the moment of photons striking the retina to our registration of an image, the eye is only relatively fast. Within a time span of less than a microsecond, however, the ear can pick up disturbances in the medium. Faster than thought, the tempo of auditory perception deeply underlies the acoustic hunter-gatherer instinct within biological species—a millisecond being sometimes too late for prey.41 Why pick this site, a space that for the everyday passersby is considered sehr lärmbelästig (saturated with noise) through the continual rumbling of trains punctuating the passing of time as they roll over the bridge? The intention of Sonic Vista is not to mask, to hide the passing presence of the “here and loud” trains by producing another overlay of sonic information. Through the two overtone series generated by the bridge’s acoustic territories, Auinger wants the public to experience the city in its full audio/ visual sensory life—to bring the auditive world not only into the space of attention and awareness but “also into our design briefs.” The fact that the bridge location has a very low “mess-up factor,” little cognitive dissonance between the ear and the eye, is one of the attractors of the site for the artists. “The kind of people you are dealing with here in terms of us,” O+A tell a group gathered in Berlin one year after the opening of the installation, “are people really interested in and focused on understanding the actions of the world with our ears and are not so easily distracted by looking. If someone says there is a beautiful forest we are going to listen to it first and decide whether it is beautiful. Are you then getting the same impression when you look as when you listen?” O+A relate experiences of the mess-up factor in international art locales. The Irene Hixon Whitney “art bridge” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, designed to enhance the experience of art for visitors, spans a highway dense with multiple lanes of traffic coming out of a tunnel.42 The New York MoMA sculpture garden, supposedly secluded in a protected zone in the back of the museum, registers a continual 78 dB SPL, “sounding like any other taxi stand. Why would the highest visual standards be allowed to be so completely fucked up in an auditory way?” rings the desperate question from Odland. The mess-up factor becomes even more pronounced in the almost grueling preparation for Sonic Vista as O+A research the 80 km2 zone known as the Frankfurt GrünGürtel in search of a site for their eventual intervention. Envisioned as a link between the city’s urban and natural landscapes by the Frankfurt city planner and architect Till

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Behrens in the mid-1970s, the original impetus for this “green belt” sought to create a path from “chaos to the ideal city”; a protected green leisure zone and natural habitat nestled between the old city center and the newly developing outskirts whose planning began as early as 1925. Influenced by the German “garden city” movement, one of the capstones of German modernism, the lack of concrete action in the 1920s to create a series of microgarden suburbs led to increasing public dissatisfaction with Frankfurt’s post–World War II urban sprawl and the lack of suitable contrasts to the skyscraper-ridden urban landscape. In his overarching vision of a green area of bands separating urban from rural areas within the city’s larger metropolitan arena, Behrens sought to both regulate the building epidemic by dedicating spaces that would be maintained by the farming, forestry, and waterway industries. This would both eliminate the cost of maintenance for urban taxpayers and be built at the same time and pace as the urban construction projects. The Hessian state government approved Behrens’s “City Development Concept for the Green Belt Linking the Shores of Main River with City and Traffic Planning” in 1991 (figure 1.12).43 But Behrens’s original GrünGürtel concept to separate urban from rural areas and thus natural from cultural spaces of the city fractures when encountering the boundaryless nature of the urban acoustic onslaught—regions “extremely poisoned” by what O+A call “grey noise,” or information-less sound emitted from our “cement industrial overlay.” Occupying almost one third of the city’s surface area, the GrünGürtel’s acoustic transformation over twenty-five years has been as prodigious as it is startling, subsequently revealed when O+A play for me their site recordings of the belt’s various regions. The steady swarming of aircraft mixed with the wind. Rumbling traffic sounds masking the voices of children. A duet of birds combined with the crackling, sizzling, standing waves of magnetostricted electrical transformers and the appoggiatura of flight paths. The polyphony of transformer standing waves is an “extraordinary situation”—invisible, humming specters that saturate the trees and streams. Bruce asks what these hums do to our experience of the “fluid rhythms and sounds in nature”: Do these standing waves change our attention, breathing, bodies, and imagination? Do they transform our ability to make sense of quieter moments of ambience in space? Is short-circuiting going on in the brain when a steady sound, like an omniscient presence, is always there? O+A’s artistic vision is one of alteration, not denial. They ask what material interventions can be made that bring a focus to the kind of sonic organism that distinguishes Frankfurt from Bangalore, New York from Rome or Beijing—to find sensory equilibrium in the surrounding urban torrent. What is this GrünGürtel in Frankfurt like? It looks beautiful, but is it beyond the eyes? What kind of interaction is taking place

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Figure 1.12 GrünGürtel Area, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Copyright 2006 Stadtvermessungsamt Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

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between life forms and city structures? What role does the auditive play in environmental awareness when the sense ratios are so out of balance? Asking this last question inevitably evokes McLuhan. “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.”44 In discussing how to create a spot to hear the rhythms of the city, O+A describe a more than human urbanosphere. The city is “a larger structure that is not just human but a sum of all kinds of structures”; listening reveals its economic day, the shadow of clouds as flights pass over, the shifts of the weather. Transforming the sound of a site like the Deutschherrnbrücke forces an attention shift—sonic life as emblematic of the culture we live in. Auinger is adamant on this point. “Whenever they try and bring us into a noise discussion we say when we go out into the street and its loud and disturbing, what you actually hear is your culture. You can’t sit at home and order a new book on Amazon and then wonder why a truck runs screaming through the country.” Noise is not a term O+A relish. “Noise is just information you haven’t decoded. ‘You don’t like it (a particular sound) because it’s noise. But why don’t you like it?’ Here people are stumped because they don’t know how sound works in relationship to space.” Pushing this point agitates Bruce, and he launches into the next argument: “By labeling everything you don’t like as noise and pushing everything away—you get lossy information. We want to unpack that word noise and go into it by actually forgetting it . . . throwing it out . . . and say, ‘no, those are multiple living wavelengths generated by everything we are doing. So let’s talk about what we are doing.’ Try and get the information back so we can decode what we are actually doing.” For O+A, the term noise reduces complexity, “ghettoizes” the conversation. It covers up, demonizes, and thus dismisses what Odland argues is the essential element necessary for debate: the reality of the acoustic world we create and then are embedded in. If “unacknowledged active nonlistening is our basic status,” naming something noise justifies such nonlistening, because we can deny the world, dismissing “a complex topic worth studying.” Noise is context, and examples abound. Often excruciating, the decibel level of indoor environments such as restaurants or offices depends not only on how “loud” the events happening there are (the sound-pressure level [SPL] measured in decibels) but what kinds of architectural materials are used.45 O+A relate a similar contextual experience during their search for a site in the Green Belt. An area of “wonderful woods” seems at first to have a high mess-up factor, completely “contaminated” by the sound of continual landing and taking off of Airbuses at nearby Frankfurt Airport, Germany’s central transport hub. Yet, the presence of a tiny fountain in the near field, the area in closest proximity to the ear, reveals untold crystalline sonic details: tinkling platches and microsplashes as the water makes

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contact with itself and the liquid surface. The mess-up factor, the visual/acoustic disjunction is mitigated. Local listening zones are not canceled out by the tempest of flights. The readability of information is based on direct experience framed again by conditions. Like the discussion around noise, O+A also carefully avoid another trope of acoustic ecology: the word soundscape.46 That the contradictions inherent in the acoustic environment can be dismissed, purged of the unwanted, and then listened to like music avoids the hard questions of sonic praxis: How do we make sense of and decode what the acoustic space foretells? Rather, the sonic organism of the city acts like an instrumentarium (Augoyard and Torgue)—a series of multiple-sounding instruments materially-spatially-temporally framed that produce specific sonic phenomena or “sonic effects.”47 Naming the city an instrumentarium here not only defines an object of analysis but also frames and embodies a perceptual shift. Sonic Vista functions differently from previous O+A projects that I have experienced or, in other cases, collaborated on over the past twenty years. It doesn’t call attention to itself, either as an artistic statement or as an object. O+A’s earlier resonance installations sought to take the city’s roar and tame and tune it before sending it back to the world through the alchemy of signal processing—postprocessing the sound with digital software plug-ins such as GRM Tool-based comb filters or resonators—as if O+A didn’t trust the mechanics of their instrument completely.48 The amphora, the tube is a filter, as Auinger recognized in Rome. Why the redundancy—a filter applied on top of a filter? Perhaps this realization, that the city’s instrumentarium is already made immanent through the physics of the instrument, the tube’s length, shape, material constitution, is why O+A slowly give up on electronic processing of their real-time urban acoustic material—the “stepping away from electronic filters as having artifacts that are not trustworthy.” Although the two still employ prefade electronics in the signal chain, compressors, and limiters that act to choke the sudden sonic transients of unpredictable jackhammers or military planes that would exceed the dynamic range of the speakers, the sounds that arrive back from their journey are those of the tube alone without processing and extraneous color. The parable goes, “the more you become advanced at cooking, the less you need to use spices.” O+A learn iteratively, processually. Odland states: “We didn’t understand how much information was being gained by reducing things to their harmonic proportions. We didn’t understand that we were speaking to a different part of the decoding brain by shifting things into a more harmonic realm—making it easy for the brain to read patterns. By artificially putting something like a sweeping filter into it, we are disturbing the brain’s ability to read these patterns and we are introducing something that isn’t trustworthy.”

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This last statement returns us to Cage. It is only much later in their work together that O+A grasp Cage’s plea for composers and artists to give up the desire to control sound and clear their minds of music in order to “let sounds be themselves.” The resonance projects bring this about through experience. With Sonic Vista, their work increasingly becomes like “shoe horns” and “training wheels”—the two composers, trained in serious music schools, need increasingly “to get rid of a kind of musical thinking” by understanding that musical structures are already inherent in the “complex organism of the city” rather than coming from their “compositional ego brains.” In listening to that drone, the transformation of Frankfurt’s sonic environment that O+A’s instruments bring into newly perceived harmonic being, I don’t hear it as content itself. The drone is something else—a technique that simultaneously distributes perception while focusing attention. An “object of contemplation” where before there was none. In this sense, the site of the installation is critical, given the 360-degree hearing sphere afforded by the bridge. The breath of Frankfurt, the bellowing of the city, comes alive, doing things to its inhabitants who can’t explain why or what. Affect, the preconscious, precognitive impact of things, bodies, forces at a distance on other bodies, suddenly seems to rear its head. A feeling, a sense, an in-between state that impacts but can’t be localized. If perception, seeing and hearing, seems lodged in subjects, in their brains and bodies, then affects move through the world.49 Is it possible that O+A are trying to organize affects rather than percepts through their instruments (the ear, the microphone, the tube, the cube, the computer)? Why do I ask? Because the drone itself is not the composition but an apparatus for the generation of affect among and through the instrument, listening bodies, the city, the world. Materials Abide From far off, one barely understands the bridge as a site of artistic intervention, the only clue being the two almost microscopic red and blue balls floating in space like dots, fragilely clinging to the side of the rusted steel edifice. Like lessons learned by realizing that the perspective of the listening body affords a different worldview between the near and far fields, the dots become larger, more brilliant in their primary colors but out of place, almost confoundingly on approach from either side of the bridge on foot. Why are these spheres there? What purpose do they serve? The answer is not so clear, even upon entering the sphere’s zone of sounding waves. Walking toward them, your head and ears go upward, much like the animals who evolution blessed with the singular power to move or rotate their ears—to zero in on sounds and channel vibrations. O+A argue that the choice of the spheres, the blue and red polypropylene orbs perched off the bridge’s side, is both iconic and technically necessary for achieving the desired sonic effect. The objects are decoys. The bright colors signify that something visually interesting is happening on the bridge while they playfully defamiliarize the

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Figure 1.13 Sonic Vista, close-up of speaker construction. Photo by Anke Burger.

iconography of public art, the visual form, when visitors realize they must hear as well as see. The name Sonic Vista transcends its supposedly oxymoronic status. But the spheres as instruments do something else. They direct perception upward, toward the heavens alight with air traffic (figure 1.13). Odland explains that “up is very special. The direction of up we wanted to work with. Your brain interprets sounds from different directions in quite different ways.” Reflection plays a double role in Sonic Vista. In the experience of up, Frankfurt is visually mirrored in the shiny coating on the spheres. The mirrored image of the world anamorphically twisted on the sphere’s surface brings up many similar artistic references: Escher’s Hand with Reflecting Sphere, Steina Vasulka’s Allvision, Machine Vision, and Summer Salt, and Luc Courchesne’s parabolic photos.50 Similarly, in Sufi cosmology, all worlds are reflected within a single object or process. Images are within images, surfaces of reflections are split into infinite reflections, the smaller order of existence reflects and, at the same time, is contained within the operation of a larger order. But if the visual world is bounced off the surface of the object as just so many photons, the spreading waves emitting from the object also transform Frankfurt—a

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continuously shifting atmosphere in which these colored globes enact the sounding world. O+A never leave the details of technical sound diffusion to the careless whims of off-the-shelf products. Their work is about carefully understood and articulated interdependencies—the choice of site, the atmosphere, the material and lengths of the tubes, the design of the diffusion for the city’s sonancy. Sam calls this in German wirkungszusammenhang—literally, the interdependence of conditions. Odland relates to this idea of interdependence by arguing: “The entire experience is part of our art form. We are interested in everything that happens in gathering and dispersing the sounds. We don’t leave the dispersal to someone else’s speaker design. We want a fair representation of the senses. We don’t want sound marching to the orders of the visual.” To dispense with the standards of acoustic sound diffusion, O+A seek the collaboration of experts such as Werner Lorke, a trained physicist and professor for art at the University of Design in Offenbach (next to Frankfurt), and Kevin Bastyr, an acoustical research engineer who works at Bose, to design a new kind of speaker that spreads sound without the discrete point-source effect. The technical challenge looms. As Bastyr argues, overhead speakers have the tendency to project sound straight down, thus creating an acoustic hotspot directly below. O+A, however, want acoustic seamlessness—the experience of walking through a sonic atmosphere melded into the city’s sound space instead of a sound art installation calling attention to itself. Despite a distance between the hanging spherical speaker units of 15 meters, their desire demands equal loudness contours. Bastyr designs a highly unusual computational acoustic model, predicting resonances and diffraction issues before settling on the solution: a 10 cm hole in front of an equally small woofer generates a pressure buildup within the ball and thus forces the sound out into an almost even diffusion pattern.51 The sound spreads evenly, producing a close to uniform sonic pressure level across the entire area of the bridge. Like Bastyr, Lorke is an expert at bending, pushing, shaping, but also respecting various kinds of solid and liquid matter. Talking together on the bridge during the opening of Sonic Vista, he tells me about the need to respect the capacities of materials—what they do. Materials abide by rules, constraints. The more one knows, that is, understands, from the experience of working with their actions and conditions, the more one can push, question, and change their states. “The more you know about the material, the more you can manipulate or push it towards a cutting edge situation.” The goal is for artists to bridge the material and technical—not leave these things to specialists. Lorke’s modus operandi is to use models as predictors of future states. Modeling operates in an explanatory context; parameters are set up and manipulated in order to predict what will happen to a material as it progresses forward in time. Such parameters do

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not function as a flat hierarchy—as independently equal from each other—nor independently from reality. Indeed, as he relates, “the more you place this simple model into reality, the more specific and special conditions you have to do deal with.” Modeling “reproduces the laboratory” as a site in which specific conditions are set up and organized to construct tools derived from the modeling practice. In order to model a system, things are analyzed, conditions created. The model exists in order to describe the exogenous—the complex reality outside—with just enough specificity to serve the process of shaping. The laboratory thus acts as a place to create knowledge of material by manipulating its parameters. “The knowledge then of a scientist is where to cut off, where to leave parts out which are not important, not interesting for your results. Here you have to recognize this border and if you want to make sure, you have to look outside and see if there are any showstoppers, things that will derail the model.”52 I ask Werner if his physics training comes into play in the ability to model and calculate complex systems that have many interacting variables. Of course, the “showstopper,” the critical point of such systems is usually the tiniest element—respect not only for the material as a general concept but also for the microconditions under which the smallest thing can disrupt the entire effort. The material, Lorke argues, “is always right; whatever goes wrong is because you didn’t pay enough respect to the materials.” This statement expresses a humbleness, a sense of matter’s own laws, predilections, tendencies. As much as we try to bend and manipulate matter to achieve our purposes, it may always elude our intellect, run from us, slip from our hands. The alien? We think we know it, but it deceives us again and again. This is indeed the Heraclitean account “of a world which holds forever,” in which “men prove uncomprehending, both before hearing it and after they have heard.”53 4 Stories Told of Sonic Reals As scholars in the history of science continually remind us, phenomena such as the movement of longitudinal waves only reveal themselves through the socioculturalmaterial conditions of the experimental setup or situation. Material phenomena subjected to scientific inquiry are not simply discovered out of some independent “nature” but instead, as Gaston Bachelard argues, produced, invented, and realized by way of technological instruments of analysis and manipulation. In the process of what Bachelard calls phenomenotechnique, the construction of an object of knowledge or experience is partly achieved through instruments. “The instrument is the necessary intermediary in the study of a definitely instrumented phenomenon that has been designed as an object of a phenomenotechnique.”54 Technology thus extends phenomenology. The objects discovered by science, like the behavior of

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sound waves, are not pregiven in the world but only come about tenuously and temporally through instruments and processes—“by purifying the natural substances and thus bringing order into nebulous phenomena.”55 Science provides language and descriptors to understand sonic reality: frequency (the rate of oscillation), period (how long the oscillation lasts), phase (when does the oscillation begin in time), amplitude or displacement (how far a wave moves from its rest point, equilibrium, in both the positive and negative direction), wavelength (how long or short is the wave in the medium). But to move from the realm of description to what acoustic waves disturbing and traversing air, water, metal, wood—that is, moving through mediums—do, we have to shift language, scale, and register. The descriptive machineries of physics also offer us language for action and qualities: elasticity, plasticity, force, strength, strain, resonance. These are qualities outside of human or animal perception and cognition but which constitute what we eventually perceive as the aural and the tactile, among other sense modalities. We shift registers again, zeroing in on a wave’s activity, its performances as it propagates, rarefacts, expands, reflects, couples, dampens, bends, squeezes, covers up, breaks, floats, absorbs, masks, rolls, snaps, ricochets, bounces, rounds corners, cracks, decays, absorbs. These actions do not describe what the wave is “like”; they are not a representation but a dynamic ontology of phenomena continually in the making. To say sound “bends,” for instance, provokes not only the question of why but how and in what context? Certain frequencies cover up others due to their closeness in space and time. The temperature changes the tuning of a system. A solid wall can block mid and high frequencies creating a shadow, but low frequencies can bend around it. Agency as activity and capacity enmeshed within the larger flux of the world immediately suggests that such behaviors are not trapped or imprisoned within self-sufficient objects. Each of the action verbs above describing a wave’s propagation encodes a concrete type of behavior. Sound waves hit a wall and bounce off of it (reflection); they interfere with and cancel each other out (phase cancellation); they bend as they move near to and far from the earth based on temperature (refraction); they couple with and reinforce each other’s phases and frequencies, generating “standing waves” or resonances. Acoustics describes the behavior of sonic-based phenomena and how such phenomena come into effect. But, as Bachelard tells us, the forces of raw phenomena are always mitigated, mediated. So we return to instruments. The material principles of acoustics, as Emily Thompson writes, are inevitably enmeshed in a complex web of sociocultural influences. For example, an equation by the young Harvard physicist Wallace Sabine that relates a room’s volume to the total area of absorption in square meters constructs an ideal “reverberation time” that acoustically standardized most concert halls in the early to mid-twentieth century. The “mastery of sound,” or “control through

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absorption” by way of the artificial manipulation of acoustic phenomena, became only possible by the increasing use and transformation of materials “plundered” from “animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.” Spaces transformed through the use of materials including plastic, fur, wool, felt, and even plant fibers became increasingly “absorbent”—far from any “natural” acoustical property.56 Despite the intertwining within sociotechnical-cultural contexts and partial production and realization through technologies, the acoustic-physical behavior of sound is neither mere metaphor nor pure social construct. It is concrete stuff with repercussions and affects. In this sense, we can understand sound as part of the realist tradition within the history of science. The real, as Ian Hacking articulates, “is that in which we can intervene in the world to affect something else or what the world can use to affect us.”57 This real for Hacking is intimately bound up in experimental life—tied to practices, instruments, and procedures whether within or outside of the laboratory. As in Bachelard’s technically conditioned scientific objects, the instruments of experimental practices enable us to manipulate entities in order to make sense of and understand them. In bringing forth the invisible and the silenced by partially shaping the vibratory world, O+A’s work is also highly dependent on a technological instrumentarium: microphones, digital recorders, flash cards, outboard processors, electrical circuits, and speakers. These condition and make possible a certain type of hearing that would go unheard without these tools of intervention. In this sense, instruments that expand or broaden perception belong, as Langdon Winner argues, to a certain regime of political practices.58 Instruments cannot be seen only as vehicles for knowledge representation; they are also machines for producing breaks and ruptures in learned, habituated ways of doing and perceiving. If I use a parabolic speaker, I engage with and manipulate a specific physical phenomenon— that of parabolic reflection, in which waves hitting a dish produce a narrow, columnated beam of sound in space. When the ear encounters this beam, a striking effect takes place; I suddenly experience sound as something architectonic—with physical and spatial boundaries and defined shape. As concrete, tangible form. For O+A, questions about how instruments enable their work are deeply convolved with processes of listening and attention to sound—what Felix Guattari, in his effort to thwart pure anthropocentric subjectivity, calls a “material of expression.” Instruments, procedures, and techniques need to be invented in order to bring forth and transform the sounds the artists seek. The hidden, infinite rhythms of frequencies in the “white noise” of streams could not be made audible “without headphones and probes and portable filters to actually hear what is inside that stream,” Odland explains. Listening is enabled and learned

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through instruments—through the hydrophones and probes that enable the ear to insert itself into the material expressions of streams, forests, the resonances of cities. The question of knowing the city by learning to listen is thus interdependent with the material conditions of the laboratories that artists construct to experiment on such sonic phenomena. Sound’s materiality, what Odland calls “simple and complex” simultaneously, can only be heard, felt, and experienced by organizing the proper conditions. These probes are far from neutral. Like the stories that historian of science Peter Galison tells of the twentieth-century transformation of physics by way of different worldviews between instruments of visual representation (image) and instruments of computation (logic), O+A’s instruments also leave the artists and their sonic objects of study altered.59 In an iterative manner, techniques of manipulating sonic phenomena capacitate the listening of the rhythms, frequency relationships, durations, and dynamics of a vibrating world—one which also changes the ears of the makers of these tools. “This turns out to be the most valuable thing that we found out: when we walk away from our installations, we still hear them. Our filters have changed in our hearing due to our instruments—so we’ve learned a new way to listen.” I hear at the moment from my Berlin window a siren’s two-toned pulse. It begins in the distance and gets louder and louder, suggesting that it nears in proximity. Suddenly, like a hole in time, the sound is gone. Did the vehicle reach its destination? Did someone turn off the siren’s switch? Did something pass in front long enough for the siren to go beyond earshot? What did these double windows of thick German-made glass and wood do to the sound and to the ear that picked up the vibrations? Is it there, or is what I hear a phantasm—one generated by the world? 5 Four Ears, or Listening as Making A few days after the opening of Sonic Vista, I accompany Sam, Bruce, and Werner on a sound-recording expedition through Frankfurt. Werner has shot amazing, large-format images of the industrial no-man’s-lands situated at the periphery of the GrünGürtel. Tarkovsky-esque in their appearance, the photos depict abandoned, desolate areas rung with highway overpasses and dotted with gnarled, bare trees and fetid pools of water. O+A plan to record in these infrastructure and green-zone crisscrossed nonplaces by using their unique “Four Ears” technique in order to obtain the sounds accompanying these frozen image spaces for a planned audio-visual installation of Werner’s photos.60 This installation ultimately doesn’t happen, but the experience of observing and working with O+A nevertheless sheds light on how they listen to and capture sound from the environment. For O+A, listening itself is making. “Four Ears” is both a recording technique and a worldview. As a technique, it describe two sets of ears wearing binaural microphones—small microphones placed

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directly in both ear canals that record two separate, 3D stereo images, essentially reproducing exactly what the ears hear.61 Although normally such devices are inserted in the ear openings of a so-called dummy head, a Styrofoam carved head that simulates the spacing between the ears and allows for the frequency adjustments (mathematically known as HRTFs: head-related transfer functions) that occur as a person moves their head around, O+A (and myself) also use their binaurals “in ear”—within their actual ear canals to accomplish highly detailed, ear-accurate recordings. The details uncovered by two sets of binaural microphones should thus aim to match the incredibly high resolution of Werner’s photos. Like many artistic processes, the Four Ears technique arose almost by accident. In their early 1990s collaborations, O+A already sought to record the acoustic environment from two different hearing perspectives. Starting with a synchronization between their two DAT62 recorders and binaural mics, the two composers carefully mapped out walking routes and carried their portable digital-capturing devices locatively through large-scale infrastructures—acoustic “hives” such as Grand Central Station buzzing with what Odland calls “alternating current technology”—in an effort to search out the rising and falling of different rhythms, durations, dynamics, and timbres that marked commuter time from postcommuter time. Later, listening to such recordings on a four-channel (two stereo pair) set of speakers unveils weird artifacts—different sounds and qualities of phase, frequency, and amplitude emerge from the four pairs of ears synchronized within the same time flow. A high-pitched whine sounds on Auinger’s recording of the white noise roar from the Croton reservoir’s spillway, whereas Odland’s capture, done in the exact same time and location, only reproduces the white noise of the water flow. The why in this case of accidental unveiling has to do with the specificities of instruments, both physiological and electromechanical. Unlike conventional microphones, binaural mics do not just record sound as if it was independent of the organ hearing it. Indeed, like fingerprints, the shape of every individual’s pinnae, the outer muscular flaps adorning the ear, specifically influences the frequency content of what enters the ear canal long before such frequencies are analyzed upstream as “sound” by the auditory cortex. The high-pitched whine that rings in Auinger’s recording of the Croton spillway is the result of his physical height combined with his particular listening position, which, at the time, was different from Odland’s. Frequencies of 8–9 kHz produced from some unknown source are revealed on one apparatus and silent on another. The technical machineries of recording themselves reveal that sound as a phenomenon is once again a combination not only of physiological, psychological, and technical conditions but also intrinsically intertwined with listening customs. What does such a technique wedded to and interwoven with the ears of the recordist do to listeners? Unlike technical spatialization methods such as wavefield synthesis

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or Ambisonics that attempt accurate simulation of acoustic spaces through the sheer firepower of the multiple, Four Ears does not aim at mimetic fidelity or auditory verisimilitude—the reproduction of a spatially accurate representation of some acoustic space on a multiple-speaker array.63 The technique instead unfurls a sonic atmosphere—acoustic spaces and auditory scenarios that provide the listener with a sense of how particular spaces react to specific sets of conditions. For example, when playing the recordings back over four sets of speakers, the audience experiences the strange sonic artifacts of the process— weird phasing and frequency effects that take place as electrical hums move in and out of contact with cars, buzzing airplanes, car alarms, or the movement of human bodies. Using the Four Ears technique, O+A’s 2009 performance project My Eyes .  .  . My Ears . . . , for example, showers, saturates, and bombards its listeners with the acoustic contours of urban sites: the almost dead reverberations due to the imitation leather seats within a car; the shattering clarion call of cash registers operating almost synchronously in the bowels of fast food stalls and newspaper stands in New York’s Penn Station; the zooming pitch shifts and seismic force produced by tires relentlessly crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Instruments reveal the habitus of sounding spaces. As a worldview, Four Ears discloses something else. Listening itself constitutes an artistic practice. Here, ear and microphone seamlessly merge. The mic that records in order to render the world is inseparable from the ear that houses it, making possible the sounding world. Perception spreads, divides itself. With such a technique, who is to say where listening is located? Syncing We gather at Werner’s backyard studio around 10 a.m. to set up the equipment for the day. In the driveway, a most unusual sight: a 440.4 cm aluminum tuning tube, bungee cord tied to the roof of Werner’s Mercedes station wagon (figure 1.14, top left). Surrounded, ensconced by our gear. A situation bordering on the ridiculous. The rear of the car a roving studio, crammed with apparatuses: MacBook Pro, mics, power cables, XLR cords, electronic detritus snaking spaghetti tangled through the backseat, making its way through the window slits and onto the roof. On our bodies, more gear. The body electric. iPads, iPhones running GPS navigators, digital recorders, preamps, more skeins of wires. I’m put in charge of monitoring the expedition. Stranded in the backseat, following the screen with my eye, earphones implanted, wrapped up in the thin, black serpents that emerge from the ends of these machines that act like gods (figure 1.14, top right). Before the recording expedition begins, preparation consists of an almost unfathomable series of rituals for those uninitiated in the acts of synchronization. We switch

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Figure 1.14 “Four Ears” recording session with O+A, Frankfurt. October 4, 2011. Photos by Werner Lorke and Chris Salter.

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on and sync all of our recording instruments in a specific sequence in order to get a somewhat time-locked set of recordings from these machines. “So, we need to have everybody ready and then we can start,” Bruce says as he moves away from the car, trying to get the attention of Werner and Sam so that all of the devices can be switched on in the appropriate order. As Four Ears procedures dictate, the key is the improvising of a sync point that ensures that both of O+A’s recorders are actually loosely synchronized, or “locked” in time code parlance, over the same time window with each other. Bruce drifts away from the backseat recording booth over to the garage area, where Werner is gathering additional equipment as I try somewhat futilely to capture his attention. “OK. The order will be . . . the laptop goes first, yours can go in and out. Sam’s has to be second. I’m going to conduct some interviews here as we do this.” I begin to document what devices we have with us. “So we have about three or four recorders. Bruce has a camera and an iPad . . .” Bruce interrupts. “Chris, I’ll document my own weapons . . . ask him what he’s got . . . wait, we have to sync first . . . Oh shit . . . just a second . . . adjusting the gain on the device [pause] . . . my voice . . . my voice . . . my voice is -20, I can come up a little bit here,” Bruce announces as he goes through that strange, almost robotic ritual that all sound engineers face: finding an appropriate level by using the voice as a marker. “My voice is . . . -12. I’m coming up a little more. My voice is -10. OK.” Sam almost forgets to switch on the GoPro attached to his head. “I have to switch on the camera. OK. Switching on the camera means I hope I hear it.” The moment finally arrives as Bruce snaps his fingers in the Four Ears directions (“left, right, left, right, center”) in almost ritualistic fashion as O+A’s digital recorders are now synched and Bruce narrates what indeed we are going to do over the next hours. Listening to Nonplaces Our sound-scavenging expedition takes us to three peripheral spaces bordering the GrünGürtel. Forsaken, DMZ-like areas sandwiched under huge freeway overpasses that shake and rattle these desolate territories with infrasonic and sometimes audible flanging effects, booms, and roars. All visually and acoustically united and dulled by gray noise wrought by the presence of mostly recent traffic infrastructure. In each, the messup factor is beyond the evident. Blatant, overstepping the obvious. Site One: A forest with the addition of two overpasses stacked on top of each other and filled with zooming traffic whose delayed waves interact with each other under the concrete, generating comb-filtered sounding frequencies (figure 1.14, center left).64 Site Two: A large park area filled with bicyclists and pedestrians strategically positioned 20 m below a massive freeway bridge—sonically plagued by the continual bumping and thumping of cars hitting uneven asphalt and dips above (figure 1.14, bottom left).

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Site Three: A placid park with a meandering canal and path filled with bicyclists and joggers that cuts under a viaduct that, while on first sight appearing to be placid, is revealed on the tube and binaural recordings as two crisscrossed expressways with multiple lanes of 100 km/h traffic. At times, these sites’ sonic quality is impinged on, transformed by an invisible but not inaudible substratum that upon more careful listening reveals an urban panoply of clashing materials responsible for the cacophony: concrete, tires, exhaust pipes, motors, rivets, and steel. At each site, our working ritual is the same: arrive, get out, check levels on the Mac in the back seat, organize and set up mics, recorders, cameras, sync, listen, record, listen, record. Yet, each location brings about its own special conditions and experiences. In the first, O+A and Werner have a surprise encounter with the police, who question what we are doing in this forest, why there is an elongated tube of aluminum attached to the roof of our car (which might be too long according to German traffic regulations), why grown men appear to wander aimlessly in a closed-off area with cameras strapped to their foreheads and earphones in their ears (figure 1.14, center right). In the second, beneath the percussive rhythms of the trucks and cars zooming overhead, a woman passing on a bicycle briefly glances at Sam wearing his wind-protector ear muffs in the middle of an autumn day and almost falls from her seat, either from pangs of laughter or terror. In the third, the park cut up by the freeway, our desired listening site is removed from vehicular access, and thus in order to obtain an interesting resonance recording we have to disassemble the tube lock, stock, and barrel from the car and carry the whole studio to the site, installing it in broad daylight on a makeshift sawhorse, much to the almost oblivious attitude of passersby (figure 1.14, bottom right). Failure, trouble ahead. Resync. Chris: “Ahh .  .  . got clipping. I’m going to pull the level down.” Sam: “The levels were so wrong . . . everything was clipping. Bruce, I have to restart otherwise, you can’t move close to anything.”65 The desire for acoustic proximity, the capacity to zoom into the delicateness of sonic details by moving your body and ears closer to the sounding source due to the characteristics of the binaural mics, is masked, blotted out by the concealed specter of the traffic’s sudden peaks and bursts of uncontrolled, unmediated amplitude and frequency. In the station wagon shuttling between the three sites, the conversation acts to punctuate, comment upon, and relieve the extreme concentration of listening to these spaces with microphones, recorders, tubes, and computers. Like in and out points of a recording, our running discussion bookends the Four Ears sessions and runs the gamut from technical arcana (how hackers have figured out how to interfere with wireless controllers; data hostaging; phasing and frequency artifacts arising from the shape of the overpasses in relationship to cars; how many colors of noise there really are;

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technical issues with a sudden ground loop caused by the Mac’s power supply connected to the car’s cigarette lighter) to more far flung arenas of anthropology, neuroscience, and acoustics (why anthropologists of science seem fascinated by technical descriptions of equipment; definitions of noise and how the brain hears specific signals; Shannon entropy and information as a technical concept). “Boys with toys” gabbing about “such good tools.” The intensive concentration required in listening to the specificities of each site as unique and individual also reveals something extraordinary about the ways in which sound enunciates change due to the interdependence of conditions. In this way, a listening excursion with O+A goes far beyond a standard sound walk; although the sounds are all being recorded onto digital devices, the experience of listening creates more knowledge concerning the interaction of elements than just the sound sources in and of themselves. One begins to listen to the behaviors of spaces—their temporal alterations and contours—and experience what Daniel Stern called their “vitality affects.”66 Sounds accelerate, pass by, suddenly burst forth, screech to a halt, decelerate, fire forward in relentless motion toward the future not only due to their own makeup, their spatiotemporal morphology, but also because of the spaces where their behaviors become articulated, influenced, and shaped. My job in the back seat is passive; my listening sense slaved to the machine while O+A wander around in the wild capturing the din of the world without the distraction of graphically seductive readouts and the artifacts of headphones and faulty audio cables that deliver undesired signals into the feed. Still, listening like this burns through the brain. Have you ever listened so intently that everything heard counts? Microzooms. Sonic fractals. I detect a strange effect, a sudden dip; a notch in the sound produces an odd phasing as cars pass. The phasing changes at different frequencies, producing surprise—a range of uncontrollable effects. Autos buzzing by, their sounds filter swept by the architecture. The various overpasses produce frequencies that interfere with each other within the harmonics of the tube. Flanging, comb filtering, delays, masking, the basic sonic effects one now finds ubiquitous in even the cheapest software plugins, are brought into being through the shapes, materials, and forms that physical spaces take. I didn’t know they were there without the machines. The alien appears . . . Listening to the Pregnant Oyster Berlin, months later. Another architecturally spiked sound-collecting journey with O+A at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures [HKW]) during the 2012 annual Transmediale festival, where I participate as artist and symposium co-curator.67 The recording session on this cold, snowy February day is shorter, more concentrated. With the three of us carrying digital recorders and O+A outfitted with Four Ears gear, the session begins with the ritual of synching and announcing the date, time, and location.

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Figure 1.15 “Four Ears” recording session, HKW Berlin. February 4, 2012. Photos by Bruce Odland and Chris Salter.

The building is extraordinary. Designed by the American architect Hugh Stubbins in the 1950s, the HKW was originally constructed as a congress hall to be given as a gift to then isolated West Berlin by the US government in 1957. Interestingly, the structure is prized among Berlin’s sound art community for its unusual acoustics, but to locals it’s only known by its moniker “die schwangere Auster”—“the pregnant oyster” (figure 1.15, top left). Stubbins’s thin-shell structure of curved concrete surfaces and glass windows, open plazas, relief-like flat surface panels, and half-circular, plate-like roof overhangs demonstrates and produces all manner of vivid sonic phenomena: slapback echo, unusual reverberation, flanging (phasing) and compression effects, filter sweeps and frequency cutoffs, standing waves, masking, diffraction. We commence our listening/recording exercise inside the large, open, and glassenclosed restaurant of the HKW—a boxy interior that can all but lay waste to most high-frequency-based sounds due to the reflective, nonabsorptive properties of the immense floor-to-ceiling glass window panes. But the ears here outwit the eyes. The space sounds surprisingly clear, conversations reduced to almost murmuring level—the after-lunch glucose drop experienced by the Transmediale crowd.

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Shifting into the similar but much smaller glass-enclosed back entrance leading from the cavernous restaurant to the outside patio, the acoustic environment radically changes, revealing thresholds. The narrowness of this glass box with the low ceiling and a thin but still absorptive slice of dirty, snow-ridden carpet on the floor gives the impression of the room as a giant compressor—a sound not unlike the 1980s gateddrum effect pioneered by musician Peter Gabriel.68 Like all experiments in which one changes the initial conditions to see what effects occur, opening and closing the door confirms this strange sonic coincidence. Outside, the snowy, slowly darkening Berlin mid-afternoon day dampens the sounding world. The sounds of the hardly there permeate the icy, still air (figure 1.15, top right). We wish to listen to this apparent aural stillness, to savor the snow’s vacuuming up of Berlin’s din, but only get within a few meters from the door when a new sound ruptures the contemplative scene: a whirring, droning tone. It builds as we near. Long pause. Just listening. Finally, after a few minutes an exasperated Sam speaks. “This sound fucks up the whole area.” We cannot escape the acoustic residuals of infrastructure. At first, only the highfrequency whine is present, but rounding the corner and moving down a small flight of steps, the entire wide-band frequency range comes into play as the eye syncs up with the ears. The source is revealed: a large ventilator fan embedded into the concrete surface of the bottom outer wall of the building, whose droning (what Bruce identifies as the third harmonic by singing along), limply clattering sonority colors the frigid silence of this winter afternoon. A low roof overhang acts as a filter sweep, reducing the range of harmonics as we move further away from the ventilator wall. The drone saturates the recording, masking out the snowy acoustics (figure 1.15, bottom left). Yet, just as suddenly as we discover the sound it abruptly, almost mysteriously switches off, the pitch of both the third harmonic drone and the clanking metal sound like a tin can tab thrown into a clothes dryer slowly die in dynamics; a glissando into nothingness. The three of us fall reverently silent in almost ecstatic relief as Berlin’s snow-absorbed sound swiftly returns: an S-Bahn train’s normally clattering steel wheels are reduced to a sliding whisper—the opening up of the hearing sphere as the city acoustic space contracts and then expands in the absence of the ventilator tamboura that seconds ago smothered the area. In the ensuing return to conversation, I ask O+A to describe the complex, material phenomenon of the ventilator interacting with the environment we are experiencing— the architecture, the density of the snow that only fully absorbs certain frequencies based on its thickness and compactness, the particular normative shape of this piece of mechanical apparatus produced by a factory far from its eventual site of deployment. Interdependencies, different systems clashing—a 50 Hz system (as opposed to the

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North American 60 Hz one), the normative structure of the device, perhaps a machine that is not particularly efficient. All these different parameters combined produce the complex acoustic phenomenon we have just experienced. Bruce seems annoyed by the notion that one could even begin to imagine the ancillary gray noise of this ventilator as being in any way efficient. “It’s not efficient. It’s all inefficiency. They didn’t produce it to make a sound. Their intent is to move air. Their message is to move air but the medium is sound. This ventilator came from a catalog. What they didn’t do is combine the catalog part that moves x amount of cubic liters of air per minute—they didn’t put that into the equation of how wide and tall the trapped air space would be that would create these sounds . . . they didn’t realize that what they were building was a filter for the third harmonic. That is a total accident. The sounds that are produced . . . it’s not their problem. They believe that sound behaves according to visual boundaries but it does not.” As dusk encroaches, we move from the patio area to the upper-level platform—a large, open concrete plaza ending at a curved, ribbed, muscular concrete back wall. As we mount the stairs and enter into the snow-dusted plaza, Bruce claps. The sound immediately ricochets back to us, two or three times in rapid succession like the quick volley of a tennis ball. Bruce continues, moving closer to the building, then further away again. The combination of the crunching mid-frequencies generated by our shoes trudging through the snow and the rapid slap back of echoes against the curve of the architectural shell make this visually empty, windswept site a force suddenly teeming with acoustic vitality. The “pregnant oyster’s” curved surface literally bounces the sound across the ribbed structure. Bruce speeds up his running pace along with the clapping. The increasing and decreasing length of the reflections produces a bizarre perceptual effect as we lose the sense of the sound’s origin. It no longer seems to be coming from Bruce’s hand. Due to the older reflected waves, the original source cancels out newly birthed ones. The building itself appears to sound, itself a source that not only listens but also talks back in material glory. 6 Can Architecture Hear? Interiors, writes the architect Peter Zumthor, function like instruments, grabbing, intensifying, and transmitting waves. In suggesting that materials render existing sounds’ potentials and effects, Zumthor posits architecture as altering existing sounds and generating new ones—as both signal processor and instrument. “We live, work and play in gigantic complexes of sounds—their distribution is what we call architecture.”69 Far from neutral shells, the shapes, textures, and materials applied to surfaces produce the invisible, dynamic forces we label acoustic phenomena. The complex swarm of echoes and flanging effects produced climbing the steps of the

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Mayan temples in Chichen Itza; the almost infinite sostenuto of plainsong caused by the extended reflective acoustics of medieval cathedrals; the circular motion of sounds whipped around the interior circumference of seventeenth-century English “whispering rooms.” In these and similar examples, the idea of architecture as a sounding surface and vessel has a long historical trajectory. If humans or forces like the wind or fault lines in the earth are necessary to create the disturbances in a medium that produce sounding waves, then sounds cannot exist apart from the spaces which they move in and through. The “composite of spatial qualities that have an aural dimension,” writes acoustician Barry Blesser, suggests not only that “spaces speak” but also that we can listen to architecture.70 In his 1959 work Experiencing Architecture, the late Danish architect and city planner Steen Eiler Rasmussen described “hearing architecture.” To hear architecture is to pay attention to matter usually ignored: the reflecting surfaces found in the floors of churches; the stone walls of nineteenth-century museums; the sequential flow of differently sized rooms inside Rococo mansions and villas that continually shift the acoustic register; the glass, steel, and concrete interiors of postindustrial spaces. The shapes and sizes of rooms impact the physics of sound and the physiology of memory. Although the immense stone architecture of Gothic cathedrals leads to specific kinds of music, namely the droning structures of Gregorian chant partially generated by the parallel walls and floors that “the ancients learned to play upon,” the political conditions of the Reformation resulted in acoustic reforms in churches, creating radically different spaces in which absorbent wood came face-to-face with stone granite. The addition of wooden galleries and boxes indeed created a radically different set of acoustic conditions. These conditions were taken advantage of by composers such as Bach who, freed from the almost infinite reverberations and sostenuto drones generated by the earlier stone cathedrals, could now turn toward writing music in a multiplicity of keys without the fear of spectral blurring from the continual reflections of waves.71 Through the example of composers adapting not only musical styles but entire compositional practices to architecture’s shifting sociotechnical assemblages, Rasmussen’s argument again demonstrates that the interdependencies between human actions and the actions of materials reveal the secretive powers of what we usually label as dead matter. But if architecture catalyzes human sonic invention, its ancillary effects resulting from a careless attention to matter equally generate stresses and strains for human perception. As masters of constructing box and cube cities, “we Westerners,” Odland argues, “basically fucked-up sound through the shapes we build.” Sound shapes are constrained, their dynamics thwarted by “European shapes that are easy to build with a ruler.” The intensity of axial, tangential, and oblique resonance modes grows in force as rectangular geometries are perfected and standardized.

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In contrast to modernist obsessions with “squares, rectangles, and cubes,” Odland passionately describes O+A’s experience in the parabolically shaped ruins of the ancient Pueblo site of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico; spaces where resonance operates on completely different principles than the rectilinear footprints generated in contemporary structures. The cultural center of the Pueblo peoples between 850 and 1250 CE, Chaco consists of mysterious architectonic structures within the canyon that form vast parabolic shapes. With their archaeo-astronomical orientation toward celestial bodies and cardinal points, the erosion-heavy ruins of the remaining edifices articulate the significance of the colossal scale that such ceremonial architecture held. Yet, according to Odland, the Chacoan structures also enable a freer movement of sound away from our imposed Euclidean geometries of boxes and cubes in which sound waves are constrained to reflect off rectilinear surfaces like arrows and rays traveling in straight lines. If a wave’s behavior, its dynamic potential as it moves through a medium such as air, is expressed in curves, in parabolic forms in which the “trees appear to be talking,” why do we continually build architectures that constrain these “sound shapes”? Such shapes, achieved from listening to Chaco’s resonating caves, crevasses, and chambers, give a “profound, physical, palpable sensation” of sound’s material dynamics. In one conversation about Chaco Canyon’s complex acoustics, Odland describes a small place where you can climb up into a rock formation that is worn down and that when stood upon functions as a “gigantic ear.” That Chaco’s parabolic-shaped ruin evokes the gestalt of the ear is not attributed to anthropomorphic happenstance or metaphoric fantasy. As in the exterior shape of the outer ears and their pinnae, the physical geometry shaped out of the environment acts to reflect sound as well as gather, direct, and focus conversations that may be happening miles away into its interior. O+A’s experimental investigations in Chaco Canyon into the genesis of sound’s materiality and behavior launch the preposterous-sounding question of whether architecture can hear—but this question in itself is not new. Francis Bacon’s 1627 work Nova Atlantis, a text often seen as a precursor for our current era of experience-based architecture,72 describes the utopian city of Bensalem filled with multisensorial buildings and, in particular, “sound houses” in which practicing and demonstrating “all sounds and their generation” is achieved through mechanical apparatuses for acoustic propagation, “to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.” Around the same time and as portrayed by the seventeenth-century Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, buildings, through their architectural features, allegedly took on the properties of the ear’s mechanics. In his definition of sound as the movement of bodies making contact through the interstices of air, Kircher already demonstrates his conception of the acoustic as lively, dynamic, in continual transformation based on the spaces it interacts with.

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In dozens of images in Kircher’s magnum opuses Musurgia Universalis and Phonurgia Nova, physiology and architecture seamlessly merge: “Piazza listening devices” shaped like cochlear forms (cocleato) are embedded into the interiors of edifices that link the whispers of the outside to the mouths of “talking statues” (statua citofonica) inside of rooms; drawings and diagrams of arched ceilings and walls from which echoes (Hxco) effortlessly bounce; horn-shaped acoustic instruments like Bacon’s “strange lines and distances” that travel across and through the structural supports and walls of buildings.73 If Kircher’s merging of listening instruments and architecture embodies the Baroque fascination with fusing the magical and the technical in the search for a new kind of perception, then O+A’s listening instruments that blur inside and outside, collecting and modulating the vibrating world, could also be said to carry on this tradition. Just as Chaco Canyon’s ancient forms interact with and partially form the landscape of rock and sounding waves or Kircher’s cocleato and delectationes eavesdrop on the chambers of royalty, modernity’s social-technical pinnae, its brutalist, conformist shapes that form the canyons of cities, create the roar and resonance of urban infrastructure. To rethink the experience of the sonorous and the architectural is to understand the world as a continually sounding plenum. In their work on sonic effects, Augoyard and Torgue formulate an impassioned call: “Listen to our cities! Is it not the nature of the urban environment to make us hear, whether we like it or not, this mixing of sounds? Dull murmurs, machine noise, the shifting and familiar acoustic racket created by people—every urban moment has a sound signature, usually composed of many sounds together. Beyond classification, the ‘city rings.’”74 The act of listening twists around ear and area over multiple scales and times. Although not making meaning in the way that neurons and brains do with sounds that enter the auditory canals from the world, the city as an architectural-acoustic entity demonstrates the inseparability between perception and materiality—the city both as sounding and listening organ. The walls listen, respond, and rejoice. 7 Hearing View A little over a year’s time since the opening of Sonic Vista. O+A have a new project—a 1 percent art and architecture commission in Northern Switzerland. Named Hearing View, Rheinau in O+A’s inimitable style of audiovisual disjunctive provocation, the planned installation site is a new architectural addition to the famous Rheinau clinic, part of the University of Zürich’s psychiatric faculty since 2007 and the first university psychiatric clinic in Europe (figure 1.16, top right).75 Hearing View, Rheinau will open in 2013 and seeks to create a permanent site of acoustic calmness. It integrates the two O+A trademarks, the tuning tube and the cube

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Figure 1.16 Rheinau Clinic with O+A, Rheinau, Switzerland. October 2011. Photos by O+A and Chris Salter. Schematic by O+A, copyright 2012.

speaker, into a new architectural renovation of the non-descript-sounding Buildings 80–82 at the clinic (figure 1.16, top left). The new building is a threshold between the outer and inner world. Patients housed here are already partially free to reenter the world outside but must return each night before complete reintegration into society. The cube speaker will be installed onto a specially designed circular, concrete platform. Following similar O+A installations, the cube is constructed of concrete but this time dyed blue and covered in a set of Lexan faceplates that enable it to be lit from underneath. Set within the enclosed back garden area and accessible only for certain patients, the cube faces outward to a fence, beyond which lies a road and a tranquillooking pasture. In the far distance, one of the highest peaks in Europe—the Jungfraujoch—is faintly visible. As the patients enter the garden, they will discover the blue cube mounted on its concrete platform in what Bruce names “the basic state.” The cube will hum softly all the time with the resonance of the tuning tube: a 4.2 m × 110 mm pipe installed on the building’s roof. If a patient sits on the cube, gazing into the distance at the far-away

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Alps, they trigger a pressure sensor, and the basic state gradually raises the volume in response to the visitor’s presence, cross-fading into a more “active state.” “The longer you stay, the more it opens up into a hearing view that’s both imaginary and real,” Bruce narrates. “The crossover to hearing view means that when you have a view, you expect to spend some time and throw yourself out into the environment to fully engage with the sense. You go there on purpose to put yourself into a certain corridor of observation. You plan to spend a little time. It’s not a snapshot.” This active state of perceiving reveals the second element of the installation: a special “Rheinau library of healing sounds” gathered from and recorded in the immediate environs. The pool of sounds spans the four seasons, different times of day and night, and changing weather patterns based on the measurements captured from a series of weather sensors that calculate pressure, wind speed, moisture, and temperature, which triggers and then interacts with the sounds (figure 1.16, bottom left and right). As Odland writes in the project proposal, “the Rheinau library will be developed by O+A using their twenty-five years of experience collecting an ‘Alphabet of Sounds’ in conjunction with the medical knowledge of the staff at the Rheinau clinic and in accordance with the needs of the residents.” The Rheinau clinic is something of an experimental ground for new concepts around what is termed forensic psychiatry: literally, the interface between psychiatry and the law “in which psychiatric knowledge, research, and opinion are applied to assist the courts in resolving legal disputes within legal contexts.”76 The various buildings have been highly structured in order to stage the journey of healing for the patients: from the maximum security “being completely locked up and living in a cage,” prison-like fortress that has won architectural awards for its humane design to structures that act as wayward stations and finally the new building addition that is the “last state before you can go back into normal life.” In this sense, the kind of sounds that O+A collect, such as Rhine water harps, the resonances of stones, lake waves, and the white noise of pine tree branches, will function as liminal acoustic accompaniment for those on the threshold journey back to the everyday world. The Rheinau project is a decidedly different one for O+A, which is why I’m here. Besides the fact that it is a permanent work conceived with architects and planned in advance to be directly integrated into their construction plans, it is also one of the two’s few works that does not principally focus on the urban sound environment. Does this new site change how O+A listen? Do the politics of enclosure and discipline that are so evident in this placid locale create a different way to listen? Although the tube resonator blurs the sounds of the surroundings, fusing the gnashing tires on pavement from the street before the clinic’s entrance with the vocalization of bird sounds in its cylindrical resonating body, the eventual presence of these spatially imprisoned human listeners summons forth quiescent microperceptions of

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timbres from the far field—the Rhine, the Alps, the barely noticeable rustling of leaves against each other, the hushed fall of snow onto amplified strings. Sounds designed for out-of-balance minds and spirits. Crying Sounds in the Rhine Arrival in Switzerland. After the burial, back to work. Exhausted, shoulder muscles in knots from despondent airplane flights across the Atlantic, too much conference drinking in Copenhagen. General feelings of apocalypse. I sit silently in the car, soaking up the warm air and wondering where I am and how I got there. Plan with O+A unknown. Hearing View, Rheinau remains, at least for the moment, unspoken of. All I know is that we are about to embark on a hike where we plan to make water harps in order to record the songs of the Rhine. This time, I will experience directly how tree parts become singing objects. Watching and talking with O+A finally turns into action. We walk along the river’s edge looking for sufficiently thick tree branches to construct the harps (figure 1.17, top left). Glistening sun reflects on the shimmering surface as we pass the fourteenth-century Rheinau abbey that sits regally on an island in the middle of the watercourse. Traces of Riverworks, O+A’s first work together, resurface. The search continues for the optimal locale in the Rhine to submerge our not yet built water harps, scanning the river’s current, wave patterns, pockets of stillness and turbulence. We settle on a concrete dam jutting out into the river (figure 1.17, top right). Rhine scouting and recording—a delicate operation; a not easy balance between human mechanics and the river’s flow, our human-constructed tools and nature’s predilections. If the river here has too many cross currents, oscillations will warble the sound produced by the water interacting with the harp’s strings, eliminating the possibility of steady tones. If the river is too slow, as it is in parts, not enough force and pressure will build up to drive the hydrophones, which are not submerged like usual but instead rubber-cable tied to the long branches in order to function like contact microphones. But the Rhine does what it will do, a concept explored by Odland not only in projects like Riverworks but also in his liner notes to a track called “Water Raga” on O+A’s 1992 CD Resonance in which water harps were used to hear how “the Croton river sings its melody during a spring flood.”77 The water harps we build are more like rapid prototypes than highly crafted instruments. Unlike the first Aeolian harps (also first described by Athanasius Kircher in the Phonurgia) played by the invisible revenant of the wind, which, as Shelly Trower notes, brought “nature’s music” to the senses, our harps consist of a taught wire and attached hydrophone that make contact with the branch outside of the water. We plan to dip the contraption into the moving river and record the sounds produced by the flow’s pressure intersecting with the string. As we plunge part of the branch into the current,

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Figure 1.17 Fishing for sounds in the Rhine, O+A, Rheinau, Switzerland. October 2011. Photos by Chris Salter.

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the hidden but sinuous microeddies of the Rhine should excite the string and produce sounds whose vibrations are picked up by the hydrophones.78 While Bruce carves a spot in the branch to place the hydrophone audio cable, he eyes me, momentarily emptyhanded. “You should play around . . . you should make one . . .” I find myself a branch, and Bruce assists in spanning the long strand of tangled harpsichord wire across the length of the wood, attaching it to an eye-hook that functions like a tuning peg (figure 1.17, center left). Affixed to the branch and consisting of a passive piezoelectric element, the hydrophones we use function like ultrasensitive contact microphones (figure 1.17, center right). Originally developed by the military to detect submarines and icebergs during World War I, these sensors are mainly used to measure pressure changes underwater and for acoustic monitoring in the sea, but in our instrument they remain outside of the river’s way.79 We now each have a water harp/hydrophone instrument whose audio output is connected to a digital recorder, and we submerge the twisted branches outfitted with wire and electronics into the Rhine. In the headphones, the sound of mourning bursts forth, evoking chanting Gyoto monks, sobbing mothers, crying infants. Fluctuations in velocity shift the pitch and amplitude of sounds produced by the string, generating vibrato and tremolo. Like a violin, the flowing water pulls on the string, dragging it downstream as the tension adds a restoring force, pulling it back. We watch the water gathering around the string in tiny whorls and vortexes—sudden invaders in the river’s somewhat regular flow (figure 1.17, bottom left). The water harps are so sensitive to their material conditions that slightly shifting the parameters, such as the thickness of the wood, the tuning tension of the string, or the mechanical-electric quality of the hydrophone, results in completely different melodies and rhythms. What we record seems far from the typical sounds captured by hydrophones—the songs of whales, the detection of submarines in the absence of sonar, locating oil and gas deposits, acoustic monitoring of movements in the undersea earth. Using the hydrophones to probe and record the hidden motions and invisible energies of a now sonified Rhine, over the next two hours we listen intently with rarely a spoken word among the three of us (figure 1.17, bottom right). Actions that border perception. The hydrophone becomes partly the ear. Listening substitutes for speech, with aural communication reduced to intent concentration, staring into the water, smiling and nodding from our headphone-encased heads. Each of our Rhine harps has its own unique timbral and rhythmic quality; the space of interaction tightly coupled to the situation. Occasionally, one of us jumps up excitedly and hands off his headphones to a fellow listener to glean in on some microspectacular sonic detail passing by: a warbling caused by unseen turbulence; a pitch change that shrieks out; a sudden dulling or dampening of the sound due to clogged leaves and detritus stuck in the string.

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At one point, I shift position and walk to the end of the concrete pier that we have been recording from, sticking the harp into far more agitated waters. The pitch in the headphones violently oscillates, as if the water were suddenly torturing the string, brutally crashing into it and forcing out cries and screeches in a destabilized, vacillating manner. From the corner of my eye, Bruce and Sam seem still mesmerized by the river’s micromelodies, even as they begin to draw out their dripping branches from the water. The light is slowly fading. The recorders are finally filled up with sound. Our experience of the Rhine’s performance concludes for this day. “The Sounds of Our Culture” Amazing after-dinner walk with Sam and Bruce in the open fields above Rheinau. As we hike away from town into the chilled, crystal-clear air, the sky becomes luminous with stars. The fields are thick with low-lying, shimmering fog, forming halos around the yellow town lights at the periphery. First, in the pitch-black darkness, we again pass by the dam where we recorded with the harps earlier—the almost deafening cascade of white noise from the Rhine’s ceaseless current unrelenting. We make our way up the serpentine road to the fields on top of the hill bathed in monochrome fog on the left, with the village of Rheinau on the right. Bruce describes the white-noise filter sweep—the way in which a filter is rapidly run up and down the frequency bands—generated from the white noise of the river as we climb the road and move away from the Rhine. The white noise of the dam’s coursing waterfall now slowly gives way to the sonancy of infinite numbers of flying aircraft in the sky. Because the white noise masked everything near the dam, I now only gradually get the acoustic sense that the heavens are indeed filled with planes. Earlier in the day, Bruce and Sam sung a little song to me that goes: “The heavens are full of tourists. The Google books will come!” Indeed, as we make our way across the field there seems to be an infinite stream of flights. Tiny blinking lights slowly flitting across the sky appear almost invisible to the eye but fill the air with a thousand sonic thunders and flanged rushes. We continue walking. In the auditory near field, only the quiet sound of the gravel crunching beneath our feet is evident, but in the far field the ubiquitous sense of traffic continuously hums, masked somewhat by the dense woods on the other shore of the Rhine. In our acoustic bubble, the outside tries to leak in. We cross down toward the inlet in the Rhine occupied by the island with the abbey on our left. Sam and Bruce once again laugh as they relay a story of trying to record “beautiful church bells of the abbey” before my arrival. Waiting patiently for the hour to strike, with a perfected setup of expensive German microphones, the onset of the bells is interrupted in the moment of recording by the blaring explosive acoustic trail of a plane flying overhead. An astounding number of flights in the air: Where are they going at 23:00? In the urbanscape, these Icarus-like visions are masked (just like their

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acoustic counterparts), but in this darkness the moving particles are easy to pick out in comparison to their distant star cousins. Bruce continues the story of the church bell recording session. Waiting. Starting over but then only to have the session disrupted again, this time by the shattering harmonics of a diesel truck gunning its engine as it passes by. The idyllic “Swiss landscape of tractors, weed cutters, engines and motors . . .” We cut across the small footbridge spanning the inlet and walk over onto the island. Rupture. The sky tears asunder. The phantasmagoric sound of a turbo jet passing overhead. As the aircraft produces its unending falling glissando, the result of both a Doppler shift and the parabolic spatial pattern that such a siren-like sound produces, it seems like this timbrally pure but still roaring presence emerges directly out of the stolid, massive walls of the abbey’s architecture itself.80 The walls reflect the changing frequency, boosting the amplitude and giving us the impression that the jet is landing directly before us. It is as if the walls open up their hidden sonic secrets to us. The disjunction, the mess-up factor between the visual and the acoustic, arises at every turn on this intensive sound walk in the middle of what one believes to be the idyllic Swiss countryside. The visual appearance of the river seems to change with each step, based on the continual flow of objects in the heavens. At one point, I stare into the still water and catch the upside-down, mirrored reflection of the starscape. The shimmering undulation makes it appear that the stars are flickering faster than in their distant reality, while the far away traffic and flights overhead give the impression that these dying bursts of light are speaking. As we leave the darkness of the island over the footbridge again, a new sound gradually fades in on the horizon: a pervasive, mid-frequency-range ventilator that colors, blankets the entire landscape with an omnipresent standing wave like aural fog. The sound appears to get denser, louder, more present, intrusive as we pass a row of neatly manicured and ordered Swiss row houses that face a long stone wall on the other side of the tiny village street. The tone makes one drearily nauseous and corporeally fatigued, as the resonance increases with the reflections bouncing back and forth between the edifices of the houses and the stone barrier opposite. The standing wave seems to cover the entire village, its origin coming, as Bruce explains, from a flower shop with Internet delivery service in the village below. “The sound of jobs.” The abbey bells ring. The wave coats them as well, leading Sam to claim “the bells have a fan attached to them.” Indeed, only after we round the bend and the familiar white noise of the dam on the Rhine sneaks its way back into the aural environment do we begin to lose the drone. It is only barely erased when we arrive back at the inn, a full forty minutes after we initially hear the resonance. Later. Even inside my gemütlich Swiss-styled room in the guesthouse, the tones break through, pursuing me. The low partials of the ubiquitous aircraft penetrate the room’s windows and

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Figure 1.18 Sam Auinger recording at Rheinau Clinic, Rheinau, Switzerland. October 2011. Photo by Chris Salter.

the silent night. Unlike an auditory schizophonia wrought by the age of noise in which sounds have been untethered and disembodied from the mechanisms that produce them, these intrusive sounds take on their own life.81 They are not the product of an unwanted and destructive industrial age that was somehow foisted upon us like acoustic ecology pretends but are instead, as Sam repeatedly states, “the sounds of our culture.” The Site of Thresholds The construction site at the clinic. This morning it is decked out in an ambiguous mixture of bright sunshine and fog, the view of the Alps, almost 180 km beyond, blocked by the thickening haze (figure 1.18). As we sit down outside the fence, directly where the cube speaker will eventually rest (“the point where you will look out”), we gaze into the fog and try to imagine the view, listening and recording the sounds emerging from the pallid haze—the tinkling and clanking sound of cowbells that slightly rupture this unusual atmosphere of stillness. The hearing view quickly overcomes us as Bruce speaks. “When you look in this direction and you look down to the Jungfrau, you have this 180 kilometer view. It passes all sorts of different landscapes and ecosystems so we’ve been going out and visiting the places you can see from here and collecting, like a tree full of blackbirds from that particular hill that you can see. If you are here and you are sitting here, and you’re trapped and there’s a fence and you can’t leave, what can your imagination extend to by listening and coupling to the view which you can see. The mountains come and go, you can see them some days and other days they are not there . . . and on the days that you can see them, they come and go in the haze and so there is a temporal nature to the view that you see, a temporal nature to the cycle of days, months. You can say that this piece is about time and how your senses respond to time and we are making [the

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sounds] quiet enough that you have to go to this spot to hear. So, our job is to collect sounds and work with them . . .” Despite Bruce’s enthusiasm, being here at the site of the clinic and noticing the architecture of discipline unleashes political queasiness. I can’t help but notice the irony of this situation, in which punitive infrastructure and a calming, healing acoustic worldview collide. On the contrary, this seemingly placid landscape of late nineteenth-century buildings evokes gut feelings of tranquil yet somehow unsettling isolation from the world of the normative “outside”: the asylum in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain; the countryside setting of Jean Oury’s and Félix Guattari’s psychiatric clinic La Borde outside of Paris; the experimental space of the radical antipsychiatry movement at Kingsley Hall. The fact that the Rheinau clinic performs a double role as a site for retribution and healing unearths an almost Foucauldian nightmare in which prison and clinic seamlessly merge, all the while somehow mitigated by O+A’s delicate hearing lexicon of Rheinau’s pastoral moments. Is this site really that different? We stare at the Jungfraujoch in the distance as it gradually emerges from the haze. Only brief moments of silence. The tinkling is masked by the mid-range blustering roar of a distant plane overhead. A somehow familiar sound yet odd in this quiet context that has a noise floor of below 30 dB. Perhaps a foreshadowing of things to come . . . A Sounding Journey to the Top of Europe Speculation becomes reality. The site of the Jungfraujoch beckons us. We set out on a long, almost three-hour drive to record the sounds of glacial melt and cracking ice some 3,471 m high at the top of Europe. The continual flight paths overhead that interrupt our intense conversations and nightly walks into the fog-bound fields around Rheinau also wreaked supreme havoc yesterday with plans to record the delicate sounds of nature in the environs near the city of Winterthur: the faint rustle of pine leaves impacted by the autumn breezes; the trickling of a Swiss countryside brook; the mollifying pleasure of crinkling leaves beneath our boots. Instead, the supposedly idyllic Helvetian environment continually teems with a different set of sounds: the whirring of lawnmowers, the distant but ever omnipresent rumble of the autobahn, and the grinding of wheat threshers and tractors. It seems we will have to literally take the 180 km journey from the installation’s future location to the heights of the Jungfraujoch to record with hard disks and microphones the distant cross modal hearing view, that extension of the eyes and ears that Bruce spoke about that at the moment is masked so efficiently by the din of Swiss industrial agriculture and cross European flights. Bruce states, “I’m looking forwards to recording the jets at a higher altitude . . . so I can get closer to them. Also looking forwards to snow blowers and . . .”

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Like other recording and sound-scavenging trips with O+A, the journey is marked by observations that always put the acts of hearing and listening at the center. Traveling on the ultramodern Swiss highway system, we stare somewhat shocked at the material quality of acoustic barriers and baffling that flow from tunnel section to tunnel section, from highway to off ramp and back. The devil is in the details, but in Switzerland this clichéd expression reaches godlike proportions. What can we make of the carefully designed Swiss architectural-acoustic features? For example, tiny fins that hang from the top of a tunnel running under Luzern carefully positioned to eat up the 5 kHz frequencies that spill off the highway. Or acoustic structures built out of soil so carefully designed that they merge seamlessly into the landscape, appearing as natural features that mitigate their normally intrusive visual qualities. Perhaps even more shocking for us are the “insanely quiet” tunnels that have 70 dB noise floors due to punch-hole precise, perforated steel panels aligning the walls, noise deadeners on the roofs, acoustic treatment on the sides and broken up surfaces, all usually unheard of in long chambers filled with roaring car engines grinding against pavement. Sam states that the tunnels are “really constructed, they’re constructed,” suggesting that the Swiss have actually paid attention to the acoustic aspects of design. It somehow seems to be louder inside the car than outside of it. Some two hours later, we are nestled into the almost antique mini Jungfraubahn, the cogwheel teeth–based (rack rail) train that makes its 140 euro journey from the valley base station at Grindelwald-Grund upward through the Kleine Scheidegg midstation and finally to the Jungfraujoch “top of Europe” peak so many thousands of meters in the sky. Begun in 1896 but only completed in 1912 due to financial delays and workers’ strikes, this rack rail train is another marvel of Swiss engineering. Cut deep into the rock of the Alps, the small passenger train makes several stops at intermediate stations within the mountain itself along its journey. For brief, five-minute moments at a time, we passengers can briefly exit the train and glance outwards through thick plate glass windows onto the wide expanse of glaciers (figure 1.19, top left). Something seems slightly amiss. The tourist brochures announce the Jungfraujoch as a “high-Alpine wonderworld of ice, snow and rock, which can be marveled at from vantage terraces, the Aletsch Glacier or in the Ice Palace.” Upon arrival at the Ice Palace/Ice Sea (Eismeer) station, the last of the mid-stops before reaching the top, expectations begin to deflate. The wonderworld remains of the last ice age palpably manifest the pernicious ravages of climate change directly before us: gaping holes in the ice with only barren rock left as a reminder constitute the almost ghastly scene lying outside of the thick, ice-cold-to-the-touch, glass panorama window. While Sam, Bruce, and I take photos, I cannot help the uncanny suspicion that our imagined utopia of glacial sonority will quickly become unglued.

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Figure 1.19 Recording the melting glaciers at the top of the Jungfraujoch with O+A. October 2011. Photos by Chris Salter.

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Arrival at the glorious “top of Europe,” the Jungfraujoch station, throws us into the next surreal experience: an approach into a supermodern train tunnel that appears to have been designed straight from the sketches of Ken Adam’s sets for James Bond films (figure 1.19, top right). Lines of fluorescent fixtures span the seemingly endless length of tunnel cut into the mountain. Leaving the train and ascending the almost vertical staircases that burrow through the rock, we arrive inside a gargantuan visitors center that seems designed for an unending stream of international tourists. Thirsty from the long journey, Bruce offers to spring for cappuccinos at the innocuous-looking snack bar that greets us as we enter into the air-conditioned, mall-like center. Purchasing a coffee from a stall should be a relatively standard activity, but we notice that the menu is partially written in Sanskrit and features masala chai and the Indian snacks known as chaat. During the preparation of the drinks, I wander over to what at first appears to be a standard souvenir store, replete with Swiss flags and Victorinox knives. This little store, however, also seems to feature a predominance of expensive Swiss watches that, judging by their four-figure price tag, are certainly not like the fake models one can fence from a street seller in Shanghai. Almost livid, Sam appears next to Bruce, announcing that he has already had enough. Apparently, as I am later informed, Sam’s attempt to find the exit out of this family fun park yielded another surprise: an authentic Bollywood-style restaurant on the floor below us with picture-perfect panoramic views onto the top of Europe. Somewhat panicked, we again attempt to locate the exit to actually go outside to the glacier, a none-too-easy task considering that the visitors center consists of a series of labyrinthine tunnels going in different directions. A soundtrack of strange and dramatic but faint orchestral music seems to be drifting aimlessly through the tunnels, its rising and then falling amplitude accompanying our desperation as we seek freedom from this designed experience. The “Alpine Sensation” series of exhibits, as we later read in glossy tourist language, is described as follows: “With captivating individual pictures, lighting and music, the experience round the tour depicts the past and present of tourism in the Jungfrau Region, the ingenious idea of Adolf Guyer-Zeller—founder of the Jungfrau Railway—and the extreme efforts made during construction of the railway.”82 The tunnels continue past massive steel doors cut into the rock and video- and sound-filled rooms that flash, rumble, and spin in all manner of tourist-attracting magnetism. We quickly hurry past so as not to be caught in the pull of this constructed Alpine adventure. But in the final, last-ditch moments of upwelling panic, we discover an even larger metal door that almost carelessly leaves us suddenly outside in the white. Abruptly, we land in the frigid air and blinding sunlight bouncing off the snow and ice. One might think a sigh of relief would be in order, and yet the family entertainment bonanza continues into this manicured, defanged wild: a not trivially numbered

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group of visitors undertake sledding down one side of the glacier that abuts up to the building we have just exited, while their assembled voices all but mask out the remote, dampened gurgitations of the ice we seek. It is clear from the scenography before us that any recording of the delicate sounds of the ice awakening will have to be done far from this site. The journey toward a noise floor from which one can perceive by human and artificial ear what we came to find begins. Past the throng of plastic-prone sledders, past the picture-snapping planners of future weddings overlooking the range, past the rampaging Indian children bundled in North Face jackets and Bogner pants there must be something akin to an unblemished sonic movement of crystallized, stratified matter that yearns to sing its song of awakening from slumber against the impenetrable chorus of atavistic tourism. We glance at our watches, knowing that the last train to the base leaves in one hour (figure 1.19, center left). Trudging further away from the din of globalization, the voices become fainter as the wind first diverts and then removes them from the hearing perspective. We eventually come upon an area of glacier devoid of human bodies and voices (figure 1.19, center right). The sun here is dazzling, blindingly so; it forces us to don sunglasses and remove equipment, the fuzzy windscreens, Roland and Sony recorders, portable rubber tripods, hydrophones and batteries from the plethora of bags and backpacks we carry. Bruce continues walking farther ahead, trying to escape the legions behind (figure 1.19, bottom left). As he disappears over a hill, Sam unpacks his gear, fastens the binaural mics in his ears, and aims his recorder at the glacial structures to our side. Standing at the edge of the glacier, one hears the slow falling of dripping water, but it is still ever so slightly masked in the background by the up-and-down pitch inflections of Korean, Indian, and Japanese voices, which have a very different rhythm and intonation than Swiss or other European tongues. At the edge of the open, snowbound expanse, we hear the water dripping, moving in the crevasses. Sam wants to stick the hydrophone in the ground, but the problem is that we’ve gone so far up and the train goes so far down that we have little precious capture and listening time. We are under someone else’s time now, the time of infrastructure and not elastic perception. Consequently, our predilection for listening seems to have shrunk. Then, almost miraculously, the clattering background voices cease. An austere silence envelops the scene. It shocks our ears through its sheer emptiness, the only disturbances being the minute sounds of turning on and off the cameras and recorders we tote with us that microfracture the mute glacial air. Sam warns that below the smooth ice fields lurk crevasses, sometimes tens of meters in depth. We pause again, listening to the quietude. “Maybe we find the place where we hear the rumble then . . .

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sometimes, like in Austria it’s quiet for hours and then from one moment to the other, it starts moving . . . acting . . .” Standing in almost suspended animation with recorders aimed at the walls of ice, we only hear our dampened breath and the now very far off sound of kids’ voices. Nothing moves. My hand quivers trying to steady the recorder. Our breath appears in front of us and then, just as suddenly, dissipates again into the chilled atmosphere. Time passes, but little sounds. At the edge of starting to hear the tiniest movement in our headphones, without warning a cacophonous acoustic shriek generated by a military jet slices the sky and just as soon is gone again, leaving us with the microsounds of the silently breathing glacial ice almost in response but masked out on the recording. Bruce reappears after what seems to have been an endless period of strained, intensely mindful listening for the rumbles. He points at a gigantic snow blower and assorted other snow-grooming machines. “There are the holy motors that run the culture and keep us from deteriorating and putrefaction . . . the holy cryogenic motors of speed and decay . . . the holy motors of speed . . . There are two kinds of holy motors: the ones that freeze us into stasis and keep us from decay and the kinds that accelerate us into oblivion.” Sam points to areas of the glacier that have clearly been melting at an unusual rate. “You see, this doesn’t really match up anymore . . . that’s why they have all these signs not to walk across the snow here . . . ” We all stop to listen. The sound of very distant whooshes mixes into a kind of barely audible white noise. “Wait Bruce, I get the feeling that from down there you can hear a kind of a road . . .” “At the moment I hear a jet . . .” Nothing. A rapid spell of silence. Rupture again. A shattering sound, without warning. Another fighter jet, most likely doing exercises, rips up the sky. Its sheer fierceness uncannily evokes Pynchon’s opening lines in Gravity’s Rainbow: “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”83 We are dumbstruck from the brutality of its sheer volume and speed. The sound barrier almost snaps, and then just a booming reverberation remains, resonating among the mountains. Unfucking-believable. Dead silence. Shock and awe. We continue walking and then stop to record. Walking. Recording. Stopping again. The backpacks and gear swish back and forth as we move closer to the dreaded visitors center. None of us speaks, but we are increasingly aware of the ticking clock announcing the last train soon leaving the station. Another sound announcing itself. Growing in amplitude and then just as soon, disappearing. No longer the supersonic trail of a jet, this new sound is the inevitable circular, Doppler-shifted click clatter of another familiar skycraft: the helicopter. We hear but cannot see the source of the sound, like a nondiegetic sound effect in the film we inhabit.

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Soon, the sound returns with more vengeance. It spins around us centrifugally, gradually encircling the visitors center that stands in its way. The circular, flange-like clattering of the blades is accompanied by a buzzing, nasal-sounding symphony of grinding, winding motors. It is as if a thousand leaf blowers had suddenly descended from the sky onto our glacial paradise. A helicopter scene worthy of Apocalypse Now, but we still cannot locate the source of this all-encompassing acousmatic terror. We finally catch the source of the disturbance. A bright-red tourist helicopter is attempting to land on the ice shelf leading from the visitors center and toward the precipice (figure 1.19, bottom right). Inside the cabin, the figure of a dark-skinned woman with a high-end, prosumer DSLR camera positioned against the glass. Oddly, the helicopter does not set down but instead picks itself up and flies away, carving an almost 360-degree circular trajectory in the air whose acoustic trail traces an identical series of reflected wave shapes around the bordering mountains. With the helicopter image and sound briefly out of sight, we stare dumbly out into space. A long gap of somewhat awkward and silent disbelief. Finally, Sam begins: “The guy’s just sightseeing. Sightseeing with the helicopter . . . (another long pause; a longer pause) . . . It just tells so much about the sound in this space. Super fascinating how the sound swings around . . . ” Sam is interrupted as the aircraft’s sonic melee once again begins to grow in intensity and volume. The same pattern of events in playback: the clicker clatter of the blades, the army of buzzing noises sounding like lawnmowers, the droning vibration of the engine, the circular ricochet of reflections against the mountain walls. The helicopter reappears, but this time its tourist occupant has changed seats, relocating to the other side of the aircraft. A more picture-perfect shot of the glacier? We are even more dumbstruck that the helicopter has returned. The wall of sound becomes almost unbearable, and we flee to take refuge from the pandemonium in the “Alpine Adventure” of the visitors center. Sonic affect indeed. 8 Affects and Atmospheres In his discussion of the concept of affect as a “pre-personal category, installed ‘before’ the circumscription of identities and manifested by unlocatable transferences, unlocatable with regard to their origin as well as with regard to their destination,” Félix Guattari invokes the little-known and mostly forgotten German phenomenological psychiatrist Hubertus Tellenbach in a footnote. For Tellenbach, in the acts of smelling and tasting (but one could include hearing, touching, and seeing as well), the subject blends with the world as much as the world blends with the subject. Unlike his contemporary, Tellenbach doesn’t speak of affect but instead of atmosphere. Atmosphere signifies a surplus, something lying beyond the actual act of experience but “that we sense belonging to it.”

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Atmospheres operate through preverbal and prereflective contact. “An individual has atmosphere in that it radiates the nature of his personality— ‘like a delicate cloud, which emanates from his person’ but simultaneously, one also has what he calls ‘a sensitivity for atmosphere’ . . . only in the resonance of others responding to our atmosphere radiation do we sense the nature of our own being . . . through the medium of atmosphere we continually acquire ourselves from others” (Tellenbach).84 Atmosphere as emanation and radiation. Atmospheres don’t only originate from humans. The smells (or sounds) of “churches, hospitals, schools, and barracks” emit particular scents (or sounds) we enter into. Atmospheres emanate from preindividual situations beyond the limits of human subjectivity and perception. Thinking about affect, writes anthropologist William Mazzarella, “points us towards a terrain that is presubjective without being presocial. As such it implies a way of apprehending social life that does not start with the bounded, intentional subject while at the same time foregrounding embodiment and sensuous life.”85 Indeed, affects function more like resonances, growing and weakening in intensity—actuated and excited as things come into sympathetic vibration with one another. They not only speak to me but “through me,” and in this way they blur the worn-out dichotomy between a world of subjects and one of objects. Affects circulate, intersect, and intertwine through the world, making no distinction or value judgment over human, “animal, vegetal, mineral .  .  .Human hatred, anger, or joy is real, ‘is somewhere’ just as within animistic societies good and evil forces flow through all manner of objects, sites and practices (acts of scarification, sacred rituals and dances, animals and totems). Affect thus “remains hazy, atmospheric [my emphasis].”86 The subject to such affects, Guattari argues, the supposed s/he who perceives the world through the sense organs, is beyond the immediate “me” or “I” and instead “no more than a fluctuating intersection, and the consciousness ‘terminal’ of these diverse components of temporalization.” But Guattari goes further, because just as there is no clearly bounded subject, no immediately stable “I” that is affected, there is also no clear object demarcated, astray or for itself in the world that acts as the sole origin of such affects. But affects are not just extraordinary. As Guattari in his discussion of “polyphonic subjectivity” argues, they occur in the heterogeneic, crisscrossing flow of everyday rhythms and actions. These “ordinary affects,” writes anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, “give circuits and flows the forms of a life. They can be experienced as a pleasure and a shock, as an empty pause or a dragging undertow, as a sensibility that snaps into place or a profound disorientation.”87 That affects operate in the atmospheres of everyday, like a gasoline-stinking, yellowlit tunnel throbbing with car resonances beneath the Frankfurt train station or the

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crystalline Alpine mountain air shot through with the shattering din of aircraft high above the world, is also why they form a critical part of the toolset of artists. It is then less a question of how we use materials than of making possible, enabling the noticing and arrangement of assemblages of dynamic conditions, the atmospheres that make possible the production and emanation of affects—ones that are certainly beyond any singular point of control. O+A don’t describe their practice as harnessing affect. Yet, from my observations and our collaborations they are aware of what it does and how it functions. The careful, precise arranging of interdependent conditions that operate on each other captures much of what O+A and other artists working with atmosphere, with the acoustic, the vibratory, and the unlocatable yet still palpable conditions of environments appear to be after. From their way of working with the sounding world, O+A do not describe a separation between human perceivers and nonhuman materials or objects nor do they articulate their work in terms of nodes of actors/actants within a network of relations. The hearing perspective is far more complex, more nuanced than these theoretical frameworks, because the interdependencies of conditions, the wirkungszuzammenhang, are not fixed but temporally unstable, subject to sudden fluctuation. Often they operate without specific intentionality, plan, or an implied system of order and hierarchy. This does not suggest that the conditions that become arranged are random; the response to the interwoven conditions of particular acoustic sites and climates is indeed part of the technique and highly articulated craft that O+A have developed immanent to the hearing perspective. In our experience at the top of the Jungfraujoch, the “setup,” the atmosphere, does not add up. Another mess-up factor. No one, no singular subject, has put together the extraordinary and unintentional scenography of snow-blowing machines, touristfinanced helicopters, intercontinental aircraft, Indian vacationers inspired by Bollywood with their lust for the exotic within the Swiss alpine landscape, recreational infrastructure, the fragile state of glacial masses suffering, composers listening to their cracking and melting. The situation is only partially arranged, but it can nevertheless be felt in all of its heterogeneity; its rhythmic oscillations, temporal contours, interference patterns. This atmosphere is neither neutral nor intentionally designed, yet it does things to us without our being able to describe why, how, or what is responsible for this doing. It is alien to me. O+A describe their work as being about a perspective, a hearing one. That perception is only situated in the organs of hearing, the ears, however, may be an illusion. This is not only a story of localized sense making in the body, for if artists like O+A use a technical instrumentarium like a resonator, a digital recorder, a microphone coupled

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with the ear, then something else seems to be taking place; something that thwarts the concept that there is a pure hearing subject who distantly listens to sounding objects in the world. As O+A’s tube-and-cube resonating instruments demonstrate, perception between the machine and us blurs. It emerges from and latches onto affects flowing through the world and not the other way around. 9 Tuning When I first meet Bruce Odland in the fall of 1992, he tells me his goal is to “tune the world.” With widespread access to the World Wide Web still to come, I search for references in the Stanford library’s electronic card catalog system about tuning, sound, and the world. The one book that continually comes up is R. Murray Schafer’s 1977 work The Tuning of the World, which many still refer to as the “bible” of soundscape ideology. Murray Schafer’s definition of tuning suggests a harmonious relationship actively established between the sounds of the world we inhabit and us. Inspired by the medieval alchemist and mathematician Robert Fludd’s drawing Divine or Celestial Monochord (1615) that depicts the hand of God literally tuning the instrumental body of the Earth, Murray Schafer’s book is not without controversy.88 The sound artist and trained entomologist Francisco Lopez criticizes Murray Schafer’s notion of tuning as one of “silencing” our noisy, postindustrial cultures. “A musical composition (no matter whether based on soundscapes or not) must be a free action in the sense of not having to refuse any extraction of elements from reality and also in the sense of having the full right to be self-referential, not being subjected to a pragmatic goal such as a supposed, unjustified reintegration of the listener with the environment.”89 Later, I discover another definition of tuning—one not derived from music versus noise but that captures the process by which technologists engage in a continual material interplay between their devices and the world. Tuning is involved in the development of new machines in which a “delicate material positioning or tuning .  .  . in the sense of tuning a radio set or car engine with the caveat that the character of the ‘signal’ is not known in advance” takes place.90 I am intimately familiar with both contexts. My own projects always involve tuning the delicate interplay between technical systems, such as sensors that try and gather as much information about the physical world as possible, and human actors. “We never have time to tune the system” goes the mantra. The painstaking task of adjusting the parameters of software to the exogenous noise of the world to produce interesting and, at the same time, somewhat repeatable results somehow gets added on and then curtailed at the last minute because of time, financial pressure, and the general constraints of complex technoscience-based artistic production.

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But my work with O+A suggests yet a third understanding of tuning—that is, a mindfulness, an awareness of how material forces and human perception meet, interplay, interfere, transform each other. Tuning as coproduction. One cannot tune a system if the conditions are not right or if competing interdependencies interfere with each other, much like sine waves that are 180 degrees out of phase cancel each other out. This mindfulness of conditions brings me back to the question that Sam initially posed in relation to one of our discussions around the Rheinau project: “How are we really going to design the world we are living in? Do we do it by accident? Or do we do it according to what we have learned?” The Indian philosopher Sundar Sarukkai suggests that this awareness of conditions, of tuning, may move us into a new territory of aesthetics. According to Sarukkai, art making or making things in general may increasingly be akin to a form of judgment rather than the romantic notion of individual expression. Making things may no longer be about a priori plans that ignore the conditions at hand but rather setting up a situation, being acutely aware of how things act within that situation, and responding (what Sarukkai calls “judging”) to it. Monday, September 30, 2013. Hearing View, Rheinau opens. I talk with Sam on the phone about the alphabet of healing sounds. He says the patients and the local clinic staff seem mesmerized by them, sitting on the blue cube in the garden for a long time. Then, I receive a strange email from Bruce: Long, much longer story made vey [sic] short. Piece is up. First test with patients scheduled for half hour, lasts three. Patient who for year and half refused to speak to doctor, Gets up off cube expense of library of sounds, Starts immediately talking to doctor about what he heard. Doctor will write journal article. B

In one of our countless conversations, Auinger states that the reason he continues to collaborate with Odland is precisely because of that initial project Riverworks, so long ago. “At that time, what I couldn’t stand [in terms of art] was being in public, being in the environment and not reacting to different conditions . . . what was so wonderful is what Bruce came with, along with these objects, was the idea that the interface was also really a connection to some kind of living structure .  .  . because the interface of these objects, putting them into the Danube was not only making something speak that, at first, you would not hear but most important, that changed with the environment.” Perhaps it is this awareness of the ensemble of conditions and their impermanence that O+A strive for in their art and research; in their attempts to “tune the world.”

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Figure 2.1 Tissue culture session, SymbioticA. April 2012. Photo by Anke Burger.

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Animating Semi-Living: Muscle Actuators as Cultural Evocative Objects

• Aims, Expected Outcomes, and Significance This interdisciplinary project will investigate the use of skeletal muscle tissue (engineered from isolated myofibres from established rodent skeletal muscle cell lines) as actuators (linear motors) from technical and conceptual perspectives. The proposed project involves preliminary research with data collection into the growth, stimulation, and animation of muscle tissue in vitro (in a tissue culture flask). In times during which our cultural understandings and ethical framework concerning life are becoming increasingly incompatible for what we learn about life through the sciences and what we can do to life through technologies, there is an urgent need for interdisciplinary research that involves collaboration between different disciplines. It is also important that future projects include, as a major objective, concerns with public outreach and output in the form of an artistic/design research as well as exhibition. This research is unique and significant as it involves cultural researchers who are engaged hands on with the technologies of the life sciences, who are actively collaborating with scientists and engineers. The idea, as well as the device, of the Semiliving actuator will be best implemented and understood if approached simultaneously from both technical and cultural perspectives. This is because the device raises profound perceptual and ethical issues concerning the approach to life as engineering. These issues will be best approached, comprehended, and articulated by the collaborative effort of scientists, engineers, and cultural practitioners. Furthermore, exploring this research subject from interdisciplinary perspectives will feed in return the design of the device and will contribute to some of the technical approaches.

Knowledge transfer

Cultural practitioners (Perceptual and ethical knowledge)

Scientists + Engineers (Technological knowledge)

Holistic conceptualization of semiliving engineered systems communicated to wider public

The significance of the proposed project lies in its interdisciplinary nature. Not only does this study tackle novel cultural, philosophical, and ethical questions regarding human perception of movement and life, in the process of doing so it also provides an unique opportunity to asses and experiment with the technical use of engineered muscle tissue as an actuator in engineered systems, such as in the field of prosthetics and robotics. The project will thus be conducted for multiple perspectives and has the potential to develop as a collaborative project and to allow the researchers to pursue specialized aims. The project, in short, involves an initial research into the growth and use of muscle tissue actuators as “motors” that generate movement. These tissue constructs will be explored from cultural perspectives,

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mainly through art and design discourses and actualization. Furthering discourses about humans’ perceptions of movement as an indicator for “agency,” as manifested in technologically created/dependent “life” (Karafyllis 2003; Turkle 2005). Following the growing field of biological art, this evocative, animated Semiliving will contribute to some of the philosophical and ethical discussions concerning the implications of new life sciences knowledge and its application on our society (Squier 2004; Waldby and Mitchell 2006; Landecker 2000). Hopefully, these basic prototypes will be presented in the future to the public in art and design venues. Also, this project aims to examine the underlying mechanical properties of tissueengineered muscle and their potential use as an actuator in engineered systems (e.g., a robotic arm).

• Research Plan, Methods, and Techniques Using tissue-engineering techniques, skeletal muscle tissue (engineered from isolated myofibers/primary cultures/established rodent skeletal muscle cell lines such as the C2C12 mouse myoblast cell line) will be cultured and differentiated, in specialized differentiation medium, into muscle fibers (also known as myofibers/myotubes). Using a variety of substrates, we will attempt to align the muscle fibers, that is, to grow them over a silk suture, and use a pressurized system to stretch and relax the substrate. Different methods will be used to contract them simultaneously, such as the use of electrical current. Another method will look at using the properties of the substrates for contractibility.

• Mechanical Properties Muscle tissue will be grown over size 0 laminin-coated silk suture, serving as artificial tendon (Dennis and Kosnik 2002). The artificial tendon will be mounted in a permeabilized fiber test apparatus (Model 802B, Aurora Scientific Inc., Ontario, Canada) capable of measuring in the μN range. (The test apparatus is housed in laboratory of Dr. Gavin Pinniger in the Department of Physiology and has been made available for the purposes of the proposed study.) The mechanical properties of the synthetic tissue will be quantified by applying small-amplitude-length steps, ramp stretches, and sinusoidal oscillations via a high-speed length controller and recording the force output with a highly sensitive force transducer system at 1 KHz. Muscle temperature will be kept at 37 degrees Celsius. Muscle will be activated via electrical field stimulation through platinum plate electrodes connected to a Grass S44 stimulator following the procedures of Dennis and Kosnik (2002) or via exposure to highly Ca2+-buffered solutions of a known free [Ca2+]. A force-length relationship of the tissue-engineered muscle will be developed by repeating force measurements over a series of muscle lengths ranging from ±50 percent of the initial muscle length. The muscle-force-length relationship will be converted to a sarcomere-force-length relationship by imaging the muscle sarcomeres during contractions using a microscope-mounted camera (Model 802B, Aurora Scientific Inc., Ontario, Canada). A force-velocity relationship of muscle will be measured using a classic force-clamp technique (Malamud and Josephson 1991). Maximal isometric force will be normalized to muscle stress using an estimate of the muscle cross-section obtained from microscopy. Maximal power and work output obtained from the force-velocity experiments will be normalized to muscle mass. The properties of the engineered tissue will be compared against the properties of single muscle fibers isolated from the fast extensor digitorum longus and slow soleus muscle of adult wistar rats. —Ionat Zurr, “Animating Semi-Living: Muscle Actuators as Cultural Evocative Objects,” unpublished Grant Application, 2009

1 A Living Machine? “Unbelievably expensive!” This is my response while furtively glancing online at apartment rental costs in Perth, Australia, from freezing cold Berlin, part of the hurried

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preparations for an upcoming three-month residency at SymbioticA, the Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts housed in the School of Anatomy, Physiology, and Human Biology (APHB) at the University of Western Australia (UWA). Because I’m on a one-year sabbatical, I’ve taken the opportunity to travel to the other end of the Earth with my wife Anke to collaborate with SymbioticA’s Ionat Zurr on a new art and science project involving the use of cellular tissue as a medium for artistic expression: Tissue-Engineered Muscle Actuators as Evocative Cultural Vehicles for Discourses about Material Agency and Living Machines. TEMA for short. The adventure I am about to embark on strikes many I tell beforehand as science fiction—the creation of a “semiliving” machine in order to conceptually, technologically, and aesthetically explore the fragile border between life and nonlife and the ageold dichotomy between machine and organism.1 The concrete plan seems even more outlandish: grow a clump of muscle cells in vitro, outside of a body, prod them with electrical or mechanical actuation in order to induce contractions, and sense and map these tiny contractions into the scale of human perception through sound, light, and vibration so that the tissue’s micro-movements are amplified and felt by spectators in the gallery. This seems par for the course for SymbioticA, an organization renowned for shattering ontological assumptions about the living versus the inanimate. Also known by their artistic name, the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A), Zurr and her partner, SymbioticA cofounder Oron Catts, have worked for over twenty years to use “tissue culture as a means of artistic expression” and in the process have garnered international praise, astonishment, hatred, radical misconceptions, and, as Catts tells me with a gleam in his eye, “fruitful misunderstandings.”2 First experimenting in the Lion’s Eye Institute at Sir Charles Gairdner Teaching Hospital in Perth, then soon after under surgeon and tissue-engineering pioneer Dr. Joseph Vacanti while in residence at Harvard Medical School in 2001, TC&A has pioneered the use of biotechnological material within artistic contexts through the creation of what they term “semilivings”: sculptures constructed out of cell cultures grown over polymer scaffolds in order to maintain their shape and form. Ranging from Victimless Leather, “a prototype of a stitchless leather jacket grown in a techno-scientific body” to the infamous Disembodied Cuisine, an in vitro, cultured muscle cell steak eventually consumed (and spat out) by visitors to the 2003 Nantes exhibition L’Art Biotec, TC&A’s projects all have one thing in common: They exploit the arcane and complex techniques of tissue culture and engineering to construct hybrid natural-cultural objects that challenge the ontological distinction between the living and nonliving in a highly designed, visceral manner. But the project that Catts and Zurr have invited me to collaborate on is different from their earlier work. Although it involves the use of tissue culture techniques, TEMA aims to “explore the complex relations between movement and vitality”—to convey

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a sense of aliveness and hence felt affect through the direct movement (i.e., spatial displacement) of an artificially engineered cellular object. TEMA stands in strong contrast to the abstract notions of long-term growth (part of Aristotle’s arguments for what constitutes life in De Anima) that Catts and Zurr have provoked with their previous projects.3 Whereas earlier works such as Victimless Leather or Semi-Living Worry Dolls produced evocative “living” objects constructed of growing and differentiating cells seeded onto 3D substrates to hold their physical shape, Zurr now wants to up the stakes: that is, take head on the issue of aliveness and agency through what she calls, after physicist and science studies scholar Karen Barad, “ontoethico-epistemological” questions about “life and affect created through the phenomenon of movement.”4 The Work of Moving Muscle Cells The technical work of TEMA involves the tissue culturing of skeletal muscle cells (called myoblasts) from mice and derived from the well-known C2C12 cell line—cells grown in tissue culture that stand for generations of a primary culture. The cells are grown and maintained in a custom-designed technological environment called a bioreactor—a device that mimics the chemical and mechanical conditions of a tissue’s native environment.5 In vitro—literally, “in glass.” As the cells grow in culture, a specialized fluid mixture of nutrients and antibiotics supplemented by fetal calf serum (or fetal bovine serum, FBS), the myoblasts begin to differentiate through a process called myogenesis, forming a multinucleated, sausagelike syncytium called a myotube.6 Myotubes have the potential to produce self-motion, to literally contract and expand if grown in specific conditions and hence, when in motion, produce minute mechanical forces (figure 2.2). As usual in such research-driven art-science projects, multiple agendas vie for attention. From a scientific standpoint, the collaborating biomedical and sports-engineering researchers want to measure these engineered muscle-cell microforces and compare them to similar movement in explant (primary skeletal muscle fiber that has not been cell cultured) tissues. In order to encourage the myotubes to contract and expand, that is, to twitch, however, the cells have to be aligned in rows next to each other in the petri dish and prodded with tiny amounts of force so they respond. Inside the bioreactor, we need to install actuators, which provide tiny but significant external forces to the fused myotubes as well as sensors to measure the force and displacement (strain) of these contractions. The bioreactor that needs to be built thus has a number of necessary design requirements: the ability to maintain, organize, and actuate the muscle tissue through electrical, chemical, or mechanical stimulation as well as to measure motion. A larger question looms: how to turn difficult bioengineering research into an aesthetic experience, one which palpably creates a sense of “unheimlichkeit” (uncanniness),

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Satellite cell

Myoblasts

Myotubes

Myofiber

Figure 2.2 Myogenesis of a cell. Graphic by Ionat Zurr.

in which a microentity’s quivering, fragile motion reaches out from its protected sterile housing and viscerally holds us in its sway. Unlike many biologically based artworks that depend on sight, TEMA amplifies Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s argument about the production of “presence effects” in contrast to the hermeneutic tradition of interpretation in material form. For Gumbrecht, presence suggests something that is “supposed to be tangible for human hands, which implies that, conversely, it can have an immediate impact on human bodies.” In stark contrast, in attributing meaning or interpretation to a thing, “we seem to attenuate, inevitably, the impact that this thing can have on our bodies and our senses.”7 Presence as touch from a distance. To achieve such presence effects, we have to move from abstraction to the concrete—onto people’s bodies. The sensors and actuators will translate the movement of the muscle organoid (as it will come to be called) into voltage and then amplify it into the scale of human perception. By mapping the muscle movement through software into vibration and light within the exhibition environment, the barely perceivable twitching of this organoid should create a visceral reaction in and through the bodies

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of the spectators. This strategy avoids the need for purely microscopic visual representation of the myotubes in the exhibition context—something that would turn the brute materiality of the semiliving machine into another purely image-based representation. At least this is what we imagine. 2 Suspicions of a Wet Kind Doubt Seeds Art This plunge into biological art is ironic. My own artistic work has everything to do with performance and nothing to do with biological systems. I know much about sensors, sound design, and sensorially expanded environments but little about cells, tissue culture, and current biological laboratory practice. A strange role—a collaborator who is skeptical of the work. An insider with doubt and partial knowledge. A trip to the unknown and a direct challenge to my own practice. I doubt this project will actually happen; it sounds so beyond plausibility. This is why impossibility is so intriguing. I have long been suspicious of biotechnical art due to the inherent contradiction in the rhetoric of many artists who work with “living” (that is, biologically based) material, only to turn such life-like “stuff” into static sculptural objects or purely conceptual art strategies à la Duchamp. Mostly, biotechnical art functions like an epistemological game of belief construction, in which spectators gaze upon manipulations of life inside the often fetishized accoutrements of laboratory apparatuses while projecting their hopes and fears, their beliefs, that something is alive in those flasks and incubators before them, even though that alive “something” is as removed as diamonds behind glass. Writing in Bioart and the Vitality of Media, cultural theorist Robert Mitchell makes a similar observation about bioart’s scientific rhetoric and its simultaneous allegiance to conceptual art strategies, such as performance and happenings from the 1960s. On one side, Mitchell argues that bioart acts as a prophylaxis, shielding the gallery or exhibition visitor from wet and fleshy living matter by employing distancing devices to “re-present” biological issues using nonbiological media. On the other extreme, bioart exploits a vitalist strategy, directly confronting the spectator with the media of biological materiality (cells; fluids such as blood; skin; bacteria) in order to “use spectators themselves as a means, or media, for generating new biotechnological possibilities.”8 In many biologically based art works, the sense of vitality that Mitchell suggests, however, is less conveyed through the perceptual experience of motion than by the appearance of something organic and textural, communicated through the faculty of visual perception. As the visitor gazes into the alchemical vessel of the bioreactor, a sense of haptic vision, as the nineteenth-century Austrian art historian Alois Riegl named it, takes over. Unlike the distanced sense of what Riegl called “the optic,” in

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which vision holds objects at a cognitive distance (fernsicht), the haptic suggests a sense of intimacy and closeness (nahsicht) in revealing the depth, density, and impenetrability of an object.9 If the prophylactic versus the vital represents one binary in biological artworks, the tension between wet versus dry also haunts the field. Getting your hands wet, not observing and standing back. The wetness of a sculpture composed of throbbing tissue. Messy, slimy, living stuff that gets your hands dirty. The new flesh. But also, a strike against computer art. The dryness of screens, mobile devices, software. So unvital. Curiously, the historical migration of the term “wet” in the natural and chemical sciences has little to do with the shock value of using blood or tissues as an artistic medium and much more with the workaday content of laboratory infrastructure. In contrast to “dry laboratories,” which emphasize the use of “dry” materials, electronics, and large-scale instruments, “wet laboratories” consist of bench-based experimental practices in which biological or chemical agents are experimented with, tested, and analyzed and which require “water, direct ventilation, and specialized piped utilities”— literally, wet in the sense of the use of liquids.10 There is a more controversial appropriation of wet that returns us to the problematic of the visual. Wet suggests a fascination with the moistness of biological material such as cell cultures, blood, organs (the Greek artist Stelarc’s external ear),11 or everyone’s favorite material of the moment—skin. This further transformation of the word “wet” into a visual Grand Guignol spectacle seems all the more strange considering the long and torturous path that vials of liquids in the lab need to take to eventually become some kind of grotesque living fantasy or the fact that, despite continual discussions of wetness signifying “hands-on” practices, there is no direct contact with biological material for reasons of contamination and/or infection.12 There is something amiss here. The more I hear these dichotomies of wet and dry used, the more they seem at odds with an artistic-scientific atmosphere dedicated to breaking down binaries and splitting asunder ontological divides. Affective Time or the Timing of Affect As a practice, tissue culture deals with another more critical problematic: that of time. In her first-of-its-kind historical analysis of the subject in Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies, anthropologist Hannah Landecker argues that the name tissue culture itself describes both a technique and a field of knowledge: the artificial growing and sustaining of cells in vitro using a complex regimen of instruments, technologies, and methods.13 With the invention of tissue culture as a medical technique in the early twentieth century, the essential breakthrough was the ability to intervene in and manipulate biological time. Not only could cells “live without being inside a body,” but they could also suddenly be observed changing directly in front of the spectator.14

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Examining the accounts of tissue culture pioneer Ross G. Harrison’s early in vitro experiments with growing explanted tadpole nerve cells in drops of clotted lymph, we can already experience the sense of wonder and awe at being able to see, that is, palpably sense temporal processes that up to that point were locked away inside the bodies of animals and humans.15 Acutely aware of Harrison’s work and Landecker’s research, Zurr and Catts want to make biological time a key artistic component of TEMA, part of an affective register within an aesthetic event that operates all the way down to the level of human perception. Time should be materialized, felt in and on the spectators’ bodies—its fine grain shifts, stops and goes, sudden breaks and ruptures. The challenge of TEMA is not to fall into what Georgina Born calls “monotemporality”—one continuous flow of time and becoming—but instead to enable the visitors to feel time over multiple scales: the immediate response time (the so-called time constant) of the myotube’s twitches that lies beyond visual perception; the latency and gaps in time initiated by electrical-mechanical stimulation of the cells in order to condition more motion; the actions of the mechanical components of the bioreactor itself, which holds the “living machine” in the form of the muscle organoid and will produce positive feedback; the atmospheric time in the room where the machine will be exhibited; and finally, the changes of sound, light, or whatever elements we decide to use to sidestep visual representation and amplify the tissue’s behavior for the observer’s bodily experience. It suffices to say that movement in this science fiction project is not only to be experienced as the physical displacement of an object in time but also as a felt expression of its dynamics and duration, one that “gnaws on things and leaves on them the mark of its tooth” (Bergson).16 3 Experiments in a Lab at the End of the World Wind back the clock. One year prior. Perth. A strange place for a strange experiment. The most remote city in the world and twenty years ago a sleepy backwater of a town now experiences an unprecedented economic boom thanks to the exploding Western Australian mining industry. Fueled by what seems to be infinite Chinese growth, gold, silver, precious metals, and, most of all, iron ore are being extracted out of the ground at a ferocious rate in the middle of the Western Australian desert at Kalgoorie in the east and in the Pilbara some 1500 km north. Similar to the dot-com mentality that overtook San Francisco like an epidemic in the late 1990s, the stratospheric salaries paid to FIFOs—mostly men who “fly in and fly out” to work in the searing heat of the mines and then retreat for five days at a time back to civilization—have caused Perth to become one of the most expensive cities in the world.

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The disappearance of a whole day goes by unnoticed—a hole in time. Landing in Perth at 21:00, blurry eyed. Crossing the date line and losing all sense of orientation, time, and position. Endless flight from Amsterdam via the always otherworldly Dubai airport. I take a taxi out to Ionat and Oron’s house in the northern suburbs. In the darkness, the desert-like environment rolls by, crisscrossed by highways whose shoulders are dotted by sparse vegetation: gnarled trees (one of some 200 varieties of Eucalyptuses) anchored in sand. The vertigo of eternal travel is soon replaced by the grounded confusion of place, a theme of incongruence that will continue over the next days as I strive to find and maintain my bearings. To land in Perth is like landing at the edge of the world. Driving the next morning with Ionat into the campus of the University of Western Australia where SymbioticA is based, I study the seemingly haphazard cityscape of Perth and its far extended suburbs from the car window—a juxtaposition of English-style architecture, an American downtown with Indian influences (all the houses have outside porches) that seems to have fallen into the desert. The incongruity of foreign place continues upon arrival at UWA: a huge, picturesque campus sitting on the blue-green waters of Matilda Bay that unmistakably reminds me of my alma mater, Stanford. With its Romanesque architecture of sandstone buildings and red Taco Bell roofs shaded by enormous palm trees swaying in the dryish warm weather, I feel like I have fallen back in time to Palo Alto. SymbioticA as Studio-Lab SymbioticA. Founded in 2000 by Catts (then finishing a design degree at Curtin University in Perth), cell biologist Miranda Grounds, and neurologist Stuart Bunt (both faculty members in the school of Anatomy and Human Biology), SymbioticA was modeled after Catts and Zurr’s Tissue Culture and Art Project success. Since then, it has garnered international recognition as the place for artists from Australia and abroad to explore and experiment in the nebulous grounds between art and living matter.17 The center is directly embedded, perhaps parasitically so, in the School of Anatomy, Physiology, and Human Biology, a rather nondescript university building whose white stone and glass-windowed front appears functionally modern but aesthetically bland (figure 2.3, top). Ionat shows me around the building. Amid the standard university setting of hallways and lecture rooms are sprinkled collage-like sculptures, paintings, large photographs of cell formations that look like galaxies, a gallery of artworks inspired or suggested by biology that occupies the first and second floors of the building that is the curatorial work of the artist/sculptor Hans Arkeveld, a “favorite son” of the school since the 1960s, whose work partly involved casting anatomical dummies among other things and whose incredible office across the way from a room of -80 degree Celsius freezers has to be seen to be believed (figure 2.3, center and bottom).

Figure 2.3 Three perspectives of the Department of Anatomy, Physiology, and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. May 2012. Photos by Anke Burger.

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SymbioticA’s central office itself is located at the outside of the main building, tucked away in the corner on the second-floor balcony behind a door that, except for a simple sign and an array of posters announcing past events, does not really let on that a world-renowned art/science center is housed behind it (figure 2.4, top). The first impression. A central office space but one of odd juxtaposition (something that I am quickly getting used to here)—a white paneled, 70 m2 room with wood floor and numerous skylights that is a cross between an eco-visitors center in a national park, an artists’ atelier, and a wet laboratory, complete with sink and sign stating emphatically “Do Not Drink Water” (figure 2.4, center). Orderly bookshelves dense with exhibition catalogs, books on biology and Leitz binders, and wall-hung posters and prints from previous TC&A exhibitions or SymbioticA events occupy this welcoming looking but rather ordinary space. There is also an array of office desks, chairs, a couch, and a central table along with a large glass box raised and resting on a wooden platform filled with all sorts of memorabilia that acts as a kind of SymbioticA wunderkammer: former residents’ visitors’ cards, devices, and other flotsam and jetsam (figure 2.4, bottom). The space itself bears little of the academic atmosphere found in the adjoining building. Indeed, it seems rough, almost unfinished, as if the builders ran out of money before finishing it. Scavenging through the archives that afternoon, I come upon the reason why the SymbioticA space still seems so raw, unfinished, out of place in a science faculty. With its founding, the initial grant proposal to the Lotteries Commission and the University conceived of SymbioticA as an atelier model—an “art and science studio” that would be a “collaborative facility for multidisciplinary research and development projects and for providing artists access to the wealth of knowledge and materials associated with the Department of Anatomy. The studio will also provide scientists access to art through their interaction with its activities.”18 This central studio would fulfill a common multiuse facility dream of many, an art-science research/culture infrastructure—an “empty space that would be utilized for different artistic activities—from a still life drawing studio through performance rehearsal space to new media installation.” The space was originally intended as an artist’s atelier to be literally used as a studio by painters, sculptors, or dancers (hence the wooden floor) who would observe or participate in the scientific milieu of the school and be inspired to create in the studio. TC&A, the central artists in residence, as well as others would thus have access to the studio for the creation and production of work. Catts, however, had another vision in mind. His and Zurr’s growing international success as well as a research-driven art practice gradually shifted SymbioticA’s mission from a lab that would inspire artists to use biological concepts in traditional artistic forms such as painting or dance to an enabling facility to work with scientific techniques and procedures—to use “life” as an artistic material in a conceptually and

Figure 2.4 Three perspectives on SymbioticA, Department of Anatomy, Physiology, and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. March 2012. Photos by Anke Burger.

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critically daring manner. More to the point, although histories of biologically based artwork trace the origins of the field and practice back to artists such as the American George Gessert, who bred hybrid plant forms in the 1970s, much of these earlier practitioners’ work was done outside of institutions.19 The laboratory’s norms, machines, practices, and culture now become paramount to art making. Access to knowledge. Instruments and techniques that cannot be found in a dingy Berlin artist’s loft or a Montreal artist-run center. One reason why SymbioticA is different. Despite the center’s notoriety, the social atmosphere is laid back, so much so that at first I wonder where all the other residents are. It soon becomes apparent that SymbioticA is organized around a kind of hub/spoke model, with the studio office acting as the central meeting and gathering space, a social hub for the ubiquitous Friday seminars as well as the office for the managing director, the assistant manager, and Oron (an arrangement that occasionally leads to certain levels of stress and distraction) together with the external satellite labs in the school that serve as the sites for research, development, and some minimal production. Expectations are immediately deflated. The hope of getting my hands dirty with the mysterious process of tissue culture on this exploratory visit is dashed. My visit is too short. I cannot be inducted with health and safety regulations in the use of the labs and thus can only watch from a distance—something that violates the SymbioticA modus operandi of “hands-on” wet biology. To compensate, Ionat allows me to observe the process as preparatory work for my follow-up residency, planned for next year, as well as to get a sense of exactly what is entailed with cell culturing. The tour continues. We pass through endless arrays of laboratories, those “salons of the scientific world,” as Georges Canguilhem called them: CELL Central, with its arsenal of imaging equipment from dissection and inverted microscopes to more complex histological apparatuses; a spinal cord repair center with rows of glassware, refrigerators, and shelves filled with flasks holding fragments of preserved spinal cords and other biological stuff next to incubators with taped-on names like “Hercules”—again, standard trappings of biological research that increasingly appear otherworldly in the slowly oncoming jetlag (figure 2.5). Sites of manipulation and transformation. These rooms of apparatuses and bits of cultured organisms suggest Karin Knorr-Cetina’s observation that laboratories are the places where objects become transitory, subject to endless malleability and transformation, “never more than a stage in a transition from one state to another.”20 This notion of a transient, continuously malleable object constitutes the essence of the kind of work that Zurr and Catts do—the almost alchemical transformation of one substance into another, the manipulation of life, but also the transformation of the artist manipulating it. Is this transformation of the maker what distinguishes the lab work of artists from that of scientists?

Figure 2.5 Biology laboratories, Department of Anatomy, Physiology, and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. May 2011. Photos by Chris Salter.

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“More Research than Art” After an expensive lunch on the University Club’s porch in the blistering Perth sun, we jump immediately past the introductory formalities. Ionat has been awarded an internal university grant to develop the technical infrastructure for this art and culture project that I will be part of. This grant involves collaboration with Nathan Scott, a professor of mechanical engineering and long-time supporter of SymbioticA who ironically will soon be leaving for a new job at a US university. Nathan’s job is never too easy; he has to conceive and build a specially designed bioreactor to house and maintain the muscle tissue.21 Although the bioreactor as an instrument is a functional necessity in microbiology, biochemistry, molecular biology, and other sterility based sciences, it has also become something of a fetish object in art and biological circles, particularly in how its visual appearance is framed and staged within the mise en scene of the exhibition context.22 But given that we wish to sense, actuate, and measure the muscle cells’ behavior, we need to build something else: a micromachine that is more mechanically and electronically sophisticated than a standard incubator that maintains cells at a proper temperature. As part of the collaboration, Nathan hires a young mechanical engineering undergraduate named Sean Pepper who, having discovered the muscle project job posting on an undergraduate engineering wiki, is working on it for his third-year honors thesis. Trying to play catch up at this point as well as to map how an undergraduate engineering student relates to this rather odd art project, I talk to Sean in the cluttered laboratory next door to SymbioticA a few days after my arrival. The project that Ionat originally envisioned at an earlier stage is revealed: creating a tissue-engineered muscle that could actuate a linked robotic arm—something that after conducting a preliminary literature review Sean says “was a little bit down the track” in terms of feasibility. Curious as to why an undergraduate mechanical engineering student would choose to work on a project that involves so much biology, Sean explains that it not only “looked cool” in comparison with the more “academic” or “esoteric” projects but that it would accomplish something for humanity. “I don’t see why if we’ve got the ability, why we shouldn’t improve the human condition and I think a lot of medicine is becoming part of this . . . like regenerative medicine . . . this is becoming a big part of future health.” Naïve but genuine altruism. The hope of biotechnology improving human life. Both seem to clash with SymbioticA’s and TC&A’s critical aesthetic take on biotechnology— what Oron calls “the engineering mentality about life.” Sean has no life science experience. He is interested in fusing the “gooey, wet stuff” of biology with mechanical things like microtensiometers, sensors, and software control systems.

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Throughout our discussion, there is an unspoken disciplinary tension among art, biology, and mechanical/electrical engineering. The tension is all the more ironic considering that the project’s aim is to build a hybrid machine-organism in which all of these fields must work in symbiosis with one another. Sean reveals this tension when I ask him about his strong mechanical engineering approach to a project that is ultimately about life technologies. “Oh it’s all very mechanical .  .  . and you can see that in the proposal that Nathan and I wrote for Ionat and Oron in December [2010]. The first half of that is a very brief literature review answering very mechanical questions so that if a biologist were to look at it they’d say, ‘oh, why are they even bothering with this.’ [Laughter.] There are things like: can we pick up a cell and put it down; how can we put it down; is it possible to glue these things together; what mechanism .  .  . it was all about mechanisms and touching and manipulating . . . that sort of thing. Whereas I’d imagine a biologist or a tissue engineer would think more about temperature and as far as their materials and their mechanical stuff went, they think, ‘let’s get some kind of material underneath or a 3D polymer’ . . . but for us as mechanical engineers, the biology part is sterility. Once we’ve taken care of that, we’ve taken care of the biology part.” Peculiarly, Sean labels this kind of mechanical/biological dualism an “ideology”— perhaps one between wet and dry researchers or between machines and living, oozing matter—“we struggle to get down to the small level and even though the muscle cells are small we still think of them as objects that we can move and manipulate instead of effecting with a . . . fluid.”23 But Sean’s unending frustration is other. It is the fact that he must adapt his way of working, his practice to accommodate precarious living matter. “Cells are cantankerous . . . trying to make sure they don’t die.” Experiments with coating the mechanical parts in Teflon, for example, yield a batch of some living and some dead cells, without knowing why. Sean’s normal habits of leaving grease on things, working with solvents and superglue, and forgetting to clean up metal shavings does not really befit the maintenance of living material within sterile environments. All in all, I am fascinated by how this young researcher in training sees our “fuzzy” project (as he names it at one point in the conversation), suggesting that the neat borders he has been trained in are breaking down during the course of building the bioreactor prototype. As Sean states, his goal is “to build a bioreactor, grow some tissue and do some science.” Science, the conducting of an experiment that has been done previously in order to prove that the device works and then hopefully to discover something new, now puts engineering, the building of tools and getting those tools to be functional, in its place. Sean suddenly lets the cat out of the bag—one that will forever haunt this project. “Well, the project now is ‘more research than art.’” What does he mean by this? Whatever purpose the bioreactor will be used for in terms of creating artistic work seems

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beside the point (“well, there’s art which we really haven’t had to bother with yet because it doesn’t work yet”). Perhaps this is due to the fact that Sean is working on the project not as an engineering collaborator with artists but as a researcher for his own thesis work in mechanical engineering. Once finished and with a publishable thesis, he will continue his studies with little knowledge of the project’s eventual conceptual/aesthetic outcomes. Yet, Sean’s statement about research eclipsing the artistic work ironically will foreshadow the direction of the project over the next six months. What is left out of these discussions about disciplinary borders and material manipulation is the critical position of the imagined bioreactor in the making, in how it not only helps facilitate our conversation but also serves as a mute but powerful actant during this and subsequent meetings. This neatly arranged printed circuit board seeded with electronics concretizes the discussion around the different kinds of biological and electromechanical material conflicts, functioning as both an epistemic thing and a boundary object. The epistemic thing, as Hans-Jörg Rheinberger names it, is a material entity—a physical, chemical, mechanical, or biological object or process that constitutes the object of inquiry while it captures the unknown boundaries of experimental research practice, embodying what the researcher does not yet know.24 Although the epistemic thing makes the “characteristic irreducible vagueness” of the experimental process apparent, the boundary object is other—fluid enough to maintain a common identity across heterogeneous sites while remaining autonomous within these respective sites.25 At this moment in time, the bioreactor that Sean is building is a nonfunctioning fiction playing multiple roles: boundary object, actant, vessel for dreams on the border of the unknown. Technical Work and Shop Talk around a Bioreactor The technical development of our proposed bioreactor introduces two conundrums: (1) how to maintain sterile conditions in an environment outfitted to the gills with electronic and mechanical components all the while being able to “produce precise, accurate and reproducible data in a continuous stream in a sterile environment on a fragile material” (Sean Pepper) and (2) designing a system that will not only incubate but literally sense and actuate the muscle cells so that they will produce motion and behavior that can be measured, translated, and mapped into other media. These research questions involve a series of formidable technical and design challenges, the main being the fitting of the electrical and mechanical components within a petri dish (a design decision), a none-too-small feat considering the sterility problems that electrical circuits and precision-fabricated mechanical parts pose to the sterile life desired by cells. Outside of sterility (“the biology part”), the main technical issue is measuring and sensing displacement of the myotubes as they twitch in order to get a relationship between force and their strain and length (figure 2.6, top).

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Figure 2.6 Plan view of the completed bioreactor and microtensiometer sitting inside a 38 mm petri dish. Sean Pepper, MS thesis, University of Western Australia (unpublished). .

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For the muscle cells to twitch, however, they need to be “exercised,” that is, have a linear force applied to them from without so they can subsequently contract. Sean and Nathan’s solution: to build from scratch a rather complex mechanism—a microtensiometer, a device used to measure the level of strain or tension in a stretched material. The tensiometer construction involves researching various types of sensors and actuators all the while trying to imagine how to integrate these into a sterile environment—something that strikes me as problematic in that it will require a large amount of experimentation to see what works and what doesn’t (figure 2.6, bottom). The prototype bioreactor/tensiometer that Sean has built at this time looks like standard electronic circuitry: a rectangular printed circuit board (PCB) with a maze of components and a circular hole cut out of the board where the petri dish will sit, all enclosed within a rectangular Perspex® box (figure 2.6, bottom). Within the petri dish, however, lies the Pandora’s box of engineering: an incredible array of sensors and actuators, incredible due to their minute dimensions and the fact that all of these sophisticated and fragile microelectromechanical system (MEMS) devices will sit soaking inside a dish filled with nutrient media and millions of living cells. The electronics in the dish include two high-precision machined metallic arms that should serve to actuate the organoid by pivoting and thus applying strain to it. The resulting stress and strain is measured by a linear variable differential transformer (LVDT), an electromechanical transducer that translates an object’s (rectilinear) motion into electrical voltage. The organoid should be attached to the arms by tying the ends of the substrate suture to small magnets and using these as clamps against the arms of the device. In addition to maintaining 37 degrees Celsius and 5 percent CO2 exchange, the constant flow of nutrients into the tiny petri dish is accomplished by what is known as a perfusion system—a microfluidic waterworks by which blood or other fluids are delivered to the organs from the capillaries. A tiny hole is cut into the dish through which nutrient media can continually be circulated and recirculated by way of miniature stainless steel tubes and a perfusion pump. This way, one can avoid having to continually change the medium during incubation and experimentation. The Mute Don’t Speak . . . On the second day in Perth, a strange meeting transpires that in my jet-lagged limen between consciousness and sleep feels even stranger. A group of scientists and engineers working on a large Australian Research Council project dealing with tendon biomechanics have heard through the grapevine about Sean’s “miraculous” bioreactor prototype and want to get in on the action. In attendance: Sean, Nathan, a shy but skeptical Chinese mechanical engineering professor (the only woman besides Ionat), a biomechanics researcher named Jonas, and a former UWA engineering professor who is now a senior research administrator at a nearby university. We sit around the table

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with Sean’s unfinished PCB-based device squarely in the center for all to point to and marvel at. It steals the show. A blast of grant speak–fueled jargon inundates the air. “Expanding networks,” “common interests,” “maximum return,” “nonduplication of efforts,” and “looking forwards.” More grant writing. As usual in such meetings between different disciplines, a weird awkwardness permeates the atmosphere. The group wants to know about the bioreactor prototype. The question emerges. How could it be that SymbioticA, an organization focused on biological art exploration, has gotten further ahead in engineering development than a large-scale, government-funded research network? The million-dollar tendon research network’s bioreactor has run aground with issues of “contamination” and design overcomplexification. There was “a particular design concept .  .  . but that didn’t really satisfy all of the aims,” goes the euphemistic litany. All the while, we engage in that ever-awkward tango between artists and scientists provoked by such institutionalized research meetings in which artists act as interlopers and buskers looking for a handout. I’m here. Sitting in the midst of you. Mute, deaf, and dumb on this table. Pay attention! You constantly speak in my name. You call me “this amazing machine,” and “it,” but I can’t answer back. I command attention and aura, but I can say nothing in response. You place your hopes and dreams of a new future in me, but my opinion doesn’t matter. I have no words, only bursts of electrons, flows of current, changes of voltage. The subaltern doesn’t speak. The nonhuman doesn’t either.26 Magic? In the midst of this endless networking doubletalk and technical arcana, Nathan blurts out something extraordinary: “From a mechanical engineering perspective, we think there is magic that comes off of healthy tissue . . .” Magic. Now this is an unusual word for an engineer. I pause to think. In his great anthropological monograph The General Theory of Magic, Marcel Mauss describes a genealogical link between the history of technology and magic in which “certain techniques with complex objectives, unsure steps and delicate methods—such as pharmacy, medicine, surgery, metallurgy, enamel work (the last two are heirs of alchemy) could not have survived, unless magic proffered help and made them last by actually absorbing them.”27 Is this what Nathan suggests—not magic as the mysterious and not well understood signaling of cells in communicating with other cells but instead a link between the origins of magic in primitive societies and the powers of rational technoscience? But this may not be the case. As philosopher Isabelle Stengers argues, through the Platonic dream of rationality, of the logos, technoscience = magic takes on a new meaning: as “sorcery,” and “spell” that holds us tight in its grasp, eliminating resistance. The

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practice of art with biotechnology, the ghost in the room, takes on another meaning. The modern difference, Stengers states, between “the ancient crafts and the new technology” is an ethical-political one. This suggests renewed resistance, a bidding farewell to the idea that technology and rationality will indeed free us, making a better world. What is the role then for artists, those specialized in the supposedly irrational and ancient “arts and crafts of influence” in this space?28 In the midst of this surreal meeting, this exercise in rationality, I think of another inspiration for magic, techniques and art that sidestep the logos and will also come to haunt this biotechnical jungle that we are ensnarled in. Antonin Artaud, the great twentieth-century actor and director, theorist of dramatic incantations and metaphysician of visceral spectacle, described a theater of “danger” and “cruelty.” For Artaud, cruelty doesn’t signify violence from without but rather the welling up of intense border experiences inside: a laceration from within. The environment, one described in his manifestos on the “theater of cruelty” as acting “directly and profoundly upon the sensibility through the organs,” provides the catalyst of cruelty but not the results or affects. Cruelty, for Artaud, thus “signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.” These are the real materials we will have to work with as we attempt to manipulate life.29 4 The Tissue Culture Point of View—Part I “Like Cooking . . .” After a weekend of Australian beaches and jetlag recovery, tissue culturing starts in earnest, albeit from a distance. Thankfully, I am not the sole interloper who does not touch in the following days, as Ionat also demonstrates the techniques to a potential student visiting from New Zealand. As I take notes and watch, Ionat commences the litany of rituals that constitute cell culture methods, unleashing a battery of terms, names of chemical substances, and procedures to my untrained ear while systematically and precisely reviewing the protocols she has at one time painstakingly learned from other scientists. Although there are written procedures, tissue culture technique is more akin to both an orally transmitted practice and a master/apprentice model involving watching and then doing. Transformation and transubstantiation. At first, from an outside perspective, the techniques resemble more chemistry than biology. Within this first short 1- to 1.5-hour period during which we engage in the culturing process, procedure after procedure involves thawing, pouring, mixing, pipetting, siphoning, transferring of liquids from one container to another, incubating, observing, transferring, remixing, repouring, resiphoning, shaking, centrifuging, washing, disposing, reincubating, and rethawing. As Ionat jokes that tissue culturing “is kind of like cooking,” my mind flashes again to alchemy, another premodern science involving the transformation of one kind of

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matter into another using mysterious elixirs. But these thoughts are quickly pushed into the subconscious as we launch into the protocols. A Choreography of Liquids We run back and forth, between SymbioticA’s facilities and equipment spread between the physical containment (PC) level 2 lab (that will become our home) and an adjoining noncontainment/nonhazardous materials lab. Ionat explains and inventories materials and instruments: laminar flow (or sterile) hood, incubator, water bath, centrifuge, freezers and refrigerators, hemocytometer (cell-counting device), inverted microscope, cryostorage containers, sterilization facility (the autoclave on the second floor of the building), cell culturing flasks and containers, pipettes and pipette dispensers (or guns), syringes and needles, media and serum, the biowaste container, and, last but not least, the cells themselves. She removes a series of 50 mL vials with bright orange tops as well as a large bottle labeled “Foetal Calf Serum” from a small freezer and proceeds to drop them into a warm water bath in the PC2 lab next door. While things defrost in various bottles and baths, Ionat dons latex gloves as if she was getting ready to take my blood and rapidly describes the difference between containment levels (PC1 versus PC2, what protects what from whom) as well as the mechanism and functioning of the sterile or laminar flow hood, all the while spraying its gleaming metal surface down with ethanol and wiping it clean. She also selects a blue plastic test tube holder, sprays this down, and, along with the flasks that she extracts from the bubbling water bath, carefully places all of these things onto the floor of the hood. The continuous wiping off and spraying of things is obviously precautionary but also part of the obsessive rituals of separation and sterility that quickly become second nature while working with living matter. Ionat bursts forth in a biotechnical Tower of Babble. “We need to prepare the nutrient media and look at the colors—in this case, the medium is pink. If purplish this is an indicator of too much alkali. If too orange, it means the opposite. The protocol for C2C12 indicates that muscle cells should be nourished in 20 percent serum—so 10 mL to 50 mL DMEM. How many calves worth is this serum? Do we know .  .  . Of course, we also need to add antibiotics to the serum because the cells have no possibility of defending themselves .  .  . so, to nourish the cells, you need a combination of serum, antibiotics and DMEM” (which I see from the label of the squarish bottle holding what looks like red cranberry juice stands for Dulbecco’s Modified Eagle Medium, created by Invitrogen in Carlsbad, California).30 I nod as if I understand what is going on, subsumed by the streams of acronyms, but now turn my fascination to a new object that Ionat removes from a large, sealed plastic bag inscribed with the German text Zellkulturflasche: the tissue flask (figure 2.7, top left).

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Figure 2.7 Tissue culture session, SymbioticA. April 2012. Photos by Chris Salter and Anke Burger.

I am enamored by this German vessel’s hard-plastic material, its bright-yellow screw cap (the Wiederverschliessdeckel), and its rhombus-like shape, with the top (or is it the bottom?) of the flask protruding slightly over the lip of the container. Ionat carefully lays the flask on its side under the hood as well, pausing momentarily to admire the miniature stage set of carefully arranged props inside the fluorescent lighting of the sterile hood: the blue plastic holder now adorned with plastic vials of various liquids, the large bottle of red DMEM, and the tissue flask lying on its side (figure 2.7, bottom left). The moment of reflection quickly ends in the next burst of activity. Ionat places a mound of long, paper-enclosed serological pipettes that resemble sealed straws next to the hood. Armed with a blue, gun-like object (a pipette dispenser), she holds the wrapped pipette underneath the hood and gracefully manages to remove the paper without touching it, mounting the long, hollow glass straw onto the end of the gun (figure 2.7, bottom right). Hmmm .  .  . this demands a certain level of dexterity .  .  . not to

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touch the edge of the pipette while attempting to tear open and extract the item to mount on the end of the gun . . . This intricate choreography of sucking one liquid carefully into the pipette and then transferring it to another vial in the blue holder and then to the flask essentially constitutes the essence of the tissue culture ritual. After siphoning 20 mL of FBS (nowdefrosted fetal bovine serum), Ionat deftly removes the pipette, dropping it into the double-bagged yellow biohazard trash, and proceeds to mount another one onto the gun, siphoning off a larger amount of the DMEM and placing it into the flask with the serum. “Okay. Now that we have the medium ready, let’s go thaw some cells.” Foams of Life As we once again exit the lab and move down the hall into a room of -80 degree Celsius freezers, I have a palpable sense of excitement at finally getting to meet the “cantankerous” cells— those bits of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphor that have caused our engineering collaborators so much grief while designing their magic tools. Naturally, what we will retrieve from the frozen depths will be microscopic and most certainly far from the visceral shock of a final biological artwork, but the anticipation builds nonetheless. “The first thing we do is very simple. We want to get some cells and thaw them and put them into nutrient media to give them all the things they need and hope for the best.” We open one of the freezers and extract a blue circular container affectionately dubbed by the scientists “Mr. Frosty” from the ice-coated bottom shelf. Mr. Frosty is a nickname standing in for the professional but far less glamorous “Cryogenic Freezing Container”—a plastic apparatus holding the tiny vials that will make the long trip between the freezer and the lab more than once during their adventure of being woken to life (figure 2.8, top left). As Ionat takes the tiny plastic vials and begins warming them in her hands, like conducting a séance for the dead, I stupidly ask what is in the vials, thinking that this is some kind of solution we will use in our defrosting process. Surprised, she turns to me with a smile. “Life . . . in my hands” (figure 2.8, top right). For all of my anticipation, I admit somewhat facetiously that I had expected something grander than minute plastic tubes filled with partially crystallized matter. This certainly seems a far cry from what biologist Robert Hooke described in 1650 when, after staring at a slice of cork under a microscope, he named the cell. Hooke’s inspiration to name the intricate membrane enclosed entities that he glimpsed through crude microscopy came from the Latin word cellula—denoting the isolated chambers that monks inhabited. After Hooke’s original naming, almost simultaneously the Dutch inventor of the microscope, Anton Leeuwenhoek, observed protozoa and bacteria that he affectionately dubbed in his arguments to the Royal Society “very little living animalcules.”

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Figure 2.8 Tissue culture session II, SymbioticA. May 2011. Photos by Chris Salter.

Unfortunately, theorization of the cell was essentially to remain dormant until the mid-nineteenth century. In 1838, the German botanist Matthias Schlieden and his zoologist friend Theodor Schwann invented the discipline we now call cell theory with their singular and powerful argument that the cell was the basic unit of living matter. If Schwann extended Schliedan’s theory that all plants were constructed of cells to animals, another German scientist, the polymath Rudolf Virchow, added the essential final step to the doctrine of cell theory: Cells can only be derived from other cells, or omnis cellula e cellula.31 That cells were, at first, entangled in instruments of observation rather than the sciences of physico-chemical matter fits squarely into Canguilhem’s arguments in his essay on the topic that cell theory should “be considered a collection of protocols of observation.”32 As I am quick to find out, for all the discussions of wet and visceral, techniques in the tissue culture lab are still situated in the ocular and inscribed. Life is made possible through rote routines of gazing, writing, gazing, and writing again.

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This sense of understanding living stuff by virtue of the protocols of observation adds to the unresolved tensions that one explicitly feels during the encounter between the human manipulator and living matter itself through the process of cell culturing— between life that can only be analyzed and tweaked by way of nineteenth-century instruments of observation that Jonathan Crary describes and life articulated and shaped through the physico-chemical processes that constitute culturing practice.33 Yet, we are using cell lines, immortal cells purchased from industrial-scale tissue banks that, unlike cells derived from primary tissue, can endlessly proliferate.34 Although the most famous of cell lines, the fabled HeLa, was extracted from a human (the African American woman Henrietta Lacks who died of cervical cancer in 1951), the particular one that we will intimately come to know is derived from nonhumans: the skeletal muscle tissue of mice whose thigh muscles were crushed in order to simulate the effects of dystrophy.35 Named C2C12 by David Yaffe and Ora Saxel (now Fuchs), the two researchers who isolated and derived the line, skeletal muscle cells or myoblasts undertake an unusual plan of action in their course of development, termed myogenesis. The cells first need to be nourished in a medium supplemented with the standard fetal bovine serum. After around 24 hours, the cells begin to divide and proliferate, yielding increasing amounts of mononucleated (single-nucleus) cells in the tissue flask. As the cells reach a certain level of concentration or what is termed confluency, they begin to perform cell fusion, literally linking up with neighboring cells to form long, fibrous strands that are multinucleated but are still single cells, called myotubes. Here, the cells undergo radical organizational and molecular-chemical transformations, as molecules precisely structure themselves together in order for the core proteins myosin and actin that enable muscle contraction and expansion to do their work.36 Returning to the lab. As Ionat carefully places the vials onto the floor of the hood in order to prepare another pipette to extract the cells and move them to a tissue flask for feeding, I get a quick demonstration of how fragile life is by watching how the powerful recirculating air in the hood almost blows over the vials. The feeding ritual that follows is as abstracted as the rest of the procedure. Ionat sucks the cells, perhaps millions, from the vial with the pipette and dispenses them in a not quite nonchalant fashion into the tissue flask (figure 2.8, bottom right). Once again, the material consistency of life takes me aback—this time, a smectic blob that appears more like dishwashing detergent than the complex molecular organization of membrane, organelles, and protoplasm that makes up the standard macroscopic image of the cell in biology textbooks. The foamy substance that makes its way up the pipette reminds us, as Peter Sloterdijk articulates in his mammoth Sphären trilogy, that foam constitutes the prima materia—the generative substance that is at once both fragile and life giving.37

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Dispensing the foamy cells into the tissue flask, Ionat changes the pipette again (what incredible waste!) and proceeds to add 15 mL of the previously mixed medium. In the upright flask, the medium blends with the foamy but now completely invisible cells barely one-quarter full. Picking up the flask, she moves to the incubator behind her and rapidly places the container on the gleaming stainless steel shelf, all the while explaining that the cells are “unhappy” because they have been moved back and forth between freezer and bath, frozen between different states and contexts: half awake and then half suspended in a nebulous underworld of continuously changing thresholds. “We have to make them warm.” For a moment, I’m taken aback by this anthropomorphic use of language. From what appears before us, for all I know we could be looking at red dishwashing liquid and not life itself. I make a quick note of this statement as Ionat cleans the surface of the hood with ethanol, turns off the light and ventilator, and shuts the hood. “That’s it for today.” 5 Techniques for Immortality So what is this mysterious, occultish, and almost alchemical practice they call tissue culture? How has it gone from its early mix of science coupled with myth, hype, and mysticism to a standard technique in the biological sciences and, even more strangely, into the realm of artistic experimentation? The technique itself is bound up in the larger paradigmatic move from in vivo to in vitro practices at the end of the nineteenth century as the cell itself took center stage to become a new kind of experimental object whose plasticity, morphology, and temporality, when extracted from its natural milieu of the whole body, could be artificially manipulated and observed. The “history of tissue culture, plasticity, the pushing and pulling of biological things to live in different shapes and spaces and times is achieved in many cases by a manipulation not just of the cell itself but also of the medium in which it lives.”38 Although experimentation with tissue culturing already began in 1885 with the work of the German embryologist Wilhelm Roux, who removed a portion of the medullary plate from an early chick embryo and kept it alive in a saline solution for several days, it was the American embryologist Ross Harrison and subsequently the Frenchborn, American-based surgeon Alexis Carrel who are widely seen as the fathers of the technique. Published in the Journal of Experimental Zoology in 1910, Harrison’s landmark paper “The Outgrowth of a Nerve Fiber as a Mode of Protoplasmic Movement” was lauded at the time as “among the most important papers published in the field of neuroscience during the first half of the 20th century. In a single stroke Harrison invented the method of tissue culture, and then used it to prove the neuron doctrine.”39

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Harrison’s development of tissue culture stemmed from frustration with the representational approaches of histological analysis that used staining techniques applied onto fixed slices of cells, thus rendering out the temporal element of cell evolution in the process. Instead, by dissecting embryonic tissue and encouraging its growth through a drop of frog lymph as nutrient media, Harrison was able not only to study the neuroblasts outside of the body of an organism but also, more importantly, to prove the validity of outgrowth theory by way of direct, continuous observation. Nerve fibers grew directly out of the tissues before the eyes of the investigator so fast that, as Harrison reported, “in making drawings one encounters the difficulty of having the object change before the outline can be traced.”40 If Harrison is seen as the first researcher to devise the set of techniques that would eventually become known as tissue culture, it was the renowned Rockefeller Institute surgeon Alexis Carrel and his associates Montrose Burrows and Arthur Eberling who both named the process and were largely responsible for its establishment in the scientific and popular press. Unfortunately, Carrel’s own predilection for theater and his interest in unconventional pursuits such as telepathy and eugenics lead to more than one scientist declaring the technique as both confused and, worse, mystical; “Tissue culture, although a delicate and exacting technique, and one in which vigorous aspesis is absolutely essential, gained a spurious and unfortunate reputation for difficulty and almost for mysticism.”41 Understanding why the label of mysticism was applied to Carrel’s work takes a bit of background. From a technical standpoint, Carrel and his associates improved on Harrison’s work in several ways. First, Carrel succeeded in growing both healthy and malignant tissues from adult mammals rather than developing embryos. Second, he contributed numerous technical innovations, including the substitution of blood plasma over lymph as part of the growth medium as well as the design of specific glassware, plates, and flasks (including the special “Carrel Flask”) that enabled the growth of larger amounts of tissue and better optical characteristics for observing the process. Last, he applied microcinematographic techniques adopted from the French researcher/filmmaker Jean Comandon for the recording of the cultures’ temporal unfolding—a jump beyond the reduction of time to static, discrete points as was found in histological practices and that formed the basis of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of duration, a philosophy deeply enamored by Carrel.42 But perhaps the most radical advance was the sustaining of in vitro tissues beyond the standard three to fifteen days previously attempted and into an indefinite period, leading Carrel to the somewhat preposterous-sounding claim that “permanent life was not impossible.” In his desire for a prolongation of the “life of a tissue outside of the organism,” as Carrel stated, “[a tissue] could exceed greatly its normal duration in the

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body, because elemental death might be postponed indefinitely by a proper artificial nutrition.”43 Immortality enters the picture. Although such pronouncements only increased in fervor as he improved his culturing processes, Carrel technically managed to grow tissue over longer periods of time by continuously washing and “passaging” (splitting cells across numerous culture flasks when they reached a certain concentration) the cells as well as alternating the medium they were grown in within the temperatureregulated interior of an incubator. If Carrel succeeded in sustaining tissues outside of their original bodily context for months at a time, he also devised a series of methods that appeared to cross high laboratory experiments with the black mass. Carrel dressed his surgical assistants in full, black, hooded gowns, because black, unlike the standard white, would more clearly illuminate a much-feared element for the sterility-obsessed surgeon: dust. He also engaged in the unusual practice of painting the interiors of his operating laboratories matte black, not only to identify dust but also because, as the surgeon told his friend Charles Lindberg, “too much light inhibits the activity of the brain.”44 Lending an occult air to what already seemed to be almost alchemical proceedings, it is no wonder that this work gained a not altogether respectful reputation among fellow scientists.45 Carrel’s obsession with permanent life spontaneously arising from existing tissues finds a further science fiction–like manifestation in the surgeon’s more philosophically oriented writing. His 1935 book Man, the Unknown is a curious amalgam that, although at first appearing to be a standard sociological and philosophical analysis of the human being within an age of technoscientific advances, surprisingly and suddenly launches into a range of increasingly exotic and bizarre topics, such as telepathy and hypnotism, concluding with eugenics. Indeed, in a prescient foreshadowing of his eventual role as a Nazi collaborator in the position of regent in the Vichy-funded Fondation Française pour l’Etude des Problèmes Humains, Carrel argues for a “voluntary eugenics” that would be “indispensable for the perpetuation of the strong.”46 Given the colorful background of its origins, it is no wonder that tissue culture as a practice and field of knowledge is such a strange and contradictory object. It is a technique that, as Catts tells me, is still held in suspicion in biomedical science. “It is not an exact science .  .  . it was never an exact science. Even though many of those techniques are used .  . . for example, in molecular biology—molecular biology is held up much more as a science because you work with very exact measurements, almost all of the substances you work with are defined .  .  . but tissue culture is not like that .  .  . it’s actually the substances you work with are undefined . . . every batch of serum is different. When you talk with tissue culturists they would say .  .  . it’s so often that they would blame the serum for a shift in the results . . . it’s hard to prove so you never know whether it’s the serum or something else.”47

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I begin to see why such a technique is intriguing fodder for artistic exploration. There is something perversely fascinating in the fact that living matter torn away from the “internal milieu” of the body that Claude Bernard first described can then be so artificially shaped and manipulated by way of technical processes and still continue to exhibit traits of life: movement, development, growth, decay.48 In this sense, time becomes a material and, simultaneously, a process itself within the tissue culture dramaturgy. The temporal evolution of that which is live but whose movement is normally beyond human perception becomes transduced into the domain of directly observed-felt human experience. 6 The Tissue Culture Point of View—Part II Trypsinization or the Trauma of Passage Return to the cells the next day. Examining the measure of crowdedness or confluence in the flask—an important factor in that once the muscle cells reach around 70 percent confluence (meaning they cover 70 percent of the flask’s surface area) they will begin to differentiate and fuse. Again, a burning sense of anticipation arises as to what will be revealed when we open the incubator door and the unmistakable yet hard-to-place smell of warm fluids and humid flaskware will rush out. Placing one flask under the microscope, we observe that the cells have changed since a day or so ago, beginning to transform from circular, isolated entities to ones haptically rubbing up against their neighbors as they begin the road to fusion. Ionat tells me that we need to “passage” (also known as subculturing) or split up the cells across different flasks in order to prevent premature differentiation. We engage with another elaborate protocol in which the cells will be “unglued” from the bottom of the flask in order to be separated into new containers. The chief actor in this rather brusque drama involves another magical potion: this time the redcolored substance trypsin, essentially a stomach enzyme that works by literally cleaving the proteins that bond the cells to the dish so that they come unglued from the surface. The procedure for passaging resembles a liquid purification rite. First remove the medium from the flask by aspirating it with the pipette gun and then “washing” the cells three times in PBS (phosphate-buffered saline) in order to get rid of any serum residue. “Ionat, how can you be sure that you are not sucking the cells away while removing the serum?” “Well, you need to use your eyes .  .  .” As she trails off the sentence for a second, I pause at this strange answer, because we are talking about microscopic particles that resist my ability to observe them in the watery domains of the flask. Canguilhem’s protocols of observation strike back.49 Ionat holds the container in the air up to the bright light. She points to tiny clumps of what look to be miniscule dust particles; presumably they should be life

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after trypsinization. Once the flask is thoroughly washed, the ungluing ritual begins. Exercising caution, Ionat sterile filters the trypsin itself by means of a syringe and a filter cup to insure that the solution was not compromised, all of which is performed somewhat awkwardly under the sterile hood. The filtered trypsin is pipetted into the flask and immediately placed in the incubator for exactly one minute, because trypsin optimally functions at 37 degrees Celsius. While we wait for the enzyme to do its black magic during what seems to be an eternal minute, we continue the discussion about approximation, which once again unmasks biology’s messy episteme in comparison to the exactness of engineering practices. “Obviously, without the cell counter [whatever this instrument is], you are not so dependent on the measurement in case a few cells get sucked away. You can count with the cell counter but then again this is also just an approximation .  .  . otherwise, the number [of cells] is just too much to cope with.” The infinite minute continues then finally elapses. We remove the cells from the incubator to observe them under the inverted microscope, now witnesses to a bold transformation as the cells change their shape almost before our eyes, from their earlier, neuronal-like appearance to a now gradually increasing plethora of tiny floating disks adrift in a churning sea of enzymes.50 The process begins again. I voice sardonically, “So now we have this waiting again.” Ionat’s voice turns to the weary tone of someone with much experience in such laborious procedures. “Waiting. Yes, waiting. And when you have a full blown production, you work on cultures together but that means you have to come here all of the time . . . The more life you have, the more waiting, the more you have to take care and the more attention you have to pay.” The next temporal gap. Waiting. Now, the inevitable discussion about the broader ethical consequences of the kind of manipulation of life we are engaging in: the embryonic stem cell debate in the United States; the question of where life starts; the hype around iPS cells (induced pluripotent stem cells); how the extracellular matrix affects cell differentiation as much if not more than DNA; whether or not the horse performance of the French art collective Art Orienté Objet is ethically sound and if it is overtly anthropocentrically biased.51 As five minutes finally are up, I reflect on the fact that only artists or humanists would think such thoughts, as most scientists in training (i.e., PhDs and postdocs) while away the banality of trypsinization by listening to music and making notes in their requisite lab books rather than agonizing over the ethics of manipulating living stuff. The lab we are working in has no radio, and Ionat, in fact, has no lab book, so unavoidably we must plug these seemingly infinite periods with philosophical filler and ruminations. As seen under the microscope, more cells are unmoored, floating aimlessly within the flask. Ionat gently taps the plastic container against the microscope and then not

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so gently bangs it up against her hand to release the remaining cells that desperately cling to the container’s surfaces. The procedure then begins for a third time. Return to the incubator, start the timer (this time for five minutes). Wait. Discuss. Wait. More discussion. Time elapses. Open the incubator and return to the microscope. More discussing, observing, banging of the flask against the microscope as we talk of manipulating life. Finally, success is pronounced as we rush back to the hood in order to feed the dazed cells. The trypsin gnaws away at them. It seems finally that the chemical has completed its task, and now the cells need to be nourished with media-containing serum within a short time frame so that the serum will stop the trypsin’s digestion action on the cells. I fiddle with the iPad to take a picture as Ionat somewhat half-sternly and half-jokingly rebukes me. “I’m sorry, but life has a priority.” Ionat continues the passaging procedure: carefully lining up a row of new and larger tissue flasks in a vertical position, calculating the amount of new nutrient media for each of the flasks, and pouring 15 mL of media into the first flask. Suddenly, a problem. It seems that the soup of media, cells, and trypsin that now inhabits the flask is filled with little clusters of cells. This introduces the next act of violence that we perpetrate on our cells: centrifuging in order to separate them from the trypsinated soup. Normally, as Ionat later explains, we centrifuge cells before refreezing to get rid of excess trypsin and to adjust the number of cells per volume of media. This time, however, we seem to centrifuge to separate. More waiting as the centrifuge spins, cleaves, and severs the “traumatized” cells from their primal ooze of media and trypsin (“they’ve been through a lot”). Yet, after such a brutality of separation we still see clusters of cells and other muck as we hold the flask in the air, staring at its cloudy contents back illuminated by the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling light. Unperturbed, Ionat commences scraping the flask against the metal vent grating at the floor of the sterile hood, producing an exquisitely clangorous, inharmonic sound, like taking a file to an air vent or the broken strains of an up-close gamelan. Satisfied with her work, Ionat cheerfully announces the end of the procedure: “Okay, now we are going to divide these cells equally into three flasks, add some more nutrient media and come on Friday and have a look at them.” During this entire procedure, I occasionally have to remind myself that we are working with living things; such is the elevated level of abstraction that takes over during the process of cell culturing partially described by the British tissue culture pioneer Dr. Honor Bridget Fell as “the tissue culture point of view.” In Liminal Lives, feminist science studies scholar Susan Squier positions Fell’s tissue culture point of view as a scientific and popular mindset catalyzed by the technique during its developmental heyday in the early part of the twentieth century.

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Chief among this mindset is tissue culture’s ability to catalyze the discussion between life and death, scale between the cell and the larger organism, “resituate” the body of science from the realm of the static to that of the dynamic, create a glamorous and seductive encounter, and finally, and perhaps most importantly, decontextualize and abstract; what Squier calls a “contextual narrowing.”52 Thus, although tempting, the danger in the tissue culture point of view is to romanticize and project the sense of a human subject into a mass of cells or to project the agency of any subject at all. What becomes ever clearer from the procedures, methods, and instruments we are working with is that cells are not just brute material but “technoepistemic” entities—particular kinds of representations in which it is difficult to separate the material substrate from reference frameworks that operate across diverse material, discursive, and social registers (Lily Kay).53 Perhaps this contextual narrowing is necessary when faced from within the agonizing details involved in tissue culture, enabling a kind of balance between the mind numbing and rote repetition that is the nature of scientific research processes and the embodied knowing of the scientist that, while abstracting from the meaning and philosophical repercussions of the procedures, makes their execution bearable. The experience of watching the process of tissue culturing brings me to two main thoughts on temporality and repetition. The first deals with matter beyond one’s direct control. I was taken aback when the “work” for the day was over after 1.5 hours of somewhat tedious and exacting execution of protocols. In my own projects, we run on human time scales—stopping and starting when we want (or when outside schedules dictate that we should), taking a lunch break, and coming back whenever to resume the work at hand. Coding, composing on the train, flights across the ocean, the bus to the venue. All hours of the day and night. We take the laptop and, hence, part of the lab with us. With biology, the lab stays put. We are prisoners to the time of other forms. Here, our “artistic work” (can we even call it that?) ends less than two hours from when we started and can’t resume until morning, when the cells will presumably have changed, differentiated slightly more or encroached on their neighbors even further, all behind the closed doors of the incubator. Of course, what may be revealed in the morning when we continue the tissue culturing could indeed be the product of natural systems, sheer blind luck, some combination of the two, or pure magic. 7 Surface Tensions In between the tissue culture sessions that take place over the next days and that constitute the bulk of my observational visit, I attend another memorable meeting, this time between Sean and a young PhD chemical-engineering student working on cellbased biological sensors. It seems that word of Sean and Nathan’s electronic wonder

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Figure 2.9 Sean Pepper explains myotube behavior. May 2011. Photo by Chris Salter.

machine has gotten out to other researchers working on bioreactors. As Sean patiently explains the working of his device, the engineering researcher listens intently with a combination of both skepticism and excitement. The discussion quickly turns from Sean’s well-rehearsed electromechanical description to a new and even more fascinating subject: what kind of surface substrate should the muscle cells be grown on? The crown jewel of the relatively recent discipline of tissue engineering, the construction of 2D microfabricated surfaces or, more importantly, 3D frames or “scaffolds” upon which cells can be “plated” or seeded, is critical in order to create tissue structures that have a similar morphology, architecture, and function as their in vivo equivalents (figure 2.9). As surgeon and tissue engineering pioneer Joseph Vacanti explains, tissue engineering “applies the principles of engineering and life sciences towards the development of biological substitutes that restore, maintain or improve tissue function.”54 Such “substitutes” are produced out of a range of high-tech “biomaterials” with exotic-sounding names such as “hydrogel,” “biodegradable polymers,” and “PDMS”—names that ubiquitously grace the pages of nearly every contemporary paper in bioengineering, cell culturing, and molecular material science.

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In our case, Sean refers to a 2009 paper by US bioengineering researchers that plays a central role in our knowledge of protocols and procedures having to do with skeletal muscle–cell tissue engineering techniques. Known as the “Lam paper” after one of its principle authors, the research discusses muscle tissue engineering methods for “prealigning” myoblasts into neat rows so that they are forced to grow in an aligned, linear fashion during fusion.55 Whereas in vitro mechanics barely mimic the real in vivo complexity of the muscularskeletal system, the key to this process of cellular manipulation is creating a microfabricated substrate with a series of micron-width grooves that the cells can be poured over so that they will cling to the surface and be forced into a particular geometry rather than growing unaligned in multiple directions across the petri dish. More radically, the morphology of the surface material and what that material is composed of has just as much to do with how the cells differentiate as the cells’ physio-chemical makeup itself. Specifically, Lam’s paper describes the use of a miracle substance that I quickly find out is another kind of prima materia in tissue-based bioengineering: polydimethylsiloxane, better known as PDMS. A type of material famously found in the American toy Silly Putty, PDMS is a pourable, silicone-based organic polymer that, as Oron almost gleefully tells me later, has multiple desirable characteristics: “It allows gas exchange, is semipermeable, has amazing optical properties and holding accuracy in regards to molding and casting and best of all, is neither toxic nor harmful to cells.”56 Catalyst based, the amount of curing agent that is mixed with the raw liquid silicone determines how hard or soft the material substrate can be so that essentially, with some chemical magic, it is possible to alter the properties of the material. That PDMS’s material composition can be substantially shifted by changing the amount of catalyst mixed into it may not sound like a big deal until one reads in recent research that the thickness of an artificial substrate may indeed have a radical biological effect on the manner in which cells seeded on the material grow and differentiate.57 I’m increasingly confused. I drift away, daydreaming. Losing the intricate details of this polyphony of chemical matter as I think about TEMA. Who is to tell which material is essential, the living or the dead? The cells or the artificially produced chemical substrates made out of silicones and plastics that now seem essential for our in vitro life to grow and thrive? 8 The Tissue Culture Point of View—Part III Calculation, Counting, Freezing The third and final session of tissue culture for this trip. In their irreversible trajectory, the cells continue to proliferate, divide, and fuse, so there is no other choice but to place them in suspended animation rather than be caught in the eternal loop of passaging and feeding every two days.

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Unlike before, however, Ionat quickly disappears from the lab and returns with a typed protocol entitled “Waking Up and Freezing Down Cells,” which outlines in somewhat strangely transcribed English the step by step procedures for cell freezing. It seems that the freezing procedure repeats many of the techniques we have already explored: trypsinization, centrifuging, pipetting. The one jarring difference is the addition of a seemingly toxic-sounding chemical labeled dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO—literally, a kind of solvent that functions like antifreeze so that the cells do not perish from crystallization. Before we begin the act of freezing, Ionat jokes that “it’s nice to be able to freeze life and then take it out [presumably, out of the freezer] when we need it.” In looking under the inverted microscope, it is patently evident that our cells have once again changed their morphology and density. “The cells are under stress,” meaning that they are starting to run out of space in the dish. I’m not sure how the cells “express” such stress other than what is revealed to the eye under 10x magnification: a dense and thick cluster of intertwined myoblasts with the myotubes snaking through them. Moving again through the ennui of trypsinization, we discuss one major hurdle in Sean’s bioreactor development. At this moment, he is unable to test whether the cells can be placed side by side with the Teflon-coated parts of the bioreactor, because the autoclave has broken down and he cannot sterilize the petri dish filled with electromechanical components. It is clear this experiment of cells confronting Teflon will not happen during this visit: no direct experience seeing if the cells survive or not. With trypsinization complete, Ionat broaches a new procedure that she has only briefly mentioned before: cell counting. The expensive-looking German device called a hemocytometer, originally named so because it was used to count blood cells, is a literally a glass and Lucite microscope slide with a channel to pour cells into (figure 2.10). When placed under the microscope, the device superimposes a square grid from which one can estimate the number of cells that should be arrayed into each vial. This is easier said than done; Ionat struggles a bit to eye drop a milliliter of cells and medium onto the counter.58 Suddenly, in the midst of this rational calculation, an ethical quandary rears its head. Discussion ensues about how many cells to freeze and how many to bleach— that is, to kill—as it seems we have more cells in our flask to freeze across the three vials than we need. It is here that we are finally confronted by the ethical question of what Agamben famously referred to as bare life; life outside of protocols, systems of description, or reduction to function.59 Are we now taking responsibility for the life forms we have been tirelessly manipulating but which have been placed in states of sheer abstraction? Is it only artists that would have such a discussion, whereas researchers and researchers in training would not think twice about pouring in the bleach and flushing life down the industrial sink without being gripped by moral angst?

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Figure 2.10 Ionat demonstrates the hemocytometer. May 2011. Photo by Chris Salter.

Unlike the ritualized, public “killing rituals” that TC&A has undertaken before, when their mutated and contaminated sculptures were exposed to the air and sudden annihilation before the art consuming masses, our extermination procedure is banal— without fanfare and taking place in the sterile sanctity of the lab where scrutiny from the hoipoloi is minimized.60 Approximately one million cells per vial are distributed across the three ampules. Ionat switches to the micropipettes as the 5 and 10 mL tubes are simply too large in volume for transferring such a miniscule amount of living fluid. These smaller pipettes require a different kind of dexterity—jabbing the gun into a box lined with tiny plastic pipette tips, pressing the plunger at the top of the somewhat rickety device to suck the tip onto the pipette gun, carefully guiding the pipette over the fragile vial, and pressing the plunging mechanism further to release what appears to be a drop of fluid so small that it barely seems to fill the container. This is an utterly strange thing to behold, with a procedure so precise and woefully bereft of spontaneity that it almost boggles the mind with its uneasy combination of awe and rote, numbing automatism. Who invented these protocols or first knew what was right and what was not? Were they passed down like so much oral knowledge to the next generation of

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apprentices, unquestioning the procedure but blindly executing it in the name of reproducible knowledge and ceteris paribus prediction? Who decided the facts concerning how life is defined and perceived? With the cells nestled all snug in their tubes, Ionat almost casually takes the tissue culture flask, proceeds to the sink, pours it into another container (presumably containing bleach), and then discharges the contents down the drain. A gap in time. Life extinguished. The world ends. We return to where my observational odyssey started out almost a week ago: the -80 degree Celsius freezer; the scavenging at the bottom shelf for the container; the discovery of Mr. Frosty; the careful insertion of the vials into the bright-blue container; the placement of life on the bottom shelf behind boxes of frozen cell lines and other suspended entities; and the shutting and locking of the big freezer door closing with an almost whimper-like thud. So much for bare life today. 9 A Tutorial on Muscle-Cell Energetics Before leaving for Europe in the evening, a quick meeting with the young biomechanicist Jonas. Can we engineer a muscle from a particular cell line so that it “obeys the same rules” as a nonengineered one? Muscle characteristics: relationships between the length of the muscle and the force that is produced and the force and velocity connection. Another question: what are the energetic properties of muscles? Muscle is a metabolic, molecular engine. How then does the muscle behave energetically? The discussion again sends us back to the quivering border between machine and organism that we seek to materialize. Historically, muscles have always been equated with machines, and it is exciting to see a scientist actually admit that natural muscles might only be slightly more efficient than manmade devices, such as the steam engine. Now prosthetic fantasies enter the discussion: the imagination of a motor that could adapt to the environment and visions of “grown actuators” over the “brittle” mechanical devices that currently extend legs and arms after bodily loss and calamity. Jonas brings up an extreme example. MIT scientist Hugh Herr is the classic Haraway cyborgian case in point: A former expert climber who lost both legs due to frostbite in a bizarre climbing accident, Herr’s Media Lab web page declares that his research program in biomechatronics seeks to “advance technologies that promise to accelerate the merging of body and machine.”61 Jonas’s description of cell-cultured muscle actuators within a hybrid mechanical-biological body is the closest of any of the scientists I have so far encountered to articulating a contemporary post-cybernetic vision of the human without the usual ideological trappings of transhumanism or a descent into technological minutiae.

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His comment that if you have such an engineered muscle with “the ability to integrate into the nervous system and have, I suppose, as natural a system as you could get” suggests Norbert Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Julian Bigelow’s classic 1943 argument in “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology” that the cybernetic notion of behavior is based on the cycle of feedback between input/output responses or changes of an object with its surroundings.62 Ionat breaks the dream. “Well, all of this is futuristic.” Back to reality. We discuss the sheer complexity required to tissue engineer a muscle that can respond in as robust and regular a way as an assembly-line-constructed actuator. What are the steps required to get to the basic science? Surprisingly, the first thing we need to do is grow tissue in a culture dish and attempt to get it to contract through an electrical impulse—a mechanically mundane thing that will, as usual, prove to be inordinately complicated down the line. Jonas answers in an optimistic voice: “From there, I have to say, the rest of it is downhill . . . once you actually have an organoid or whatever people are calling them . . . and it can survive within that environment . . . it all then becomes a mechanical or the basic science question . . . we have means by which to do this and measure and test these properties of the muscle . . . it’s just getting to that stage.” Just getting to that stage. This statement shatters the conversation. Seems so unrealistically easy as we discuss this detailed and challenging work over the comfort of coffee looking out on Matilda Bay and the stubble-like, bland skyscrapers of Perth in the far background. Return to material reality. To engineer a clump of muscle cells into an actuator is barely what one might call a trivial act. There are, after all, so many unknowns due to the mixing together of an organic thing with a mechanical system that we simply can’t predict how it will respond. The conversation veers back to what we avoid but seek—the artistic work that lurks below all of the scientific research questions—the real “science fiction” aspects of the research. If we imagine exhibiting the movement of what Jonas calls a “biological motor” before spectators, the cultured entity will not really appear as what we normally understand as a muscle. The alien again. “The uncanny sense of the project one experiences emerges from something that moves in a state that one cannot imagine because it doesn’t look like what people imagine a muscle to be. We are thinking about things that in an exhibition context wouldn’t illustrate or give you a 1:1 correspondence between movement and the phenomena .  .  . for example, auditory output that is slightly delayed .  .  . This then is the reason for thinking how such an entity can become magnified.” While Jonas describes an experiment that “blew him away” in which a muscle’s movement electrical activity was amplified into sound with the use of EMG (electromyogram) signals (something computer musicians did ages ago), we discuss that there is still, despite precedent, something seductive about the idea of amplifying the invisible into the felt.63

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Unlike the hidden electrical activity of muscles tensed below the surface of the skin, we are after something else—magnification of the spatio-temporal scale of a hybrid, living entity that is partly entangled in a machine but whose actions and operations will be scarcely visible to spectators. Again, the nagging question of time that haunts the project but provides the key. What kind of behavior will this muscle exhibit? What kind of response time or time constant does it have? What is the temporality expressed when it contracts and expands? How will this feel? We keep circling around these questions like searching for the holy grail. 10 Where the Art Is . . . My initial work at SymbioticA is finished, but it obviously leaves more questions than answers. The experience has been something of a crash course, not only in the mechanics of tissue culture laboratory practices but also in the workings and struggles of SymbioticA as a whole. In many ways, the muscle project exemplifies the complexities of institutionalized, interdisciplinary research-creation—that dreaded arena of “Art Science” in which technical and scientific research agendas crash into, occasionally intersect, and overlap with (while only to depart again from) art making. The mention of the word “art” over and over again acts to singe the conversations I’ve observed. It lurks in the background like the spectres that sociologist Avery Gordon so perfectly describes in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination as that which “appears to be not there [but] is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling taken-for-granted realities.”64 When can you say, I ask, that the scientific research ends and the art begins? The intellectual, the technical, and the visceral are far too separate at this point. Of course, the muscle project is curious and fascinating nevertheless, because it lies at the intersection (or is part of the tension) of so many different contemporary agendas that the hybrid universe of artistic practice being sequestered in research apparatuses portends. From a philosophical point of view, it amplifies the question of what constitutes life or “the living.” But it also sets up the tension between mechanical and biological worldviews of agency and life. We are bent on the question of whether the notion of a “living machine” is really an oxymoron. This is all speculative. But what is apparent in all of the meetings and conversations is the innate inability to name the epistemic thing—not because it is unknown but because it is nameless. It defies description because it does not yet exist. It is a thing that continually inhabits the discourse of this project that forever oscillates between anthropomorphic description (“the cells seem happy”; “I’m going to scold them if they

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don’t wake up”) and brute liquid abstraction, easy to flush down the sink or toss into the yellow biohazard waste bag. Looking out over the Pacific as we leave Australian terra firma. Sean’s statement “the project is more research now than art” haunts me. The project is only about engineering and scientific questions of measurement at this stage. Experience lies on the sidelines, in the background. What we are after seems a mystery. Is it a knowable object that can be reproduced, cited, and measured in the historical epistemological annals or in the equally historicized museum or gallery away from the experimental wetness of the laboratory? Or are we back to Artaud’s cruelty? To the singeing of perception—to us “burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames?” To brutality and quiescence? Biology, engineering, chemistry. These are just means to an end, but right now the logos of technoscience stands in our way. Can we get to life as something more dangerous and severe? Not Grand Guinol in the bioreactor that inspires shock but something deeper? TEMA masquerades as science and art, but it is really more like Artaud’s notion of life “not as we know it from the surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.”65 This is what art + science + research could be. 11 The Tacit Knowing of Tissue A Project Upturned One year later, my sabbatical finally comes. Tissue culture take two. Back in Perth so I can begin the biology work on the project during a three-month residency at SymbioticA in earnest. Three months. This somewhat violates Malinowski’s dictate at the start of his landmark book Argonauts of the Western Pacific that the scientifically minded ethnographer must engage in a kind of deep fieldwork over many years (Margaret Mead’s work in the Fiji islands went on for more than twenty years, I remind myself). Ethnographic compression. Fieldwork of years in several months. Everything has changed. Ionat received a sought-after DECRA early career researcher grant from the Australian Research Council that will both academically legitimize the project and enable it to advance. The cells remain in frozen suspension. Most important, we are back to square one with the bioreactor. Sean’s magical object that served for the projection of so many artistic and scientific hopes and dreams has since been reduced to two nonfunctioning PCBs, the results of Teflon spillages and slayed electronic components. The miracle device has assumed its rightful resting place amid the other abandoned and dead objects and former residents’ staff ID’s in SymbioticA’s wunderkammer. Sean is long gone, the victim of fourth-year university exams and searching for a real engineering job (figure 2.11). Over email in the hectic months before the residency, Ionat and I have worked out the general plan: Finally, I will get my hands wet by collaborating directly on the nitty-gritty of the biology work. This will entail all stages of the cell-culturing process,

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Figure 2.11 Sean’s dead device, SymbioticA. March 2012. Photo by Anke Burger.

from unthawing to pipetting, passaging, centrifuging, changing medium, and other transformations that I initially only observed at a distance. At this stage, all of this should move ultimately toward the telos, as Oron says, of “getting those cells to twitch in the dish.” But this collaboration extends beyond the ins and outs of tissue culturing; I also plan to experiment with different biomaterials for substrates, advise on the sensing and mapping technologies, and conceptually work together with Ionat on the structure and shape of the dramaturgy of the final installation, even though it still seems eons away. If my earlier visit to SymbioticA was far more distanced through participant observation, this residency is about plunging into tissue culturing head on—acquiring the tacit knowledge of what it means to work with the material agency of biological matter.66 Although it might seem odd to talk about questions of embodied knowing in relation to the reductionist abstraction of tissue culture, particularly in light of my first set of observations in May 2011, the act of “knowing how” by engaging directly with the materials of cell biology quickly dispels any doubt over the role of bodily experience in such a process.

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Bioreactor—The Sequel The endless cycle of meetings begins anew. Critical on this agenda is Louis, a young and bright Chinese PhD student and electrical engineer who will act as “the new Sean” in helping to conceive and build a simpler bioreactor. Louis’s real name: Tao Wang, who is based in the Center for Orthopedic Medicine in the research wing of the immense QEII hospital complex, the prime location for UWA’s medical research. He is working on his PhD with Minghao Zheng, a renowned Chinese-born professor of surgery who not surprisingly is also part of the tendoniopathy research project that visited us last year. Louis’s work also demands a custom-designed bioreactor, one that not only can maintain the tendon tissues but also mechanically “exercise” them as well. The meeting takes place in Louis’s cubbyhole of an office at the QEII, a few miles from UWA’s sybaritic campus. He brings us over to the bench, where we finally encounter our next magical fetish object: a burnished, stainless steel contraption atop a perforated incubator shelf that looks like an industrial device bearing little resemblance to Sean’s almost DIY wire and electronic-component saturated PCB. Consisting of a small closed box holding a stepper motor and connected to a long, rod-like spindle that moves forward and backward, the central axle links to five extensions within five smaller containers, each with a clouded acrylic top (figure 2.12). Louis carefully explains how the device functions. With the tendon samples grown over type 1 collagen, another, at least for me, exotic material constructed out of proteins that enables cell adherence and differentiation and will come to play a central role in our project, the tendon is clamped to each end of the small chamber with sutures. The stepper motor then pushes the rod backward and forward, providing the tendon with its necessary exercise. Unusual for an engineer, Louis seems quite obsessed with issues of contamination throughout the discussion, arguing that sterility and proper maintenance of the cells should be the principle considerations when it comes to the design of the bioreactor. He finishes his walkthrough of the machine with a curious if not slightly charming salesman-like flourish. “This is the first model and it actually works. I have some experience in building bioreactors and actually, it’s pretty difficult for an engineer’s background if you want to do something like this .  .  . like you would normally end up with what you already have.” He seems to refer to Sean’s device. “You’re saying it was . . . uh . . . over-engineered . . .” Louis doesn’t flinch. “You have to know how the biology works, cell cultures, if something happens you notice it, if you don’t have the experience of the cell culturing you don’t exactly know what to do in order to protect the cells and you build something purely from the engineer’s perspective . . . you know, a lot of materials are not for biology . . . in biology you can’t just assume the materials . . .”

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Figure 2.12 Louis’s new bioreactor prototype. April 2012. Photo by Chris Salter.

We marvel at Louis’s machine, imagining what it would be like in an exhibition gallery. “I’m sure it also makes this fascinating noise as well,” Ionat states, imitating a kind of drilling sound while I mull over how we could amplify the sound of the motor turning back and forth to generate an extra layer of spectator uneasiness. Dreams over, as the conversation shifts back to pragmatic questions. Can Louis build the bioreactor for us, where will it be built, how much will it cost, how fast can it be done, what kinds of materials, such as sensors and electronics, should be specified? Louis leads us from the lab to his office. On his desk is yet another bioreactor prototype, this one with the shape of a giant cylindrical kind of metal-stamping device. “Here is an earlier device. The idea is to just pop in the tendon and we can just take it out. We don’t monitor it continuously but instead just check it one time a day . . . for the different properties of the mechanical changes. Maybe this approach is more realistic. The ultimate goal is to build something where you can have all of the stuff outside so there is no contamination. You can then control everything .  .  . the temperature, the heat, CO2, etc.” Louis’s primary concern with designing an instrument to maintain and care for cells strongly resonates with the argument Knorr-Cetina makes in Epistemic Cultures:

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How the Sciences Make Knowledge of how laboratories for biology and physiology differ in their sociocultural constitution from the large-scale, “big-science” infrastructures of particle physics experimentation. Unlike the abstracted sign-producing machines of particle physics research, socalled bench-based laboratories are physically sited, almost intimate research environments—“always activated”—in which “research tasks are performed continuously and simultaneously.” For Knorr-Cetina, the biology lab is filled with technical apparatuses whose sole function is the production of “experimental effects.” The lab with its tools and instruments thus serves dual purposes as “toolshop and nursery .  .  . a place where different plant and animal materials are maintained, bred, nourished, warmed, observed, and prepared for experimental manipulation.”67 From his secondhand description and somewhat underhanded comments about Sean’s failure, I sense that Louis is telling us to radically change our approach. The bioreactor should not be seen chiefly as an epistemic thing but rather as a technical object—an enabler in the experimental arrangement we are setting up.68 Indeed, after one year’s toil, we have arrived at a critical moment of realization: The bioreactor is indeed not the object of research for the project. The discussion turns toward the even more confounding issue of substrates and cell mounting, which, despite the fact that Sean and Nathan had ignored it, is also certainly a nontrivial matter. Louis first proposes growing the cells over silk sutures in culture and then lifting them into the small chambers of the bioreactor, because sutures are light and would be easy to thread onto the mechanical ends of his device. The motor would then exercise the organoid by pushing and pulling on the stretched suture, which would be suspended in the sterile chamber, tied to the rod at one end and a clamp at the other. The tricky thing is what kind of substrate the tissue cultures should adhere to. The problem with growing skeletal muscle tissue in vitro is that there is no substrate of ligaments and tendons. One of my jobs during this residency, therefore, is to work with growing tissues over various types of materials, particularly PDMS, given all of the advantages of its various optical, clinical, and material properties. Because PDMS can positively influence the strength of cell adherence, the rate of cell proliferation (i.e., division), and how fast the cells spread in the dish, we return to the problem of how to microfabricate the substrate that we can seed the cells onto. There is another obstacle in our way. UWA does not have a machine to microfabricate the microwidth grooves necessary to help align the cells and assist them in “rolling over like a sausage” to form a cluster of straight myotubes. Experimenting with various micro- and nanoscales in terms of cellular mechanics, Canadian biophysicist Andrew Pelling, a Canada Research Chair (CRC) at the University of Ottawa with whom Ionat has corresponded, has developed a specific protocol for cutting PDMS

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with fine microcuts and then heating the silicone-like substance so the heat smoothes out the ridges of the grooves in order that the myotubes have room to curl over onto themselves. “Well,” Ionat exclaims, “I have a lot of PDMS here so we can play with that. It’s very sticky though. We tried to use a negative shape and pour the PDMS on top of it and it just joined together. But I have to prepare PDMS for another project [an exhibition in Poland that will take Ionat away for three weeks during my residency] and we can work together to see how that functions.” Talk of the mechanics of biomatter rapidly segues into what has become part and parcel of this “artistic” project so far, namely, meeting planning and organizing: another meeting with Louis to discuss the bioreactor he is interested in building for us; a meeting with the biomechanicist Jonas and a physiologist named Gavin who is also working on measuring muscle and tendon forces; work with Ionat on PDMS; scheduling a meeting with Louis’s supervisor Zheng who has developed and rolled his own form of collagen sheets that could be used to seed the cells onto; and, last but certainly not least, my health and safety induction in order that I may actually work in the labs. Meetings, endless meetings, signing forms, negotiations, knowledge gathering, literature surveys so as not to reinvent the wheel again. This is what it really means to do research-creation or “artistic research.” One wonders what it all will yield. Induction The occupational health and safety induction at SymbioticA acts as a kind of initiation ritual for the world of laboratory work, but unlike the somewhat sensationalized account that Oron and Gary Cass detail in their 2008 article “Labs Shut Open: A Biotech Hands On Workshop for Artists,” in which tales of “laboratory explosions, dealings with possible mutagenic agents, hazardous chemicals, the threats of microbial infections and radioactive contamination” abound, my non-artist-focused induction is a mostly prosaic affair—another series of bureaucratic maneuvers in which the only materials one encounters are papers and pens.69 As I sit in a nondescript conference room with a number of other new students, the induction consists of signing various forms while being informed of the differences between PC classifications, the color-coding system for power supplies, proper labeling for disposal of biohazard waste, whether or not to go through an online gene-technology course, and how various bureaucratic online booking systems work. In the hallway after the induction, I catch Ionat, who hands me a single sheet of paper detailing a protocol for extracting primary tissue cells from animals. It would be better if I could understand where the raw material of tissue culture comes from rather than the abstracted, emotionally removed experience of clicking on a shopping cart for cells from an online tissue bank. But the extraction of primary tissue depends on

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sacrificing animals in the Animal Facilities in the university. I hastily agree to attend but am spared the experience of animal slaughter during this residency. Gavin’s Writing Machines We are slightly late for the appointment. Quickly entering the ramshackle physiology complex, we pass by the detritus of research long past: bright-yellow trash containers of various sizes with “clinical” signs clinging to their surfaces; discarded measuring equipment strewn about the dim hallways; out-of-commission refrigerators with “Biohazard” stickers that at one time held fragments of cells and other biomatter. Situated on the second floor, the room we are looking for is only identified by a spartan “research lab” sign. Upon entering, this space feels messier, more disorganized, somewhat chaotic compared to the clinical feel of the tissue culture labs we have worked in over the past weeks. A spaghetti of electrical cables snaking from racks of shiny white boxes passes over lab benches, ending in even more twisted coils attached to complex-looking machines. These devices occupy much of the real estate of this “laboratory,” which appears more like an electronic music studio filled with patch cables entering and exiting outboard gear than a site of physiology experiments (figure 2.13, top). Abruptly, Gavin Pinniger, the director of the lab, appears, smiles, shakes our hands, and quickly gets down to business. Over the next hour, this young assistant professor of skeletal muscle physiology takes us on a whirlwind tour of his research: how muscle fibers work; why they spontaneously twitch given the right nutrients; how we measure a muscle’s force and displacement using these expensive white boxes that transduce and record motion. During our discussion—in which Pinniger excitedly describes his work and the apparatuses that make it possible, demonstrating large, black, metal mechanisms with tweezer-like pinchers (figure 2.13 center) and thrusting the resulting computer printouts of Fast Fourier Transforms into our face—we are continually struck by how these machines render the palpable, embodied actions of living tendons and muscle fibers and tissues into inert traces, marks, and measurements on paper (figure 2.13, bottom). Hearing Gavin’s explanations and seeing the excitement in his face as he demonstrates his measurement devices seems to oddly confirm Bruno Latour’s now (in) famous claim that the laboratory consists of a “tribe of readers and writers who spend two-thirds of their time working with large inscription devices. They appear to have developed considerable skills in setting up devices which can pin down elusive figures, traces or inscriptions in their craftwork and in the art of persuasion.”70 With their amalgamation of material, organic, and recording-based components, Gavin’s measuring devices embody the argument of another historian of science, Henning Schmidgen, who poses the issue differently than Latour. Machines used in the life sciences are not only writing instruments but also “a transversal coupling of body and technology, of human beings, technological objects and recording surfaces.”

Figure 2.13 Gavin Pininger’s research lab. March 2012. Photo by Chris Salter.

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Schmidgen’s work in the experimentalization of life reminds us that the history of experimentation in biology cannot be separated from its machinic frame.71 The issue of time continually returns, but unlike Schmidgen’s study of the experiments of recording temporal propagation (Zeitmessungen or “time measurements”) in the neural impulses of frogs (Hermann von Helmholtz) or humans (the Dutch physiologist Franciscus Cornelius Donders), the bioreactor we seek to build for TEMA shifts the emphasis from measurement to affect: from the instrument understood as a semiological apparatus rendering time into graphemic marks and written traces to that of one amplifying and transmitting energy directly onto the body. According to historian of science Davis Baird, Latour’s transformation of the material conditions of the laboratory and, indeed, scientific practice in general into reading and writing is “a travesty.” Instead, instruments themselves, in their material formations and conditions, “bear knowledge” on their subjects, transforming them and, in many cases, bringing them into being. In Thing Knowledge, Baird argues that scientific instruments are not all the same but have “significant epistemological differences”—acting as models (Watson and Crick’s ball-and-stick DNA helix), as devices that perform (i.e., they produce material transformations on the world), or as measuring systems, producing performances in order to create representations (e.g., the thermometer).72 Writing, experience transformed to inscription, returns as Gavin shows us the depicted twitches of muscle micromotion: an FFT-generated sonogram that visualizes the changes of a single muscle fiber’s sarcomere length. His mathematical plot confirms Jonathan Sterne’s assertion in the Audible Past that, historically, nonvisible, temporal phenomena such as the acoustic vibrations materialized in and through sand on physicist and mathematician Ernst Chladni’s metal plates had to be quantified and rendered into the realm of the visible in order to be scientifically acceptable as an object of knowledge.73 Have we indeed come much further than Chladni’s plates in understanding phenomena that we cannot see but can feel? As Gavin explains the ways in which his instruments actuate and measure muscle actions, I return to the question that continues to obsess me: What kind of temporal behavior in the muscle results from actuating it by chemical, electrical, or mechanical stimulation? Can we make that temporality felt to a spectator? Gavin’s answer betrays his lack of exact knowing while simultaneously exposing a key piece of scientific information. With electrical stimulation, a “normal” cell contracts within 100 ms and relaxes in around 150 ms. When I ask what happens with the cell’s movement in this period, whether it is periodic or stochastic, Gavin links it back to machine origins: a 20 to 80 Hz electrical stimulus that can be electrically varied over time from one of his expensive transducer/actuator instruments will clearly affect the reflexive action of the muscle. Once the actuation force is applied, however, the fiber will respond and remain latent until the next response. In other words, it seems that

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stimulating it exogenously does not cause the muscle tissue to store up energy and then indefinitely continue to produce motion. Why, when put under stress, do cultured muscle tissues start twitching uncontrollably in a backward and forward motion that appears, at least in real-time video, to barely resemble periodic or even one-shot movement? Pathology, Gavin answers. Tissue cultured cells are damaged and thus may store up excess calcium that is somehow then released due to chemical imbalances in the signaling between myoblasts as they differentiate and as the composition of the nutrient media is changed. “If you want something repeatable and consistent, the best solution is electrical stimulation.” Gavin’s response presents us with an aesthetic quandary. We want to have precise electrical control over the time behavior of the muscle that we can accurately map into auditory and other signals, but, at the same time, the “look” of mechanical actuation is more interesting from a visitor’s point of view. Indeed, Gavin seems surprised when we tell him that we wish not only to visualize the muscle’s force and displacement but also to sonify it. “You know, create pressure in the room by sonifying the muscle’s motions into the infrasonic range—below 20 Hz.” What kind of device do we need to be able to sense such bafflingly miniscule motion? Once again, Gavin excitedly turns to the machines, pointing to the various and expensive piezoelectric transducers that are integral components of his family of apparatuses in the lab. These transducers are so delicate and expensive that they have to be continually recalibrated and certainly could never withstand the rigors of touring from museum to festival to science center around the globe. Each device combines chemical, electrical, and mechanical procedures for sensing, actuating, and measuring: solution and buffer baths, exposed clamps in chambers that enable the researchers to stretch and prod individually dissected muscle fibers. Unlike culture procedures, however, Gavin’s setups expose cells to the brutality of the nonsterile world, reducing their usable life span to no more than a few hours. In fact, as Gavin exclaims, “it is the interface between the biological and the instrumentation that is the challenge.” Gavin gives us the tiny microforce transducer to test out. We depart overwhelmed by the amount of information to take into consideration in our culturing experiments. Not only do we have to focus on how to technically integrate all of these disparate pieces into the bioreactor but we also have to deal with how to gauge, shape, and script what appear to be somewhat indeterminate forces from an entity that is currently purely imaginary. 12 A Revealing School Seminar On invitation from the school of Anatomy, Physiology, and Human Biology, Ionat and I give a one-hour talk on the project entitled “Tissue Engineered Muscle Actuators as

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Evocative Cultural Objects” for the weekly seminar series. The audience is mainly composed of students and faculty members who, fortified with sandwiches and coffee, have decided to give up their precious lunchtime to hear what we are up to in the PC2 labs. The talk is something of a small revelation for me. While I discuss my dual role at SymbioticA as artist/ethnographer, Ionat’s lecture provides a “dissected” overview of the project from the perspective of the DECRA grant. As she describes the conceptual basis, I can see already that sentences like “shifting perception of what is living” and “posthumanist perception of movement as an indicator of material agency” fly over the heads of our mainly science-student audience. Ionat’s talk presents the contextual frame of the project from two “compelling” yet “anecdotal” historical perspectives: the first describes an invention that attributes life to a moving object, and the second is an example of how life becomes objectified and instrumentalized by being embedded within a technological milieu. The first example, the Greek aeolipile, an automaton most likely invented by Heron of Alexander in the first century BCE and widely seen as a precursor to Watt’s steam engine, exemplifies, for Ionat, the classic Aristotelian claim that the introduction of movement into an object constructs the perception in the observer that the object is somehow alive.74 Unlike Watt’s engine, however, the aeolipile, which functioned like a kind of steam-driven turbine, was seen as a nonutilitarian device; one of many “temple wonders” that served as a toy or “party trick.” More telling is the second argument about life becoming objectified. Flashed on the screen before the crowd is a somewhat striking image—a large, white space with a series of glass and metal-rimmed boxes mounted on the wall and connected to conduit pipes. Although the image evokes the appearance of an old-fashioned boiler room, Ionat startles the crowd in disclosing that the glass boxes are, in fact, incubators and that this industrial-looking room is, in actuality, an exhibition of living infants. This “infant incubators with living infants” sideshow was the work of Dr. Martin A. Couney, a pediatrician who perfected a method to keep prematurely born babies alive in incubators and went on to exhibit his findings in expositions and fairs throughout Europe and the United States, culminating in the permanent live baby “Infant Incubator” show at Coney Island’s Luna Park and later Dreamland theme parks (figure 2.14). Although the association of freak show, “living machine,” and liminal being (the baby kept alive through the apparatus) is an intriguing one, what is most pertinent to our work is Ionat’s focus on Couney’s mise en scene; how the staging and involvement of the viewer becomes tantamount to the construction of empathy as well as modes of understanding life within a technological milieu. Rather than dry, clinical, scientific modes of presentation, the incubator freak show seizes on aesthetic devices and ploys in order to articulate industrialized science and technology within the public imagination. With the muscle project, I suddenly grasp an important idea that I have been

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Figure 2.14 Martin Couney’s “Infant Incubator” exhibit, Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition, Seattle. Photo circa 1909. Courtesy of University of Washington Special Collections.

resisting but that is central for Ionat’s practice as an artist working with instruments: that the display, the appearance of the apparatus is just as important as its behavior. 13 Goals and Purposes In the early days of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, Julian Bigelow, and Arturo Rosenblueth argued that the concept of behavior described any change of an entity with respect to its surroundings, their central argument being based on the distinction between purposeful and purposeless behavior. Behavior is purposeful if it has a clearly defined goal, whereas purposeless behavior has no goal.75 Moreover, in discussing purpose/goal versus random action, Wiener and his collaborators specify a correlation between voluntary and involuntary action. “The basis of the concept of purpose is the awareness of voluntary activity. Now, the purpose of voluntary acts is not a matter of arbitrary interpretation but a physiological fact. When we perform a voluntary action what we select voluntarily is a specific purpose [my emphasis], not a specific movement” (Wiener).76

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The fact that Wiener, Bigelow, and Rosenblueth vehemently state that not all machines have purpose (for example, a roulette wheel produces chance outcomes, and a clock has movement but does not try to attain a final state or condition) lands us at the crux of TEMA. Are we, in effect, trying to design a hybrid machine-organism with enough statistical noise (randomness generated by the presence of our muscle organoid) such that, although it at first appears to operate with purpose, gradually reveals itself to be purposeless? Would this set up a tension between order and disorder in the viewer’s experience? Or perhaps we are seeking to design a machine-organism that maximizes complexity;— what physicist James Crutchfield describes as a system in which as “one moves across the spectrum of predictability—from ordered to random behavior—the ‘complexity’ is maximized in the middle.”77 A complex system in this sense is not necessarily one with many components but rather with a precarious balance between ordered and disordered elements. It seems that underlying this discussion of behavior and goals somehow lurks the utopian desire for a kind of hybrid machine that evolves in some open, surprising, and simultaneously indeterminate manner and that, through its behavior, could startle even its makers and observers. Such a scheme is highly constrained; order or disorder may not only be measured quantitatively but also qualitatively, both lying in the proverbial eye of the beholder. To construct a system that behaves in such an “open,” that is, complex, manner is to construct a system that is far from unstructured. A similar situation arises in the context of musical improvisation. In writing about the relationship between interactive computer music and improvisation, musician and scholar George Lewis points out that historically, in the context of live computer music, improvisation involved a “performer-supplied .  .  . generation of musical structure in real time,” but it also “blurred the boundaries between human and machine musicmaking and called into question received notions of human identity. The ‘structure’ of the pieces was difficult to separate from the enabling technologies . . . the presence of contingency and partial perspective in the music promoted a sharp questioning of the notion of hierarchical control of musical process.”78 Lewis’s argument gives us room to pause. It suggests that improvisational processes blur boundaries between dichotomies like human and machine, opening up a space for questioning. But Lewis also suggests that we cannot separate the way an event is structured or organized from the technologies that assist in its organization. This takes us back to a notion of performance that we can conceptualize as an act between order and disorder, between scripted structure and the real-time, contingent unfolding of actions. I ask Ionat a question. Why do many artists or scholars use the word performance to describe actions or behaviors of nonintentional or non-motive-driven things—a so-called performativity of matter? Our muscle organoid is a good example. Is it just responding or reacting to its environment but not conscious of it? Or, as Wiener states,

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is it that the behavior of the system alters the environment and hence makes a material mark on the world through its actions? This question of the relationship between action and agency in a living versus nonliving system is also something that obsesses the cybernetically inclined neuroscientist Peter Cariani. Cariani has a vested interest in the question as his research involves timing nets in the brain and the manner in which such networks might spontaneously demonstrate emergent behavior. For him, agency requires a degree of autonomous action coupled with a goal-seeking mechanism that steers the behavior of a system in pursuit of particular goals. Agency here thus denotes any goal-seeking system, from organic, life-like organisms to secret agents, robots, and software systems.79 We circle back to my ongoing obsession with time. Although we have yet to experience the movement of our muscle cells, if behavior is a coded word for dynamics, then does the behavior of those muscle cells imply propensity, forward direction? Are their motions smooth and continuous or abrupt, disjointed, jumping from one state to another? And when those muscle cells twitch, what do they try to achieve? Is their movement purposeful, toward some telos, or just pure reaction to the environment— plain, brute action that can be easily explained away in mechanistic terms? Is it ordered (i.e., we can find a pattern) or disordered (probabilistic or stochastic)? Is this apparent to the spectators, and, if so, why should they care? I propose Cariani’s concept of purpose and goal as minimal conditions for the exhibition (if not attribution) of agency to Ionat. Immediately she has a strong reaction against the word “purpose.” “I have a problem with the word purpose.” “Yes, but from a biological point of view, organisms do have some purpose, whether to survive in a harsh environment—” “You can say the same about the muscle tissue. The action of trying to figure out the environment around it and then reacting to it, isn’t that its purpose?” “Or is that just pure reaction?” “Well, it reacts within limits to its environment.” “If we are to design a program to do something specific, like using a servomechanism to control itself (like what we are talking about with the muscle), then you would say that there has to be something or some place that the system is trying to reach.” Ionat pauses for a moment of reflection before continuing: “Are you talking about free will?” “Well, that’s underlying it somehow, although they are not the same. You don’t just react. You act according to a certain set of circumstances in the environment. You may choose how much energy you put into it or how little (is that free will?). In effect, it seems that all of these old cybernetic questions seem to keep coming back in our project because the muscle actuator can be seen as both an organism, a living entity, as well as a potential machine—in cybernetic parlance, a set of switches.”

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Ionat protests: “But that’s the difference. It’s not a brutal set of switches because it evolves and changes . . . but a machine is different . . .” “Well, aren’t machines designed for purposes?” “Yes, for purposes. And they don’t change as they become more complex.” “The machine doesn’t become more complex. It cannot evolve to a higher level of complexity in the sense that no machine can be pathological; it can’t mutate. It can break down and stop, but it can’t mutate.”80 14 Tissue Culture Hands On Time has passed, three weeks to be exact, since setting foot in the lab, the result of a very welcome vacation while Ionat and Oron are in Europe. Traveling with Anke across the antediluvian southwestern and then northwestern parts of Western Australia and traversing a scorching yet astoundingly alluring bareness like nowhere else on earth gives one room for pause. Such a journey into limitless emptiness also further contextualizes my past and future work in the laboratory, if not least due to the steady confrontation of natural-cultural worlds banging up against each other that one experiences in the Australian bush. Six-hundred kilometers of infinite desert that abruptly ends in vacation trailer parks and bottle shops abutted against a crystal-blue Indian Ocean; a corrugated dirt road alongside continual dunes where a sudden pack of 4WDs kick up dust on the horizon; a souvenir book of Australian road kill from a Sydney publisher; and greasy fish and chips to be found in the lone outpost of the Billabong Road House, which sits amidst deserts of spinifex and the world’s most poisonous reptiles. After the three-week hiatus into the Australian miracle outback, the return to our work feels almost like a kind of serene culture shock, particularly now that the distanced observation of the tissue culturing process in 2011 gives way to direct participation and the messiness of hands-on experience—of “speaking nearby” (Trinh T. Minh-ha).81 Learning by (Trying) to Do The first day of tissue culture hands on. Peculiar déjà vu experience, but this time things are palpably different; my body lands implicitly and directly into the rituals of cleaning, defrosting, washing, drying, touching. The washing and drying of hands in the lab sink to ward off bacteria becomes second nature, yet no one has thought to replace the soap in the green dispenser suspended above the sink. Unlike last time, now the smell and feel of ethanol sprayed onto latex glove–encased hands in order to disinfect before beginning the culturing process forces a sensorial experience tensioned between clinical sterility and tactile heightening. It almost beggars description, this sense of moist, alcohol-covered hands at one moment feeling watery and irriguous but all too soon dry and rubbery.

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Workaday routines such as the washing and drying of hands, the spraying down and wiping clean of the gleaming metal surfaces of the laminar hood, and reaching into the cold frosts of the industrial freezers and refrigerators to fetch serum, medium, and cells become oddly sensual experiences, only broken by the rational calculation of measurements of this and that solution or the excruciating precision necessary for a beginner to transfer cells from their microsized, cold-storage vials to tissue flasks. Having observed Ionat in action before, I have a general sense of the protocols needed to ensure that we can bring these bits of frozen cells to a state of animation. The method she uses to teach these culturing protocols is a Piagetian-influenced learning by doing: first observing/describing, followed by (my) repeating or, indeed, executing the task at hand for the first time. It goes without saying that tissue culturing hands on necessitates forgetting the omnipresent machineries of recording that I have brought to capture this experience— the Tascam digital recorder or, when it fails due to low batteries, the iPhone, the iPad running Evernote in which I occasionally type in some less than coherent field notes, and finally one of several Muji notebooks and pens that also increasingly become strewn about the lab as we move between the hood and the microscope on the other side of the room. My concentration falls solely on what I see as highly precision-based work that, if not well executed, will result in continually starting from scratch with our cells; the effects of unwanted accidents or carelessness that could conjure up the spectre of contamination and bring our culture work to a screeching halt. We commence the preparation, thawing, and feeding process. The secret lies in expediency. Given that the thawing procedure is stressful on the cells, they should not sit too long in the antifreeze agent DMSO. Expediency becomes a kind of watchword, but speed with cell culture is not always necessarily the rule, as I’ve previously witnessed from the processes of passaging. The cell vials that we extract from the box sent from the tissue culture bank have already been passaged, albeit in early stages. Ionat explains that we need to check the cells every two or three days to prevent premature confluency and differentiation into myotubes. Cell time does not go in reverse.82 When we thaw the cells, we also want to prevent clusters or clumps of cells in the early stages of propagation; otherwise it will become difficult to distinguish them during differentiation stages, particularly when the cells form myotubes. During our work, we continually slip into conversations about tissue culture’s history, methods, and uses, while Ionat reminds me of its approximation-based biological technique; every batch of serum will be different, because every animal is different. Thus, the replication of experiments becomes extremely difficult due to the large amount of unknown or uncontrolled variables (temperature in the room, shifting amounts of CO2, differences between media and reagents).

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As we prepare the work area, gathering the various flasks and media, Ionat mentions the somewhat problematic work undertaken by a young German artist who I met here last year and who was also in residence this year. Her project, attempting to coax cultured cells to spell out various texts and names on microfabricated substrates shaped like letters, seems to have foundered in the last moments of her residency while she attempted to film the process on the inverted microscope. “She thought that she could make the cells do exactly what she wanted them to do, not realizing that this is probably not possible.” Perhaps this is also a shielded warning to us—that there is only a certain amount of control we can exercise here and that we had better heed the cells’ own material characteristics as we work with them. For the next fifteen minutes, back and forth from floor to floor gathering materials needed for our work. First, we leave the room to fetch the serum. In the various refrigerators, unlabeled containers and flasks holding experiments long forgotten line the shelves (figure 2.15). Ionat removes another ice-laden container, a $500 bottle of FBS, while she calculates in her head the different percentages of what solution goes into what other solution: “Five milliliters for 500, that is one percent.” Indeed, given the fact that all of the

Figure 2.15 SymbioticA laboratory fridge. May 2012. Photo by Chris Salter.

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materials we will use involve measurements, we essentially refer to pipettes and glassware with numbers: 50 mL, 5 mL, 10 mL, 15 mL. This becomes an integral part of our daily tissue culture routine: communication of results through the colloquialisms of arithmetic calculation. In the supply room on the second floor, Ionat is interrupted (as is the usual case) by Stuart Hodgetts, a microbiologist and SymbioticA supporter and collaborator who begins discussing the regulatory requirements of a new lab in Helsinki that is going to be set up by Oron and Ionat. Not to lose the opportunity, Ionat asks Hodgetts if there is a supply of type 1 collagen—the material we want to experiment with alongside PDMS as a substrate. “Well, there is a method you can use for getting it from rat tails.” “Yeah, but that will take a lot of time to find the rat tails.” “We don’t have any . . . perhaps the guys in nanotechnology . . .” This brief conversation seems just odd enough to add to the general surreal quality of the morning, moving from frozen serum to procedures for chopping up rat tails in order to create a surface that we can pour our watery cells over. I begin to pepper Ionat with questions in order to learn as she re-explains and demonstrates various routines. Preparing to unthaw the cells, we fish out the tissue flasks, pipettes, and other paraphernalia from the drawers, placing them in what appears to be some unknown but somehow logical semblance of order next to the hood. In donning the white lab coats (“the coat”), specifically, the two SymbioticA ones with phrases on the back that spell out “life is biodegradable art,” I feel we are marked as outsiders and interlopers among the “real” biology researchers who rarely appear in the lab except for a few minutes to peer into the incubators and check the status of their own cells (figure 2.16, top left and right). After firing up the hood, spraying it down and setting out the various bottles and flasks, we again engage in measurement speak as we prepare a tube of media mixed with serum. “We want to make enough media that will fit into that tube. Umm . . . for the T75 I put 15 mL into each. It will probably be 10.” Ionat catches herself. “For 20%, 20%? No . . . sorry, did I say 10%? Muscle as opposed to other tissues need 20 percent. It has 20 percent and then when we start the process of myotubes we use horse serum as opposed to bovine serum because it is less quality. You want to starve it . . . so 20% for 50 mL is 10. So I have to put 10 mL.” Mixing several batches of medium/serum, Ionat scrutinizes my every move, never failing to point out contamination-prevention techniques and other forbidden actions: wipe the flasks coming out of the bath; toss pipettes away immediately that have even as much as touched the edges of other flasks and vials; never have pipettes collide with the vials; never keep things far away in the hood so as not to carelessly bump against them; never allow the fluid in the pipette to go above the top marked line, otherwise the filter will be ruined (figure 2.16, second row right). “Nothing touches nothing

Figure 2.16 The tenuous work of tissue culture from doing it. March 2012. Photos by Anke Burger.

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.  .  . and then, chuck away,” Ionat states as she tosses an empty flask into the waste container. Finished writing our names on the flasks, Ionat shows me how to use the pipettor. “As a rule you always change pipettes when you use a central bottle. Now, should I do it first and then tomorrow you can start?” I agree that this would be the best, considering the fact that I don’t want to contaminate a $500 bottle of fetal bovine serum on my first day. What I quickly realize is that the safety procedures that Ionat undertakes, such as changing the pipettes after each measurement, are not hard and steadfast rules but rather learned techniques from protocols passed down among generations of scientists. For example, she resists pouring the medium directly into the standing tubes but rather uses a new pipette to do it, fearing the risk of contaminating the entire lot of medium. Completing the mixing of medium and serum, the real process of tissue culture recommences at the freezer, an appropriate site given that the Norse myth of creation involves the birth of life from the gap between worlds of primordial ice and fire. At first, Ionat seems slightly puzzled. “Hmm . . . they moved the freezer.” She leaves the room to ask another researcher where it is. Discovering that the freezer has been moved to the other side of the room, next Ionat cannot find the box of C2C12 cell flasks amid the clutter of other researchers’ leavings with labels such as “liver” and “kidney” cells, and we rummage with thick, cotton protection gloves through boxes covered in layered white ice for some sign of life. The communal freezers of biological researchers seem the equivalent of the time-shared computers of yesteryear, with the main exception being the hands-on feeling of frost and cold coupled with the material inventories of stacked cartons and containers. We happen upon an unusually frozen Mr. Frosty (“very frosty”), which seems strangely forlorn in this cave of ice, and soon discover that the treasure we seek has indeed been moved to the second floor. Finally, upstairs the treasure is found: a white, nondescript box buried deep in the back of the bottom shelf of the other freezer with the Sharpie-scrawled name of “Ionat” on it. Because this time I’m allowed to engage in this quick-incubation part of the work, the abstracted, almost crystallized matter in the vials produces its aura in a more profound way as we extract three of the miniscule plastic containers, rubbing them in our hands as we make the journey back to the lab. Thawing Rewound Day 2. The occasion where everything shifts: I no longer can observe from the sidelines. Entering the lab, Ionat announces the first casualty of our experiments. Two of the tissue vials that we unthawed yesterday show little or no evidence of live cells, a notion confirmed by looking under the microscope at the different tissue flasks filled with reddish medium and finding unmoored and lonely myoblasts. Thus, we have to

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unthaw more cells, ones that have not been passaged as many times, as well as begin to change or “refresh” the medium for others that have already been incubated. The routine commences: switching on the hood, starting the bath, donning the gloves and the coat in order to “work sterile,” spraying down the hood and hands, retrieving a fresh batch of C2C12 vials from the freezer, setting the media out and the plastic holder on the floor of the hood, making sure the waste container is nearby. We open the incubator, an action that seems at first to be unleashing the contents of Pandora’s Box—not knowing what will be awaiting us (figure 2.17, top left). As we work, I announce out loud my every step, trying both to remember what Ionat demonstrated yesterday as well as assuring myself of what to do next in order to internalize it. Demanding a delicate combination of expediency and care, I first begin to remove the cells from the new vials retrieved from the freezer. This begins a sort of comedy of errors in the choreography of pipetting, as the latex gloves I wear are slightly too small for my hands. Ionat glances at her pupil, probably with a jarring combination of respect (that I’m willing to plunge feetfirst into this work) and amusement (figure 2.16, bottom row right). During my first tries, I continually break the rules of sterility while attempting to remove the paper wrapping from the pipettes without touching the glass of the cylinder— a task made more difficult first because I hold the pipette gun the wrong way, blocking my view, and second because of the fact that my gloves fit so tightly that I can’t peel away the thin paper at the end of the pipette (figure 2.16, third row left and right). “Did you touch the outside?” Ionat quickly asks. “I’m trying not to.” “Yeah, okay. You didn’t?” “I didn’t touch the outside. I touched the inside.” “Ah . . . inside is okay.” As I work to remove the icy cell clumps from the tiny vial without touching the edge, my hand shakes with nervousness and sweat drips onto the hood’s metal grill; the result of the awkwardness of my position standing directly before the hood results in mismatched coordination between my hands and the rest of my body. I now suck the cells into the pipette. Unfortunately, due to the angle at which I hold the gun, I also cannot see the tiny measurement marks on the glass. “Ah, WATCH OUT!” Ionat blurts, as the fluid almost backs up to the top of the pipette. Air into the pipette; a series of increasingly larger bubbles crawling up the glass tube. Clearly, not a good practice considering that air bubbles mixed with the cells will create turbulence in the pipette. As I inject the medium into the flask holding our new life forms, Ionat states, “enjoy your suffering.” She seems to immediately breathe a sigh of relief, most likely because I’ve finished transferring the contents of this first vial without spilling all of this lively matter on the floor of the hood. “Now I feel better, because I know they needed the serum and the medium. Now input another five.”

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Figure 2.17 First look at the cells. April 2012. Photos by Anke Burger.

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“Okay,” I exclaim, once again squirting the medium into the flask while my hand trembles. This done, I engage in the next comedy routine, attempting to take the pipette off the gun inside the hood and throw it into a wastebasket, which is just slightly out of reach. I toss the pipette and it lands, teetering on the edge of the yellow plastic biohazard bag before plunging to the floor. Once the medium and cells are resting comfortably in the flask, I label it with my name and the passage number as we proceed to the next vial. Grasping the vial, the warm water from the bath almost penetrates the rubbery consistency of the latex. “Warm . . . very warm. It’s a weird feeling in my hands.” Ionat takes the opportunity to announce why: “Well, you know life is—” I jokingly cut this philosophical musing quickly off. “It’s not life .  .  . it’s just warm because the water is warm! It’s also because the hood is warm!” As we both laugh, Ionat catches sight of the next mistake: unscrewing the orange lid of the tube and leaving it on the floor of the hood in the wrong direction—upside down. Ionat quickly picks it up and tosses it into the bin. “It’s the wrong side up. Potential for contamination.” Getting ready to pipette the cells into the next flask, the struggle begins anew. At first, my attempt to remove the paper covering from the pipette again fails because of my small-sized gloves. Somewhat carelessly, I touch the gun to the edge of the paper and then somehow brush the slightly torn open paper with my hand. “Did you just touch that with your hand? Chuck away. I told you to bring lots of pipettes!” “So that’s waste now?” I incredulously ask, as I toss away the one-quarter-open, brand-new, unused pipette. I briefly glance down into the pile of waste that has accumulated already in the last 30 minutes, letting my mind drift for a few seconds to ponder the amount of trash that is created every minute in every biology lab around the world. An almost unfathomable quantity. I start again, this time arranging the pipettes so that I don’t have to reach crossarmed across the hood to discard the wrapper immediately in the garbage. Although it is still a struggle to get the paper off the wrapped glass tube, I’m quite satisfied with my new solution to remove the paper with the left hand, toss it aside to the left of the hood, and then later dispose of the pile in one fell swoop with my hands safely outside of the sterile zone. My satisfaction is short-lived as I once again cannot tear the paper strip from the top and the sweat drips onto the front of the hood. “Mmm  .  .  . I touched it again. Once again, I can’t open the pipette.” Ionat tries to show me the proper way to do, it but she also fails, no doubt due to the small gloves that she is also forced to wear. “Nor can you . . .” “Bad design . . . bad design . . . but you don’t want to open it too easily! Don’t worry, I’ll make sure to bring new, different-sized gloves tomorrow.”

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Finally, the trial by fire subsides. The transfer of the cells and medium to the flasks as well as changing the medium in one of the flasks from yesterday is accomplished. We remove our sterile uniforms and return to the microscope to briefly look at the surviving cells. My fumbling continues, this time trying to turn the microscope on and focus it. As the image of the cells appears on the monitor beside the microscope, Ionat points out the healthy cells (figure 2.17, center left). Life on the screen indeed appears alien—spiky, neuronal looking forms whose nuclei seem to peer out onto us—for sure, an even stranger landscape than their medium-saturated plastic home. We agree to wait. The cells are growing, but we will need to return again tomorrow, at the same time, to check the confluency. We clean up, restore the laboratory to zero state, turn off the lights, and leave the cells to do their thing (figure 2.17, bottom left and right). Again the problem of time in relation to life. I’m surprised that our “artistic work” lasted approximately sixty-five minutes and that’s it for the day. I think about the tension between the laborious tasks of maintaining sterility for what essentially are containers of liquid versus the provocative image of life that I’ve seen on the screen. Sterility needs an incredibly fine touch, steady hand. No rushing things, even though expediency is of the essence. God, is this how the next weeks will go? 15 Life’s Triumph in the Dish The continuum between working with cellular life and encountering the abstracted knowledge practices that have come to constitute the disciplines of biology and tissue culture is directly embodied by the useful distinction anthropologist Stefan Helmreich makes between “forms of life” and “life forms.” Whereas life forms refers to “embodied bits of vitality called organisms, variously apprehended as ranged into species or as sorted into types occupying spaces of physical, metabolic or ecological possibility,” “forms of life” refers us back to bios, understood as the organization and structuring of life. “When I write of ‘forms of life,’ I mean those cultural, social, symbolic, and pragmatic ways of thinking and acting that organize human communities.”83 As Helmreich articulates, the origin of the term “form of life” lies in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s description of the manner in which linguistic action becomes meaningful. If, for Wittgenstein, language is that which binds human beings together, acting as “the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language,” then the forms of life that involve manipulation and transformation are, as such, contingent, subject to change. Such forms encompass the cultural and ethical context of knowledge embodied in the laboratory and its instruments, discursive practices that legitimate certain forms of knowledge, the apparatuses of capture initiated and shaped by statist political, social, and

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financial structures (such as research funding), and so on. Hence, we remain in a constant tension between those bits of carbon and oxygen we call organisms and those forms of life that legitimize, standardize, and conceptualize what those life forms should be. We would remain oscillating in this tension if it were not for an almost overlooked occurrence. Having reached 70 percent confluency and changed the growth medium to horse serum in an effort to starve the cells and induce movement, we are quickly sorting through the almost one dozen tissue flasks with various passages under the microscope. Each flask yields the same image: a thick monolayer of tubular-shaped cells almost architecturally intertwined within each other. We desperately scan for signs of life while carefully repositioning the various tissue flasks across the microscope’s specimen holder and extension plate. Stasis, unending stasis greets us at each flask. Using our naked eyes as opposed to the pixilated representation on the monitor to our left, we squint hard into the eyepiece, almost to the point at which the pressure against the eye produces phosphenes that generate a false appearance of movement. At the cusp of giving up. I readjust the flask on the plate from a region of cells that appear to be so static that they could well be frozen to another, potentially more vibrant, area. Suddenly, something seems different, and I fall upon an almost divine scene of fluctuation among the cells—a kind of glorious twitching in which mass clusters of intertwined myotubes all pulse in indeterminate rhythms. Coursing like the flow of blood from the ventricles of the heart, the movement produces a swishing jerkiness, not necessarily periodic but not without pattern. It suggests to me something like the heartbeat that appears in an early ultrasound of a fetus still nested within the womb. Readjusting the flask again in order to glance at a new region, the movement appears to now spread across the myotube mesh, throbbing like the living ocean glimpsed in the shocking final shot of Tarkovsky’s film Solaris. At first, I think that the movement is an illusion, the byproduct of wishes projected onto these coiled sausage–like forms. Upon glancing again and again, however, the movement appears very real indeed. I let my secret out to the world. “Ionat! They’re moving!” She quickly drops what she is doing and runs to the microscope to examine the evidence. A slightly latent but still excited scream pierces the sterile air–blown silence of the lab. “Oh! They’re moving!” We don’t know how and for how long, but this moment is somehow a kind of temporary telos for our work over the past weeks. We rush with this singular flask to CELL Central’s live-imaging system to begin recording these exquisite contractions and expansions—both as images to prove that the movement is not imagined and to see how long the cells will maintain their state of motility. I exaggerate this moment of discovery. Depicting the sudden and palpable experience of something that up until now has remained in the abstract. This bundle of cells resembles no ma-

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chine; how could a machine be glimpsed over weeks transforming, not only its appearance, moving from singular to multiple, but also its potential? Even though the cells only twitch for a day or so, the moment of motion experienced is not the disappearance of potentiality and the realization of actuality, but instead the catalyst for its regenesis. 16 Eight Failed Experiments in Substrate Sketching Parallel to our culture work, we start experimentation with PDMS molds. At the same time, we schedule an appointment to meet with Zheng, Louis’s advisor, to see if we can use his collagen, particularly should our PDMS work fail. We decide to produce a series of PDMS substrates with grooves at varying thicknesses and attach sutures within these grooves to which we can then seed, grow, and hopefully align our C2C12 cells.84 Experimental practice unveiled. Playing with materials to see how they perform. The approach is influenced by design practice, most particularly Bill Buxton’s concept of “fail early and fail often,” in which we can create a number of very rough and ready examples that fall between sketches and prototypes, a far cry away from the expensive “throwaway” process of scientific research in which one might spend thousands of dollars microfabricating something that in the end fails to yield results.85 Fail early and often indeed. Experiment 1 An attempt to produce a PDMS mold that is far too thin (figure 2.18, top left). We cut it with an X-Acto knife to carve the grooves. The result: a mangled sticky mess impossible to pry out. We promptly toss the entire monstrosity into the garbage. Experiment 2 An attempt with a pre-existing mold. We appropriate Oron’s small, plastic, Japanese travel washboard that he uses to scrub his underwear in hotel bathrooms. The board is too large for the dish. Scanning the material in a newly acquired Roland MDX 3D scanner/milling machine. Staring into the screen, observing the snail pace of the renderer as it marches over each long groove in the plastic (figure 2.18, top right). This process will not break any speed records. An overnight scanning marathon. We awake to find . . . an error. Begin again. Two days later, the next failure with the renderer. Experiment 3 Out with the scanning, in with using the washboard directly. Permanent sacrifice for art or whatever it is we are doing. Cutting it up into miniature pieces, setting these into small aluminum foil baskets, and pouring the mixed PDMS base and curing agent directly onto and over the surface (figure 2.18, second row, left and right). Brilliant

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Figure 2.18 PDMS trials. April 2012. Photos by Anke Burger.

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idea; coat the surfaces of the destroyed washboard with Vaseline to make the eventual peeling of the PDMS easier. Again, matter over man. Another unbelievably sticky mess; the spoon bonds to the beaker. I feel the material changing its viscosity as I continue to stir it and the effort required increases. Air bubbles galore. Disaster, like surfacing too fast from the depths. Up to Hodgetts’s lab to vacuum and then to the oven to set. Experiment 4 Another sticky disaster. Peeling off the rubbery polymer proves to be more difficult than we first imagined, even with the thick coating of Vaseline adorning the plastic. The fragile substrate tears into pieces. Out of the four examples, three survive. Another attempt. Mix more liquid PDMS, and use this as a kind of glue to fasten the molds into the three glass plates. The result: more waiting. Another frustrating day dealing with this bloody PDMS substrate problem. Because we don’t have the right materials, insect pins and a metal substrate to use as a PDMS mold, we were again halted in our tracks. The time is quickly running away from us, and there is still much to do. PDMS is remarkably brittle as a material, despite the fact that it is an elastomer. The molds we made with the remains of Oron’s Japanese washboard did not work because the PDMS glued itself to the little tinfoil housings and tore when we tried to extract it. The attempt with pinning it was even more fruitless. Should I attribute this all to the inevitable march of process—to “sketching?” Ha! What a fucking joke. Experiment 5 A day later. Again, attempt to pin the sutures into both grooved and small surfaces— the last step before introducing our cells. Trying to pin with hypodermic needles jaggedly snipped with wire cutters to make them smaller. Needles still are too large for the dish. Simultaneously, another distraction—painting laminin, which the cells like to stick to, onto the sutures.86 Mix two μL of laminin with PBS—something that has to be done with much finer pipettes. We screw up the measurement—incorrect due to the exacting small amount required. Experiment 6 The struggles wear us down. Giving up trying to pin the sutures into our thin, brittle washboard molds. Ionat suggests a solution in CELL Central: the dissecting microscope (figure 2.18, third row, left). The experience with the dissecting microscope is disorienting. A strange kind of disconnect between the hands and the representation on the screen. While one manipulates the specimen under the microscope, the amplified image of the object combined with our action takes its place on the monitor, housed next to the seeing apparatus. The magnification not only distorts the sense of the object optically but also changes how one directly manipulates it. The

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hypodermic needle seems much larger, less contained in its plastic shell than it really is, and hence easier to insert into the microfibers of the suture. The separation of hand, object, and image recalls Richard Sennett’s observation in The Craftsman that touch delivers to the brain a different set of sensations than the eye. Although the eye “supplies images that are contained within a frame,” the hand conjures up a more boundless domain of sensation, one delivering “invasive and ‘unbounded’ data.”87 Despite the intense sense of haptic distortion, we manage to somehow insert the needles sideways into the sutures and to fix them in place. The four petri dishes are ready to be seeded with cells! Experiment 7 The experiments continue while the weariness grows a pace. Our achievement quickly unravels; the PDMS is simply too fragile to hold once the cells are poured over it (figure 2.18, third row, right). We still lack a rigid and stable, metal, ribbed object that we can pour PDMS onto and that will not stick to the glue-like silicone. Ionat is obsessed. She goes to Bunnings, an Australian megastore a cut below Home Depot, and buys a set of flat and almost microribbed, tin metal blades. Impossible to cut. Trip to the molecular and plant biology building. All of those expensive cutting tools and even large-scale metal-sawing machines continually fail us. A final, almost forlorn attempt works, tearing the metal with a pair of tin scissors. Back to the lab. PDMS routing, vacuuming, curing, praying. Experiment 8 PDMS molds with our ragged metal blades turn out fine (figure 2.18, bottom row, left). After a week of experimental failures and disasters with the wonder material, we finally can seed the cells on the sutures. Three days later, the cells are visited by their old nemesis, fungus (figure 2.18, bottom row, right). Batch totally destroyed. 17 Reflections on Bare Life at the Bench One of those days in which the complexity of this project becomes apparent and also in which one of those “fruitful misunderstandings” take place. We met with Minghao Zheng and Louis this morning. Despite the fact that we succeed in our goal of getting some of the collagen to experiment with, the meeting reveals the “surgeon’s” way of practice. Zheng asked why we need to use a mechanical device to test the sensors. Why not use an organ from an animal? “So, there is a tradition in physiology so you get a cane toad (a serious pest in Australia) and get a heart from it that is about this size. And then you stick it in the solution of potassium. The heart will then be beating . . . faster or slower .  .  . then you put the sensor, you stick it there and then you can also count the beating and test the sensor. That is the best way to test the sensor rather than using a mechanical device.”

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We were all in disguise this morning. Zheng thinks I’m an engineer, because I know something about sensing technologies and discuss things like “force load” and “piezoresistance” (of course my real engineering collaborators know that I also know something but that I’m too busy to sit there soldering connectors to headers). Zheng also must think that Ionat is a biologist. When we broached the topic of art, he laughed a little. He doesn’t have a clue of what we are doing or why, but it seems that he does want Louis to learn about sensing. Is this where this art project can suddenly provide some kind of knowledge and application to medical research on building bioreactors and measuring tendons? Entering the third week of bench work. Nothing like the process of laboratory work to demystify any glamour that outsiders might harbor about scientific practice. Moving glassware around and continuing the pipetting, I think of all of those countless artists who have reveled in the power position of putting on a lab coat. But all of the tissue culture work is just laborious, precise routine. Despite our delirious encounter with the twitching cells, a brief day in which the viscerality of life as movement materially manifested itself, I find it hard to encounter, to experience within the fluidic abstractions of tissue culture’s rote processes, “bare life,” that “zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture.”88 It seems utterly strange to be working on this particular project in the midst of this Stanford imitation campus with cheery-eyed undergrads looking like they have just come off the beach—creating a work that will be shown thousands of kilometers away to audiences who are dressed in black and certainly not in Billabong board shorts and Vans. Perhaps yet another example of Susan Squier’s “contextual narrowing”? It is as if the context doesn’t really have anything to do with what we are making. Of course, this is only partly true, as the context of the PC2 lab does have everything to do with making what we are doing possible. But somehow the concept of life, which is so pushed in bioart literature, is continually like a shadow lurking in the background of abstract techniques. How many times has it been that the need to create an experience, to “plow and harrow the soul ultimately rendering it capable of good,” as that Tarkovsky quote that I carry with me states, is completely lost in the routines of techniques? Like the abstraction of computer code in which a visceral idea goes in, only to be eradicated, defanged by rules, routines, variables, syntax. But there is a difference. At least with code, you can run things in real time and see their results. In essence, computational time now feels very different from biological time. Where is it? Why does it hide from me? The throbbing presence of life seems to lurk at every corner, in the back of thoughts, at the threshold of touch, at every step of pipetting cells or

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trypsin into another sterile vial, but it quickly diminishes due to the almost mind-numbing precision, abstraction, and isolation that is scientific procedure. 18 Collagen Trials While the Clock Ticks With collagen in hand and my time in Australia quickly eclipsing, we begin a new series of experiments to see if indeed the type 1 collagen will work better as a substrate than our mostly failed PDMS attempts. “Mostly failed” should be qualified, for we have managed to grow some cells on one batch of PDMS, albeit without sutures. We also need to perform a set of test trials on the collagen that we received from Zheng due to a supposed fungal contamination in the material that has caused the tendon research to be delayed by several weeks. In what has now become almost second nature, tasks done with nary a moment of reflection, we wash out a flask with PBS and carefully place a thin slice of the collagen into the container with tweezers. Still wet with PBS, the collagen manages to stick to the bottom of the flask, even as we introduce our cell-medium mixture (figure 2.19). After a day of incubating, we observe the growth of tiny myoblast clusters crowding the edges of the collagen’s white, filament-like structure. Things betray their manner of appearance. It is hard to distinguish whether any cells are actually growing on the material, as it appears to be solid under the inverted microscope. More chemical transformations: dyeing the cells with so-called Hoechst 33342 stain so that under UV light the cells will glow both on and off the collagen.89 Applying a tiny amount of the stain to the cells, the DNA contrasts with the surrounding environment and provides a strong contrast to other elements within the petri dish under the microscope. The result should appear almost ghost-like: fluorescing points of light like stars floating in an otherwise dark abyss. All it takes to bring on this spectacle is a tiny drop of the dye mixed in water. More Sensing and Waiting Trying to sort out which sensor to use for the organoid, we meet with Louis’s friend Rob, another PhD student who works as an engineer in the hospital and whose thesis research has been hopelessly delayed due to some kind of infection in the sheep that he needs for experiments. Our meeting is focused on how to deal with measuring the load and strain of the collagen membrane so that we have some sense of what it weighs. As we sketch out solutions and try to figure out the load of the sensor, Rob the engineer again repeats the same litany, joking about biology. “Biology .  .  . that’s biology, Louis. It’s all approximation!” Rob suggests that we have to do more tests, perhaps wait for another grant to come through that will purchase a new machine that will be more accurate in sensing force loads below 1 mN.

Figure 2.19 Experiments with collagen and sticking cells. April 2012. Photos by Anke Burger.

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Ionat and I stare at each other across the table, slightly dumbfounded and both obviously thinking the same thought. We have done the literature reviews and know the cantilever sensor from Gavin Pinniger, our physiologist friend, works, as it is the only sensor in dozens of articles that has been used to sense microforces in skeletal muscle myotubes. In other words, we want Louis to use the fucking sensor—especially because it is cheap and seems to be so frequently deployed. A deadline is coming. We don’t want to spend months waiting for tests on sixweek-wet collagen versus dry collagen or until someone receives some specific machine in-house to work with whose existence depends on whether grant funding comes through or not. Our art minds or methodologies now come into play and not the endless agenda of researchers who have years to wait until they get enough data to publish and then, with glee, abandon it. A Conversation with a Microbiologist Being a bit frustrated, overwhelmed, and, at the same time, slightly skeptical of our progress, I take time out to have a chat with Stuart Hodgetts. A trained biologist with expertise in cell-based transplantation therapies, Hodgetts has been one of the prime spiritual supporters of SymbioticA since its early days. He is one of the scientists “who gets it,” meaning that he does not need explanations of why collaborations between artists and biologists might sometimes be mutually beneficial for both parties. In order for artists to talk with scientists, he tells me, however, they have to be able to perform science “at some basic level” and to grasp basic scientific terminology, “otherwise any conversation would be impossible.” What is going on exactly during the process of myogenesis? What is happening in those flasks and dishes? How much of the action of the myoblasts is based on the interior milieu in the flask? What kind of event causes these individual cells to suddenly and spontaneously fuse with each other and start quivering and contracting? Hodgetts takes a deep breath and pauses slightly, almost to suggest that I’ve asked too many questions or, at the very least, asked questions that may have no answers. Cellular response in vitro, he tells me, is highly dependent on at which stage one looks at the cultures and what kind of stimuli will generate specific behaviors, like cellular fusion. It is extremely difficult to get muscle cells, for example, to “extend their cytoplasms” and form myotubes without having neighboring muscle cells. In other words, somehow based on signaling and chemical exchanges and then through DNA transcriptional processes, a physiological or morphological response takes place that causes cells to merge with each other. Why does a cell line like C2C12 versus primary tissue suddenly and spontaneously begin to twitch after changing the medium? Here, Hodgetts makes a distinction between so-called

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pure populations, such as cell lines, and “primary cultures,” in which there may be other “stuff,” such as fibroblasts (skin cells). What takes place then in the petri dish becomes a signal-to-noise problem, because there are suddenly interactions between myogenic and nonmyogenic cells and it is thus difficult to differentiate between what does or does not constitute a relevant signal. By using a cell line, one can more or less “reduce chatter” that shows up when one has primary cultures mixed together with other, nonpertinent cells. The concept of chatter or cross talk between cells suggests that in vivo and in vitro processes are, from an ontological point of view, radically different. What takes place in the dish in terms of signaling and growth radically shifts once the milieu changes— for example, during cell transplantation when other signals take over. Indeed, there is something in the purity of the C2C12 line that denotes a threshold only beyond which do new actions become possible. When the cells reach a certain critical mass in the dish surrounded by their “peers,” something happens in the signaling process that announces: “I need to fuse with my neighbor or those cells lining up alongside me.” What kinds of signals could cause such extraordinary behavior in a cluster of tissue? Hodgetts patiently clarifies that chemical signals are not the only source of communication influencing cellular ontogenesis. There are clearly other things at work too, such as cross talk between proteins and receptors and, most importantly, DNA and RNA levels. “All the genetic material that we thought was junk, was just filler, suddenly now has a purpose. And this is another level of language that we are not understanding or not even aware of yet. Everything that we thought was just junk can suddenly now be a very important message or signal. How long is it going to take us to decipher all that? Who knows.” “Well, this is interesting, since what you say is critical of earlier philosophies of understanding DNA. That once you have the inscription, everything is solved.” “No, it’s much, much more dynamic than that. Modification states are often described at the molecular level. Transcription regulation is the hallmark. Every cell contains roughly the same number of genes, but some are turned off and some are turned on because they received different developmental and differentiation cues. But all of the genes are still there. There is a finely controlled regulation there. We know a lot about it, but there is hell of a lot we don’t know as well.” What Hodgetts suggests confidently treads into the longstanding debate between system biologists and genetic determinists around the environment’s role in ontogenetic processes. Although genetic determinists such as Richard Dawkins have long argued that the genetic code is the key to what Donna Haraway ironically phrased “life itself,” biologists and theorists from Richard Lewontin to Susan Oyama have argued that multiple influences (environmental, epigenetic, and genetic) engage in shaping the development of an organism.

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In the Ontogeny of Information, for instance, psychologist Oyama, a key proponent of developmental-systems theory, argues against the “preformationist” view of genetic information—as if information is already latent in the genes or environment and is waiting to be released in its unaltered form.90 Hodgetts acknowledges that the switching on and off of genes is critical in terms of the manner in which DNA- and RNA-transcription processes operate, but he also is not averse to stating that the context of interaction itself, from what occurs at the signaling level of the extracellular matrix to the manner in which a phenotype is expressed, is equally important in shaping ontogenetic development. Inspired by my ongoing debate with Ionat about purpose and goal within machines, I carefully pose my next question, wondering what this scientist’s response will be. I come straight to the point, asking whether the cells in the dish indeed have a goal or purpose in what they do—the very argument that Cariani makes as the key for any selfsustaining, self-organizing entity, whether biological or machinic. A bit of an awkward question. At the biological level, one cannot divorce goals from capacity—that is, what something is able to do, within limits. A muscle cell’s “goal,” for example, is to evolve and differentiate in order to perform a particular action/function (i.e., it behaves a certain way). “Once it’s differentiated, one can say it has reached its goal.” What lies at the center of Hodgetts’s argument takes us again back to the question of scale; at the organism level, things are vastly different. If individual cells’ purpose is to differentiate, cells at the organism level must adapt to another hierarchy of function. “Cells have no idea that their goal has changed. But the organism knows that my goal is to lift my hand to drink a cup of coffee. The organism is working at a higher level than the individual cell might be aware of. In this sense, goals are dynamic . . . I don’t think you can divorce goal or purpose from capacity.” Leaving Hodgetts’s office after our talk. I am thinking that perhaps the question of agency—as an act versus a trait—is deeply embedded within this notion of capacity. Material agency does not describe matter as a tabula rasa that can do just anything. There is, instead, something internal to the organization of a particular material that enables it to do certain things while preventing it from doing others. In other words, capacity suggests what the entity can do, not necessarily what it will do. Agency in this sense is dynamic—potentiality—because it is constrained by the material conditions within which an entity is enveloped. It has the potential to do something, but it might not, depending on what it is surrounded by. The Pressure Mounts Time is running out. Only two more weeks before we have to specify for Louis the bioreactor design in terms of the sensors and everything else. I won’t be witness to the device until the fall. Another gap in experience. The talk with Stuart Hodgetts today was enlightening and

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sobering at the same time. What have we gotten ourselves into? The amount of control and then abandoning it to see what the cells will do is frightening .  .  .“You could have picked something easier!” Of course, I like a challenge, but I left the conversation with the terrifying sense of “what if this doesn’t work”: What will we have left? Neither good art nor science nor engineering. Just endless accounts of failed attempts for this book. One day before leaving for our ten-day vacation in Bali before returning to finish things up in Perth. We are still trying to see whether the cells will grow on the collagen membrane, but the Hoechst staining process continually fails. Maybe we are using the microscope in the lab downstairs incorrectly, but we have now tried two batches, and our experiment is still inconclusive. Why can’t we see these cells? We are more stressed at the moment than they are. In my discussion with Ionat after fruitlessly looking under the microscope at the latest batch of failed Hoechst stain and not seeing one single glowing nucleus, she states, “I’m not even sure I see what I am seeing.” We go upstairs to Hodgetts’s lab. He glances at our somewhat despairing faces and asks if he can help. Explaining the continual misfiring with the Hoechst stain, he takes our flasks and places them under the inverted microscope in the room next to his lab. Nothing. Dark as pitch-black night with no trace of glowing fluorescent forms. We explain what we’ve done, the exact measurements used and the futile results. Nodding and stating, “well, you seem to be doing the right thing,” he nonetheless takes the flask from us to try it himself. It is clear we have to watch the master perform the experiment; otherwise we will continue to spin our wheels. As he sits down at the hood, flask in one hand and the tiny bottle of Hoechst stain in the other, he wears no gloves. After quickly washing the flask with PBS, he takes a microliter pipette, adding a much larger amount than we did to the flask, and in turn shakes the container to distribute the stain. Ionat and I stare at each other, knowing that Hodgetts will have success with the staining process, because he has the right combination of received knowledge, skill, and magic touch. Thirty seconds later, we carry the flask to the inverted microscope and are greeted by another almost glorious sight: tiny, glowing, bluish cells suspended in space, clumped around the outsides of a dimly lit collagen strip and, most miraculously, seemingly clinging to it on the top. Overjoyed and, at the same time, slightly embarrassed that we were not able to make this seemingly simple process work, we ask Stuart what the key to his success was. “Hmm . . . probably the correct measurement. Or luck,” he adds, smiling. 19 Suspension Return from Indonesia. Last day at SymbioticA. Cells continue to grow on the collagen, which is a very good sign. We prepare the simplified bioreactor specification for Louis, just as we

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planned in the calendar. It feels strange departing, as the project for me feels a bit suspended even though we have achieved the goal of deciding exactly what features we want for the bioreactor. Indeed, the project at the moment lies a little bit in that research chasm—awaiting Charon to row the boat across the Styx—so at least we know where we are. Ionat and I keep reminding each other that our goal is to get one prototype per year completed in this three-year project. It seems we will continue to walk that precipice forged so many times between research and art—their different and conflicting intentions, timelines, agendas, and so on. SymbioticA co-founder and muscle research expert extraordinaire Miranda Grounds organizes a meeting with all of the different scientists involved in either tendon or muscle research on the project. It will be interesting to see whether or not we can explain our goals to the group and make a cut between what we want as an aesthetic experience—that is, as visiting researcher Orkan and I discussed yesterday, that the project operates at the level of the human senses and the affects that such sensorial experience creates—versus the pressures of scientific measurement, data gathering, and evaluation. Our goal and critical path will need to continue reconciling the necessary engineering and biotechnical research with the ultimate aesthetic experience that we want to create for an audience. This work is just beginning. Its process and results are just as alien as our organoid. 20 Is Life in Bodies? For Susanne Langer, the American aesthetician and student of the German philosopher of symbolic form Ernst Cassirer, art itself is seen as a fundamentally different activity in the world. The artwork is bracketed off from science and language. It is nondiscursive, cannot represent or refer to something outside of itself. As a “device by which we can make an abstraction,” a symbol that gives us a feeling that is not necessarily that of the artist but of the world, the artwork elicits a “strangeness, separateness, otherness” that is set off from everyday life. The artwork, writes Langer in her 1953 theory of aesthetics Feeling and Form, is a semblance—“a pattern of life itself”—but not life. A semblance is the artwork’s “direct aesthetic quality,” but it is an illusion—a kind of virtuality.91 What then is TEMA, the muscle, organoid semblance we are creating? The organoid, the clump of myotubes kept living, breathing in its sterile bioreactor is, after all, not a body. It is only a semblance of one, unable to sustain itself without the technical milieu, the “technoscientific body.” The split between inside and outside slowly unravels. If TEMA’s body is spread between the semblance and the technical milieu, then where does life take place? Is it in cells? In the petri dish? In the chemical signals that tell the cells to fuse? In the interaction between the clump of fused myotubes and the substrate coated with laminin protein? In the nutrient media in the tissue flask? In the incubator and its

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artificially controlled environment? In the bioreactor? In the lab constituted of lifegiving machines pulsing with electromagnetic existence? The French philosopher of techniques Gilbert Simondon provides assistance. Our clump of cells, the organoid, cannot be viewed as an individual—a self-sufficient, selfidentical autonomous body that runs on its own and thus can be said to be “life.” The technoscientific body of machines that sustain it, of nutrients, CO2 exchange, temperature, sterility, guarantees this. The internal milieu of the cell depends on the external milieu—but where is that located? The organoid is not fixed. It undergoes a continual process, that of individuation, dependent on the relations of reciprocity between itself (and what is that?) and its milieu in terms of internal form and energy. We cannot look at the organoid and call it a living thing, because it is in and of a process; we, as Muriel Combes in describing Simondon’s philosophy of being states, cannot assume the existence of the individual we seek to account for.92 Life is thus not a characteristic or a quality of things but rather a process—a series of continual, dynamic interactions between internal and external milieus—here the cell, the fused myotubes, the medium, the substrate, the reactor, the incubator, all of which Simondon terms the “associated milieu.” The associated milieu is also not fixed. It arises, transforms, adapts itself based on potentials and virtuals. The process of individuation partially brings forth the milieu. But TEMA extends Simondon. He describes a theory of ontogenesis, a general theory of becoming or “the phases of being, prior to objective knowledge, which is a relation to be individuated in the milieu, after individuation.”93 Yet, like many theories of becoming, the temporal dynamics and shape of such becoming get short shrift. Becoming, phasing, relations assumed to suggest an understanding of the difference inherent in temporal shape and action. This is not the case, for what the experience of tissue culture in the lab and eventually TEMA in the gallery gives is something else—something that can only be thought of through the encounter with the materials of tissue culture: cells, media, pipettes, sterile hoods, freezers, microscopes, plastics, dyes. A nuanced experience, the affect of time working or what Daniel Stern calls the “time profiles” of things in the world. These time profiles operate on their own, outside of human experience, but they exert forces on us: subjective “vitality effects” that emerge from our encounter with that stuff’s temporal shape.94 The movement of the tissue, what vibration we map it to, the affect of the vibrations pulsing across the skin. All different times. No monotemporality, no straightforward movement of becoming. Sudden jerks, legato phrases, synchrony and diachrony, stops and starts. Reference backward. Even though the instrumentarium of the city in O+A’s work and the microbehaviors of cells at SymbioticA seem worlds apart, the links and connections between different matter and artistic practices appear to suddenly align. If the sonic alchemists O+A propose a model of distributed listening in which hearing

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perception, located in the ear, gives over to affection, coursing through the world, then it would seem that TEMA, a project that challenges the localization of life, suggests something similar. In attempting to describe Alexis Carrel’s experiments, the radical architect and scenographer Frederick Kiesler coined the term “biotechnique” as early as 1939 to suggest that life itself was not necessarily located in the organism but extended across the technical environment.95 This suggests a radical thought. Life, the capacity for “selfnourishment, growth, and decay,” as Aristotle claimed, is not located in something.96 It is not in the organism or organoid or even the body. It is spread, diffused throughout the world.

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Figure 3.1 Displace gustables. October 2011. Photo by Anke Burger.

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Abstraction divides up a sentient body, eliminates taste, smell and touch, retains only sight and hearing, intuition and understanding. To abstract means to tear the body to pieces rather than merely to leave it behind. —Michel Serres, The Five Senses

1 Limens Blackness. The beats against the skin increase in tempo and intensity. A random hit here, another one there. Blow against blow, toward the buildup. The faint, thin red line above pulses at the threshold of visibility. The tempo accelerates as the surface below trembles, the tremors nonlocatable, sensations a mass of vertiginous confusions. Then abruptly, without warning, it stops. Stunned silence permeates the air. The visitors crawl from the darkness. Still tingling, they sit awkwardly in the chair carefully positioned at the table. Light on. The absolute blackness of the environment and the continuing flow of the experience ruptured as the questions and responses flow. They are varied, contradictory, overflows of impressions of the just noticeable, the barely felt and hardly perceived. “How do you feel?” The immediate burst of sensations and recollections comes forward. Some tag the experience “ecstatic,” “pretty cool,” “awesome,” “astounding,” whereas others find it “pretty creepy,” “nauseating,” “disturbing,” and “scary.” Their bodies feel “heavy,” “floating,” “sinking” into the floor—grabbing onto the surface of the room to stop the feeling of falling through space. The interviewer tries to pry open these global responses with more detail. “How was your body halfway through the experience?” “What did you see when you first entered?” “Did you detect patterns between the light and the sound?” “When did you feel something?” The responses now become more nuanced, detailed, closing in on microdetails of transient feltness. “I didn’t really feel the roundness of my body, it was all sort of laid out like a two dimensional shadow on the .  .  . on the floor.” “It felt like my stomach was expanding so that it felt a little bit like the boundaries of my body were like . . . it wasn’t like it was back in an indeterminate space but more like a leaking of my body boundaries.” 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.” Forces, pressure, vibrations, blows come from without, from another world, and mix with the almost unutterable, indistinguishable sound. “It was like somebody was below me with fists and banged all over my legs and body.” Another visitor states that

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the vibrations almost jolted her eyelids open, leading to the production of flashes and fleeting patterns in the eye such that there was “a kind of collapse between what my body was producing and what was being produced around me.” Still another can’t describe what creates the sensations of force against the skin: “I don’t know what it was . . . it could have been something mechanical . . . it felt like something was almost hitting me.” That potentials from without, exogenous to the skin, could turn the body to “jelly,” make it “dizzy” or “sensorially discombobulated,” suggests that “sensation, receptive to any and every message, controls the skin better than the eye, mouth and ear.”1 But these tactual, acoustic, and visual effects might stand in for something else—a percept that has less to do with the difference between sensations from without than from within. 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. Whereas the confusion of utter darkness plunges one visitor into “absolute nothingness,” another seems almost liberated in experiencing a transitory burst of ephemerality: “It was that experience of dissolution and then back again. That was interesting in that there was really nothing to grab onto.”2 2 Mediations of Sensation A New Project The email arrives at 16:45 on a late April day. I hastily type to David in response: “we got it! 131, 553K!!! talk soon! cs.” Several weeks later, I meet him for coffee to discuss the content of the email. David here refers to David Howes, professor of anthropology and a colleague of mine at Concordia University. Howes arrives at the café via bicycle, his preferred mode of transportation. He is a friendly, affable man in his mid-fifties with an enormous forehead and a shock of slightly gray, tousled hair. After ordering the requisite beverages, we get down to business. We have just been awarded a sizeable research grant from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Société et culture (FRQSC), which funds academic research projects in the humanities and social sciences, for a research-creation project entitled Mediations of Sensation: Sensory Anthropology and the Creation/Evaluation of Multimodal Interactive Environments—MoS for short. The project seeks “to explore ‘techniques of the senses’ within non-Western cultural contexts and use these as creative, cross-cultural frameworks to inform the design and evaluation of new kinds of multimodal environments”—that is, spaces that deal with other senses besides vision. Specifically, we plan to create what Howes calls “chambers”: small, physically enclosed, and mobile architectures, much like phone booths that play with a wide range of sensory phenomena, from hearing and seeing to the so-called lower senses of

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touch, smell, and taste. The research questions that launch what will eventually turn out to be a messy, fascinating, careening amalgam and will occupy us for the next two years are tall, ambitious orders. Art and anthropology. Not necessarily a new topic. Long history. Certain unbridled tensions. Exotic desire for the other. 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 Deren is not the only artist to have been seduced by or to critique the sheer otherness of anthropology. There are countless other examples: the cinema verité documentary films of anthropologist Jean Rouch; filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha’s discussions of anthropological nativism (“to see the natives ‘as they see each other,’ the anthropologist should be able intermittently to ‘become the natives.’ Is this possible?”); Hal Foster’s unmasking of artists masquerading as ethnographers. (“The other is admired as one who plays with representation, subverts gender, and so on. In all these ways the artist, critic or historian projects his or her practice onto the field of the other, where it is read not only as authentically indigenous but as innovatively political.”)4 But art, anthropology, the senses, and technology? This seems like a new combination. Could there be a serious collaboration between these practices? A host of further questions arise. Can examining historical ethnographic records inform the sensory design of new kinds of media environments? Can new sensorial anthropological knowledge be created from experimental situations that are neither strictly fieldwork nor traditional ethnography? This situation that Howes calls “a flight simulator” for the training of sensory acuity eventually may be useful in what anthropologist George Marcus calls the “naturalistic setting” of field work. The initial impetus for MoS stems from Howes’s interest in collaborating with artists and designers like myself. When we first meet in 2007, he continually refers in a comical but noncondescending way to “you people,” meaning practitioners in art and design who are working with the senses as artistic medium, material, and a set of sociocultural premises. He is particularly fascinated with my “sensorial installation” Just Noticeable Difference or JND, 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. Premiered in early 2010, the project has been making the rounds in an international circuit of museums, festivals, and exhibitions—the United States, Norway, Germany, China, France, Portugal, Canada (figure 3.2). Howes knows this work directly. He experienced it as a participant in a series of user tests of the JND prototype before the project launched to the public. The installation for him removes the sense of self and gradually loosens the ability to hold onto

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Figure 3.2 Just Noticeable Difference, installation view, Guimaraes, Portugal. June 2012. Photo by Chris Salter.

things. Tantalus at the pool; the tyro meditator who cannot help but fall asleep as s/ he attempts to futilely empty the mind of thoughts; “this undercurrent of restlessness, grasping, anxiety and unsatisfactoriness that pervades experience” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch).5 David’s responses and that of others are all the more intriguing because this slippage of selfhood is instrumented by careful architectural and technological design: the construction of a space with no possibility of leaking light; the shaping of sound; the awareness of the frequency and color of light; the feel of the surface that visitors lie on; the type of vibrotactile actuators employed that not only act as loudspeakers but also produce vibrations that, with the right envelopes and filters, give the impression of blows to the skin. But how to take this further? MoS seeks to expand and broaden the work done on JND—going beyond vision, audition, and even the haptic to explore the intertwinement of the senses; what is referred to as “intersensoriality.” To get beyond the compartmentalization of the five senses.6 The argument about five senses is historical. As Daniel Heller-Roazen writes in The Inner Touch, Aristotle’s (and Democritus’s) announcement of five senses was partially linked to numerical combinations: the five organs of perception but more importantly

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the four elements (air for sound, water for sight, fire for smell, and earth for both touch and taste). But 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.7 More recently, articles appear that dislodge Aristotle’s thinking with a vengeance. With no small amount of fanfare, these studies announce that we have nine, eighteen, or twenty-one senses. Taste, hearing, and touch seem normal, but where is one to position senses that have no home in Aristotle’s schema, such as proprioception, pressure, nociception (pain), thermoception, equilibrioception (balance), and even the experience of the stretch receptors, the feeling of the inner organs stretching?8 There is one Aristotelean precept that both Howes and I agree upon and that I set out as one of the many competing but fruitful agendas for the project: 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. Anthropology Comes to Its Senses We set aside philosophical conundrums that will eventually have direct material repercussions on our work to discuss the all-important mechanics. How will sensory anthropology inform material choices for the chambers? How will we design these “multimodal” processes and experiences? How will anthropological methods be used to influence the design of sensorial material and objects that will have a direct impact on the visitors’ own sensory receptors? For what purpose? Howes cheerfully suggests that we start by bringing together the team (the two of us, graduate students, and professional artists) with a seminar devoted to sensory anthropology—its historical premises, theoretical assumptions, and methods of study for gathering specific sensorially based ethnographic data. He’s the expert in this arena, being one of the leading figures in an academic movement that goes by many names (“anthropology of the senses,” “sensory ethnography,” “sensuous scholarship,” and most recently “sensory studies”) but is centered around one central premise: 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.”9 Sensory anthropology’s reach across all aspects of the sensorium is formidable. Starting in 1988 with his work in the research group CONSERT (Concordia University

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Sensoria Research Team), a collective of sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, other scholars, and graduate students at Concordia, Howes and fellow researchers published a series of works that set forward notions of exactly how the sensorium is a product of sociocultural forces.10 In the coauthored volume Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, cultural historian Constance Classen, Howes, and sociologist Anthony Synnott plumb the historical, anthropological, and sociological record to place the elusive sense of olfaction center stage. From studies of the “rites of smell” in cultures like the Umeda in New Guinea and the Desana in Northern Colombia to cloaked-in-secrecy research on the “commodification of smell” by the titan scent and flavor international conglomerate IFF (International Flavors & Fragrances), Classen and team sought to demonstrate that “odours are invested with cultural values and employed by societies as a means of and model for defining and interacting with the world.”11 Still another volume, with the Barthesian sounding title Empire of the Senses, spans an even larger gamut: ethnographic studies of acoustic space in the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea (what Steven Feld labels “acoustemology”); the sensorial sufferers of “dystoposthesia” (the feeling of being forever out of place due to adverse reactions to everyday effluvia); the sequencing of sensation that occurs within the Japanese tea ceremony; and others. Within the so-called sensorial revolution that the book sets forth, perception must be “recovered” from the laboratory and not reduced to the ahistorical, apolitical, and internal forces of perceptual psychology, engineering, ergonomics, or other culture-denying practices.12 Sensory anthropology’s agendas and histories are far from clear, its roots and epistemes multiple and entangled: Bronislaw Malinowski’s call for experientially based ethnography in Argonauts of the Western Pacific; Margaret Mead’s study of the tactile aspects of Arapesh tribal culture in the 1930s; Edmund Carpenter’s, McLuhan’s, and Walter Ong’s arguments about the sense ratios, media extending the senses and acoustic versus visual cultures; the backlash against the “textual revolution” and the interpretive reading and “writing” of culture; the shift to more “sensorially minded” studies in the early 1990s in the work of anthropologists such as Michael Taussig (Mimesis and Alterity, 1993), Paul Stoller, Robert Desjarlais (Body and Emotion, 1992) and Katherine Geurts (Culture and the Senses, 2002); or “native theories of perception” in which a different meaning is given to the sense organs in different cultures.13 Howes’s team and perspective is not the only one in the sensory anthropological landscape. As Paul Stoller writes, sensory anthropology has two different trajectories: an ethnographic approach that features complex, holistic accounts of sensorial information as an integral component of the cultures studied and a more comparative one (like that of Howes) that “builds theories of perception, cognition and culture” through culturally specific studies of the sensorium.14

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“The importance of attending to the multiple sensory dimensions of objects, architectures and landscapes is quickly becoming a central tenet of material culture theory,” writes Howes. It is, however, curious that anthropology, that most human of the human sciences, should be interested in an ever more diverse set of subjects beyond the human—for example, explorations of “naturalcultural borderlands” and “arrays of organisms and ecologies” whose “lives and deaths are linked to human social worlds.”15 “Multispecies” ethnographies that still mainly focus on organic life are not the only new anthropological or sociological objects in town. The materiality of water, sick building syndrome, plant and human communication, accounts of transforming food stuffs such as cheese, studies of the sounds under the seas or the algorithms of computerized slot machines and the manner in which they create a “zone” of addiction, affect, and desire among gamblers have become part and parcel of new anthropological knowledge in expanding notions of “life” and culture.16 I’ve long held a fascination with the anthropological, intrigued by the complex and contradictory histories of its colonial past and its scientifically validated accounts of “experience” rendered through core thinkers Levi-Strauss, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Mauss, Geertz, or Rabinow. But I am puzzled by a question that will haunt MoS as a research project and artistic-anthropological experiment from day one. It makes sense to assume that symbols and objects have powers that we cannot grasp due to their specific embeddedness in other cultural contexts. But our job is translation—transferring and reshuffling symbol-laden accounts of other cultures into material forces, encounters that operate on the audiences that we will eventually encounter. This is the difficult conceptual, technical, and aesthetic challenge. What else is new? The Other Ghost in the Room If art is the ghost in the room in my ongoing project with Ionat Zurr at SymbioticA, then certainly the question of affect will haunt this project. I broach this issue with David, knowing that some anthropologists have a tenuous and complicated relationship to affect, a concept that at first seems so acultural and asocial. He doesn’t dismiss it outright but doesn’t embrace it either. Fuzzy, a bit mushy, not really located. This is the problem with affect as nonlocalized perception, which seems diametrically opposed to the cultural life of the senses: located, contained, inscribed in something—bodies, cultures, techniques. Addiction by Design, anthropologist of science Natasha Schull’s extraordinary ethnography of the design of electronic slot machines in Las Vegas, however, 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

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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.”17 The arrangement, the setup, the enabling of the assemblage of conditions play as much a role as our sensation and perception of them. If we don’t necessarily agree upon affect, we do agree upon one thing. David and I have no interest in what he calls “mimetic realism, or ethnographic verisimilitude”; trying to directly represent or stage ethnographic accounts of the cross-cultural sensorium, like anthropologist Victor Turner’s notorious “ethnodramatic” experiments at NYU in the 1980s. Turner’s work attempted to re-create Ndembu rituals with mostly suburban performance studies and anthropology students.18 Our study of sensorial ethnographies should instead function to inform design and technological choices and how these could result in constructing what David describes as a “gymnasium for the senses” in which anthropologists (and others) will get a “sensory workout” that goes beyond textual descriptions and that most expressive of anthropological vehicles, ethnographic film.19 Out of the senses and back to project mechanics: triweekly seminars to immerse our research team in sensory anthropology—tea ceremonies, Thoreau, induced synesthesia via the psychedelic brew called yajé (ayahuasca) from the Amazon, and sounds from the rainforests of Papua New Guinea. At the same time, we should conduct material research and tests that will eventually lead to some sort of portable environment that not merely illustrates sensory anthropology but will enable people to be immersed in it through their sense organs. David and I brainstorm visions without even looking at the ethnographic texts— vibrating walls that smell, a dark room where the floor slopes to throw visitors off balance, or design of taste systems following the Chinese first century BCE cosmological system of five elements. Discussion of works concerning the (again) newly found relationship between art and anthropology. Perhaps understanding how anthropologists and artists can work together will also provide us with crutches for a project that, at this point, straddles the border between the exciting and the deeply unknown. 3 Three Tensions Three tensions arise: one of writing, one of technology and perception, one of the impossibility of escaping one’s own habits and techniques. The process of “sensuous ethnography creates a set of instabilities for the ethnographer.”20 Such instabilities originate not only in the difficult process of writing about the wily movement of things perceived and their fluctuating perceivers, but also in vividly attempting to evoke how the mechanical, chemical, electrical, and physical forces that our perception latches

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onto in the world “make sense”—that is, bring about what we cautiously call “sensory experience.” Writing that lived event of sensing is fraught with complexities and blockages. A posteriori always, writing about the senses as representations should be distinguished from writing that produces sensation through its accounts. This is what anthropologist Robert Desjarlais suggests when he makes a distinction between sensory lives lived and lives talked about. “You cannot readily tap into the ‘lived experience’ of cultural subjects, be they in Boston or Calcutta. You can only talk with and live among them. So words, really, are the stuff of meaning and evidence here, along with other manifest actions—a look here, a gesture there.”21 Second tension. The grant language of MoS proposes to organize and arrange the possibilities of sensual life in a tripartite structure: sensing (techniques), sensation (the imprint of the world on the sense organs), and sense making (finding or attributing meanings). Meaning making in no way implies a retreat to hermeneutical interpretations over the palpable and the felt. On the contrary, 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. This is also not a retreat into some kind of lost, nostalgic longing for pure presence or unmediated experience. After all, the human sensorium is already technical, and we seek out how such techniques make possible the production, transmission, and even apperception of certain kinds of affect. “Affect is not only theorized in terms of the human body” but “also theorized in relation to the technologies that are allowing us to both ‘see’ affect and to produce affective bodily capacities beyond the body’s organicphysiological constraints.”22 Third tension. I cannot escape my habits, forever pulled between two extremes: wanting to plunge the spectators into a whirlwind of visceral bodily experience while always making them aware of the technical apparatus operating that partly enables this experience to emerge. 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.”23 Like Brecht and Artaud, who both desire a technical apparatus to fulfill their goals for the theater, I also resort to machines, apparatuses, setups, systems to explore and play with percepts and affects. Artaud proposes a sensorially driven yet almost transparent machinery of spaces, objects, masks, sounds, lighting, and human/nonhuman forms that will enable “a cosmic rigor and implacable necessity.” In contrast, Brecht’s theater is less one of affect than one of distance; the apparatus is constructed, used, needed to put social processes on the stage, but it is never transparent, hidden from view in Wizard of Oz style. The apparatus needs to be bared to reveal

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how it works and what it does. Learning takes place; knowledge of the world is acquired and judged for its contradictions. 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. Irreconcilable or incommensurable? 4 Four Seminars in Sensory Experience A Dance with Ethics The project begins almost five months after we receive the successful news. Typical university delays. The deadness of summer. My and David’s endless travel schedules and the continued tango with the university Research Ethics Board (REB) over ethics approval, because our work involves the use of “human subjects.” Filling out long forms. Project description. Funding sources. Consent forms. What are the “risks and benefits” of participation? Form comes back. REB needs more information about the protocols we will use before full approval. I say to David that we will have to make up this stuff, because we don’t even know what we will create at this stage. For example, “Please specify the total number of people that will be included in the prototype phase of the project; please provide a more detailed description of the architectural chamber beyond a ‘curtained-off area.’ For instance, what are its dimensions? What is the structure made of? How is it accessed? Are there safety concerns—for instance, how will people exit in case of emergency, will there be sensory experiences that may cause sensitivity for some participants? Please clarify what measures will be taken in order to rule out of participation all participants with health issues which may make exploring the chamber uncomfortable or unsafe. For instance, does the chamber pose any risk to someone with epilepsy (prone to seizures), Asperger’s (sensory sensitivities), or to someone who is claustrophobic?” So much for research at the border of the unknown. Four Seminars Over the next four months, David conducts a series of seminars in sensory anthropology, the goal of which is to discuss various texts in order to eventually start building up models—a flow of ideas at first without the direct need to “operationalize” them too quickly. This will turn out to be too cautious as we begin to operationalize things, at least in a preliminary manner, within two months. The seminars are attended by a changing roster of participants: David Howes, myself, my partner Anke Burger (who will collaborate later on as the project unfolds) and Shannon Collis, Harry Smoak, Philomene Longpré, Olga Zigkrata, and Matt Tremblay, all graduate students. These students who sit around the table and who will be

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collaborating as research assistants (RAs) on MoS come from multiple fields: computer science, sensory studies, studio arts-printmaking, theater, and technology (later on, we will also add anthropology and food studies to the mix). They are what the Quebec government refers to in its endless parade of bureaucratized acronyms as HQP, or “highly qualified personnel.” Because the project will also involve working with professional artists, I’ve invited my collaborator Maurizio Martenucci (aka TeZ), who is an internationally recognized audiovisual artist originally from Italy but now based in Amsterdam. TeZ and I first meet at the international art and technology festival Ars Electronica in 2009, the result of a mutual curator friend sensing a common set of interests and linking us up. Trained in “music informatics,” TeZ is also interested in questions of the senses and, in particular, how audio, image, and vibration produce “amodal” or synesthetic experiences—ones that don’t remain fixed in a single sense modality. Because he is in Amsterdam, TeZ attempts to Skype in, but as usual the network breaks down and he has to listen to the recording of the session afterwards in order to give his comments. Over the next months, David brings an eclectic variety of anthropological and historical sources to the table: the role of the senses in everyday life that are the hallmarks of Henry David Thoreau’s work; Constance Classen’s discussions of “sensual ideologies” in the predominant role of smell in the Ongee (Andaman Islands) and the color-driven synesthesia of Desana and Tukano Indians (Northern Colombia); the ethnomusicologist Steven Feld on the placeness of sensory experience and anthropologist of Japanese culture Dorinne Kondo’s studies of the “sequencing of sensations” in the Japanese tea ceremony; and visual ethnographer Anna Grimshaw’s text “Reconfiguring the Ground: Art and the Visualization of Anthropology,” which argues for rethinking the relationship between art and anthropology, specifically “extending the scope of image-based forms of ethnographic inquiry by means of a fuller engagement with artistic practice itself.”24 In this anthropological onslaught, we attempt to identify questions, themes, concepts, and images that could prove useful for our work—the building of an environment where these stories could play themselves out. How to construct an environment in which sequences of action yield particular sensorial experiences over time? How to move from symbols to affects? How to translate these different sensory orders of others into our own context? Colors, sounds, vibrations, textures from other cultures. Decontextualized. All up for grabs. In Classen’s discussion of 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

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rituals that emphasize the role of heat across cooking, language, symbolic forms: “thermal symbolism . . . integrated into a multisensory symbolic system.”25 The most striking article comes from Howes himself in the form of a simple title: “Sensation.”26 The text focuses on some of the core premises of sensory anthropology, for example, being attuned to “local ways of sensing”; as well as a critique of psychology and psychophysics’ “monopoly” on studies of perception—“an incomplete picture” that leaves out the entangling between sensing entities and the world. Yet, the most compelling part of the text is the discussion of sensation’s role in religion and spiritual practice—the play of things such as synesthesia and “infrasensory signals.” Anthropologist Donald Tuzin’s fieldwork with Tambaran secret men’s cults in the Arapesh tribes of New Guinea sets the example.27 Sound becomes the dominant means to “awe worshippers and exchange messages with the gods.” Ritualistic tonalities produced by all manner of bizarre instruments like massive slit gongs, bullroarers, and colossal pipes that amplify voices into spectral presences do not just represent the gods—“they are the cult spirits” (italics in original). Such sound-making devices generate not only disturbing audible sounds but also infrasonic tones—felt but not heard. The invisible takes over the corporeal as sound brings about, catalyzes certain kinds of religious or extreme forms of “numinous” experience. The acoustic intensity produced by such sounding apparatuses not only intimidate and terrify those outside of the cult, but are also alien to those who, in fact, produce them. If such sounds “produce an experience without an object,” then perhaps peak religious experiences operate at “the intersection of the senses.”28 Tuzin’s provocative linkage of the forces of a machine and its affects “between the auditory apparatus and a particular sensation that is widely interpreted as signifying supernatural presence” charges the group. Despite the ethnographic and cultural distance implicit in his account, sound and vibration is something we can identify with. Both provide concepts for thinking about the potential of vibration as a material that produces bodily transformation in the entities it intersects with and through. 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,” writes theorist and musician Steve Goodman, “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.”29 Later, after the seminar, I discuss this with TeZ, who is used to working with tactile vibration as part of his artistic tool kit. TeZ is intrigued by vibration, resonance, and the spectral quality of any experience associated with these elements. He describes the experience of listening to recordings of underwater creatures that composer Francisco

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Lopez once made in which he “couldn’t even identify as natural sounds emitted by living beings . . . this shows me clearly that most auditory ‘images’ are associated with a set of memories and experiences which become ‘habitual’ in a given social and cultural environment.”30 Atmospheres of Sensation In between the seminars, Harry, Matt, Shannon and I begin preparations for an exhibition entitled Atmosphere scheduled to take place in January in the Faculty of Fine Arts (FoFA) Gallery at Concordia U. We plan on showing a radically scaled-down version of JND in the gallery’s small, enclosed, black box space and another new, smallish work in the main gallery that has yet to be figured out. This should be a low-key affair (at least we first think so). Local and experimental. The aim is to develop a smaller new work for the main gallery using sequences of sound, light, heat, and other media to begin exploring some of the more potent concepts that have come up in the seminar and to see if they resonate with the public at large. We are already aware that no audience member visiting the exhibition will have any idea where the cultural frameworks for what they will experience originate. The exhibition is also a chance for us to begin negotiating the highly symbolic accounts we have been studying and translate them into material manifestations. How would the Tzotzil idea of heat get amplified to a viewer for whom hot and cold are extremes but not necessarily front-loaded with cosmological symbolism? What might happen if we try and synchronize certain sonic frequencies with certain colors displayed in light? Could taste affect sight? How could we make a room fluctuate at the border of the phantasmal? In the Air The work on the Tzotzil read last week has inspired us to use heat as a core element in the Atmosphere exhibition, in addition to changing densities of haze and sound. The haze idea (and the exhibition title) doesn’t come directly from our readings but from Bruno Latour’s essay on “Air” that I find in Carolyn Jones’s book Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art. “At first we feel nothing, we are insensitive, we are naturalized. And then suddenly, we feel not something, but the absence of something we did not know before could possibly be lacking.”31 In his consummate manner and in reference to Peter Sloterdijk, Latour describes the trenches of Ypres during World War I, the clouds of poison gas arriving like toxic angels floating above the soldiers, the sudden understanding and making explicit of the air, of atmosphere that comes only due to its removal. “Air has entered the list of what could be withdrawn from us.”32 At the same time, I’ve been looking at artist Robert Irwin’s extraordinary disc “paintings” from the late 1960s—convex, plastic resin, spray-painted ovular forms that,

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mounted on a clear, plastic tube, project from a white wall. They possess what Irwin calls “an indeterminate physicality with different levels of weight and density.”33 I find these works extraordinary in terms of what they do to the process of seeing (“I see myself seeing”), but what is even more riveting is the way Irwin lights them, producing complex planes of shadows that appear to hover in the air and, simultaneously, materialize as physical shapes on the surface of the wall. In essence, there is no object to gaze at or hold onto. Terrifying rituals of noise, the mysterium tremendum generated by the sounds of the Arapesh men come head to head with Latour’s ecological-political analysis of the air and Irwin’s almost ephemeral objects. What a combination! Could we construct shapes in the air that appear solid only to shimmer and then vanish in a speed of a blink? Spectral, ghost-like forms, tangibly felt like Tuzin’s infrasonic demons? Atmospheres pervading bodies. Materials and Tests for Generating the Ephemeral How to generate the ephemeral? A shape, a plane of light in the room that hovers in space only to evanesce milliseconds later? An “indistinguishable volume.” I confront Harry Smoak, an expert in all things lighting related, with this question. He smiles and shakes his head with a combined expression of curiosity and skepticism that usually greets my requests. “Well, we can try some experiments with LEDs and haze, like I did with the exhibition in the summer. There I managed to get closer to what you are thinking of . . . architectural shapes in space with pretty minimal means. But you know that with theatrical lighting gear, we are going to get cones because of the haze.”34 Harry suggests we experiment with strips of color-changing RGB LEDs and haze and attempt to flash them at such short bursts that it might trick the eyes into seeing shapes hanging in the air. He again smiles and sends an email a couple of days later to Matt detailing the equipment we will need for an upcoming proof-of-concept test at the gallery: “Two rolls of heavy duty double-sided tape (Home Depot), cheap wardrobe mirror (1 meter long; Canadian Tire?), plastic mirror (close to the size of a standard sheet of notebook paper; Dollar Store? Canadian Tire? Mini max?), 1 roll of clear packing tape (the heavy-duty clear kind), 3 long extension cords (10 m each; any color), a separate Step Up/Down Voltage Transformer (2000 Watt) is needed for the haze machine and the strobe . . . ” “Like Glass . . .” Matt, Harry, Toby, a German exchange student working with us, and myself gather afterhours in the FoFA gallery to do tests. Crack the material conundrum: create geometries of light in the air. Equipment strewn about the space to help generate the palpably ephemeral: 1.5 m long wooden blinders with inserted RGB LED strips (the kind

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that now proliferate at DJ shops and Radio Shacks everywhere), a DMX controller box and cable, a MacBook, and the expensive German Look Solutions Unique 2.1 hazer originally purchased for Air XY, the Venice Biennale commission I did with Erik Adigard in 2008.35 We also hook up one of my favorite instruments: a high-powered Martin Atomic 3000 DMX controlled strobe light. We’ve used this lighting instrument on dozens of projects. Its 3000 W Xenon bulb produces such a blindingly intense flash of light that vision is momentarily erased, the ghostly afterimages produced in the eye lingering seconds after its luminous blast. Unrelenting vision can be compared to concentrated vision that heralds a shift in consciousness, to paraphrase Bill Viola.36 This is what we are after, but the path is somewhat excruciating. Once Harry has the computer “talking” to the lights and the hazer, we fill the space with a thin blanket of haze. The glycol-based fluid gracefully coats the gallery so that there is the sense of substance that filters the air but doesn’t smother vision, like most cheap fog and smoke machines. Harry tests the individual RGB channels on the two lighting blinders—first red, then blue, then green, then a quick swing through complementary colors. The fact that the LED strips are deeply inset into the blinders causes the light to spill out in a kind of focused, plane-like shape, but it quickly becomes distorted the further it travels from the source. Matt and Toby hold up the two blinders and move them around in the room as Harry changes the color and begins to flash it on and off. The room fills with colored light, further reflected by the white gallery walls. Still uninteresting. No solid forms, only ambient color fields that look like bad disco lighting. Harry flashes the Atomic. For a moment, the space disappears to us. He flashes the strobe again, and almost 200 ms later, flashes the red LEDs. Matt states, “I still see a trace of red in my eye .  .  . do you guys see this?” Toby pipes in, “I just see grey .  .  . but it looks like there is a kind of fuzzy shape still there.” I intervene: “Yeah, but it’s all so nebulous. It’s not a shape, a form—it’s just color swatches—like someone flashed a Pantone color swatch in the air.” Tired and at the verge of giving up after playing around in the increasingly hazefilled gallery for several hours, something finally happens—that sudden unplanned thing that is usually called a happy accident. Harry and I each pick up one of the blinders. I hold it in the air, about five feet from the ground, facing down, and Harry lays his down on the floor, facing upward. Streaming from both blinders, the two planes of light merge and thus seem to manifest what we are searching for: the illusion of a rectangular form in the air. All of us stop in our tracks, not saying a word so as not to disturb this small triumph. Still something missing. The two light blinders facing each other clearly make a shape, but the shape’s borders are still fuzzy, too ambient, not sharply defined.

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My arms are getting tired of holding the blinder in the air, so Matt sets up a tripod in order to attach the top of the fixture with a Manfrotto Magic Arm.37 As he does this, Harry has another idea. “Why don’t we attach the two blinders together by hanging the bottom one off the top one with some monofilament? That way, we have a fixed frame in which to see the light in.” While Matt and Harry fiddle around with cutting the fishing line, I step back to look at this spit and glue apparatus—the Manfrotto tripod with two pieces of wood duck taped and Magic Armed to the structure. Harry has turned the light off, but as we tighten the two monofilament lines that run down from both ends of the blinders I suddenly see a clear and defined shape for the first time. Is this what we’ve been looking for? He goes back to the computer and, with a deep breath, turns on the LEDs. A pure rectangle of colored light appears, about 1.5 m tall and 1 m wide, its shape defined by the thin, almost invisible monofilament that, at least for our eyes, contains the thick haze that has now permeated every corner of the gallery. Matt stands in front of it, motionless at first, then reaches out, trying to touch a surface that is not there (figure 3.3). “It’s like glass . . .” He steps back as if to question what he sees before him. Harry fires the strobe and turns the LEDs off. The shape vanishes. He fires it on again, this time

Figure 3.3 Atmosphere test session, FoFA Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. November 2010. Photo by Chris Salter.

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in a deep-blue palette. The form appears but just as soon is washed away again in the burst of cold strobe light. He starts to flash a single color in a periodic manner, out of sync with the strobe so it appears there are two different temporalities taking place in the space: the steady pulse of the strobe, which comes every 20 seconds, and the rapid flashing of the LEDs. He shifts color, changes the tempo, stops and starts the light. Not only the plane of light but the space around it buckles and shifts. At each flash, the defined shape appears again and again, like a pure Platonic form. Despite the fact that the haze makes the flat plane ripple with its changing turbulent flow, the eye still holds onto the pure rectilinear geometry in its almost fluttering state. Light as surface and void. It’s 23:30; with combined exhaustion and elation we call it quits. One year later, I talk with Harry about this test session and what he thinks happened there. He tells me that part of the knowing what to do came from familiarity and tinkering, without any specific project or goal in mind. “I spent the previous summer working with those LED fixtures .  .  . that was my design .  .  . so a lot of what we were staging in the studio I already knew exactly what I was doing. How I exposed that . . . Since we were working with a group of people and I’m not interested in redoing something I’ve done before. So, I come with what I’m familiar with and try and arrange it in different ways. It’s a way of me getting another understanding of the phenomena. What else can it do?” Harry knows already the capability of the instruments, their parameters and characteristics: “How bright, what they would look like in the fog, watching for hours different color changes and speeds and stuff.” A palette of seemingly endless possibilities existed, but what comes from the outside is the set of constraints to bear on those possibilities. “It was like . . . well Chris wants to see this and I respect Chris so we’ll see it and also I just trust that by doing that, I’ll see something else. I won’t see exactly what Chris wants to see but I’ll see for my own sense something different. And that’s what I’m looking for.” Floating geometries, nonobjects that would appear and not appear, thresholds of control of seeing. Harry recalls my desires as almost “too specific.” “Seeing something you cannot not see,” in terms of the eventual structure of fixtures attached with monofilament to construct a frame in which one sees a plane of light, the phantom of a pane of changing glass that does not exist. What does it mean to create a haptic feeling in a spectator that something can be touched that is nothing more than an apparition? “It was easy for me to imagine what you were saying . . . so what I started to try and imagine was not ‘could I imagine seeing this plane of light’ .  .  . which I could .  .  . the interesting question was how to make it and then what qualities of that I thought were interesting could translate into something for someone else to experience.” The sensory descriptions we read in the seminar’s ethnographic accounts seem contradictory, culture given in symbols yet experiences that are evoked. Visual atmospheres in the accounts

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of the Desana’s seeing colored lights during their ayahuasca-filled rituals; Thoreau’s haptic experiences of crunching through leaves; the extreme ascetic order of the setups in the Japanese tea ceremony. What still underlies these discussions is the question of animism and animation—of movement and its felt perception across all of the sensory systems from these specific cultural frameworks. How to make the room move? Integration and synesthesia versus sensory separation again pervades all of the examples. Any theory of perception, whether aesthetic or neuroscientific, must necessarily be multimodal “if it is to hold cross-culturally and not merely pertain to the West.” But what is this construct called the West? Here lies the crux and challenge of MoS. We are trolling the archival record of mostly dead ethnographers dealing with sensorial otherness not only to understand that other cultures are by their nature intersensorial in everyday life but also to understand that we have ignored this fact in the construction of our own cultural and scientific models and imaginaries of these cultures. This all seems a bit strange. Are we attempting to point out this “incomplete picture” by confronting visitors with a barrage of multimodal sensory atmospheres that enact, perform different crossings, intersections, and tensions among the senses—what we only capture now from texts? Atmosphere Buildup Continual, exhausting work on the exhibition almost up to the Christmas break and then immediately up to the opening in early January. The gallery has become a mix of studio, electronics music lab, fabrication space, and architectural planning zone. While Shannon Collis and a team of assistants have taped off the vast majority of the muscular black wall in order to score it and paint in thermochromic ink, which will change from opaque to clear during the cycle (figure 3.4, top left and right), Elio Bidinost and his assistant Robert Tomes have basically taken up residence in the crawl space on the other side of the wall, where they install a battery of the SenseStage mini-bees, sensors, the requisite power supplies, and other electronic paraphernalia to control the line.38 Upon first glance into the darkened crawl space behind the wall, it appears like something from a wiretapping operation: scores of carefully prepared and mounted sensor circuits and wires symmetrically attached to and running down the length of wall. Electronic magic and firepower aimed at doing one fantastic thing: making a line that is divided in eighteen segments on the other side of the wall appear to move between visible and invisible. Elio is also charged with another strange task: to develop the control electronics for five IR heaters that will hang from the ceiling and warm the bodies of those who stand underneath them (figure 3.4, third row, right). This is a not so easy job, as he tells me. The heaters need a long ramp time to get to their maximum temperature—a blazing

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Figure 3.4 Atmosphere development, FoFA Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. December–January 2010–2011. Photos by Chris Salter and Matthieu Tremblay.

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200 degrees Celsius. Using Max39 to not only control the LEDs and the sound but also the relays to switch current on and off to the heaters, we sequence them so that they are synchronized to specific color and sound changes. As always, the shape of the dramaturgy of the installation is the critical thing. Four “states” will constitute the composition’s twenty-minute cycle: undisturbed nature, impendingness, shattering, and renewal. Like Latour’s argument about the air, the room needs to feel natural and artificial simultaneously; sometimes barely noticeable and at other times overwhelming in the fusion of media: light, color, haze, sound, heat. The room’s states become a kind of “weather”: warm and cold zones, the sense of pressure building, storms moving through, and a moment of stillness like that which occurs with the passing of a hurricane’s pacific eye over its previous path of devastation. The opening sound structures I develop suggest swarm textures, something like bees moving overhead. These synthetic tones aim to evoke “natural” landscapes similar to cicadas, frogs croaking, and wind. I drag out my twenty-five year old Prophet 600 analog synthesizer, installing it in the corner of the room in a makeshift audio studio amid the building chaos (figure 3.4, second row, right). The machine produces timbres and colors, crackling noise filters, squealing resonance sweeps, synchronized, detuned oscillators that generate dense, warm textural lines and beds—qualities that no digital machine can hope to render. Each of the weather states has its equivalent color state with the LEDs. State 1: The colors stay almost frozen across the three LED planes. Occasionally, a color flash that is so short (less than 50 ms) that the eye barely sees the shift. State 2: The room bathed in blue, then a shocking pink as all of the screens except for one shift to a dim trace of their former selves. State 3: The buildup—a thick cluster chord of detuned drones while a plague like green tint delivered by the LEDs saturates the space. As the hazer begins to fill the gallery with thick, almost suffocating clouds, State 4: All goes blank. A sequence of white lights chase slowly from bottom fixture to top fixture (six in total) in a heartbeat-like tempo while each of the strobes produces a rapidfire, stutter-like flash of light on both ends of the room. Almost silence, except for the 30 Hz low-frequency pulse that the rented subwoofer strains to produce. Then, a slow build of cacophonous, disorderly tones and noise, which increasingly gets louder, like the sound of a violent, malevolent wind gusting through the room. The strobes start flashing out of sync but in periodic bursts such that it is difficult to keep track of the slowly sequenced LEDs. A fade, and then the cycle begins anew. 5 Translation and Enactment The exhibition Atmosphere is both an act of translation and performance; translating but not representing the intersensorial mingling that is the focus of the ethnographic accounts while performing this sensory information through a lived enactment. The

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accounts we have been studying are highly symbolic and interpretive—endless descriptions of practices for the archive but no enactment. This performative aspect seems to be a key part of the experimental apparatus we are setting up. How would the Tzotzil idea of heat get amplified to a viewer for whom hot and cold are bodily extremes but not necessarily loaded with cosmological significance? Can spectators not under the influence of banisteriopsis caapi through a drug-laden trip in Iquitos still experience patterns of correspondence between repeated colors and sounds so that one merges with the other?40 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? Ritual streams through all of these accounts. Understandable, as the majority of them discuss shamanic healing practices or extreme forms of experience, with altered states of consciousness arising from the taking of plant-based hallucinogens. But ritual is not just referring to ceremonies or rites of exotic others. More recent work on what anthropologist Catherine Bell calls “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.41 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 multimodal sensorial experiences that we read about are both steeped in the specificities of cultural practices and legitimized by these specificities. The synesthetic “color energies” that come about through chemical alteration of the sensing Desana body, for example, are enabled through the ingestion of a hallucinogenic substance: yajé or ayahuasca. This ritual ingestion is not a recreational activity; as Howes argues, it is fundamentally part of the everyday reality of this group and not “a cultural construct.” The gap. Is there any way for us, as strangers, as outsiders, to understand these events as anything but a cultural construct? Anthropological distance is precisely that which allows us to create an account of the experience of this culture. From the outside looking in. The exogenous viewpoint. It is not enough for anthropology to break with the representation of “native experience”; it has to make a “second break” from outside interpretation. “In taking up a point of view on the action, withdrawing from it in order to observe it from above and from a distance, he [the anthropologist] constitutes practical activity as an object of observation and analysis, a representation.”42 Although aimed at social scientists’ top-down view of practice, Bourdieu’s commentary seems

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also directed at us—the research-creation group of MoS gathering around the boundary object of multisensory experience. I have no interest in representing sensations in this project. The sense is in the materials we are working with: How many times have we used that fog machine, that strobe light, those particular tones and frequencies, those light screens that Harry admitted he already understood? What will happen in that room when these things come together? Is this like the secret men’s cults in the Arapesh blowing their colossal instruments who do not know what the sounds they produce are and will do, not only to the uninitiated but also to themselves? 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. 6 Atmospheres Unveiled The opening of Atmosphere is a strange, atypical affair. The gallery is occupied by the flow of a hundred bodies come to stare, listen, and feel the turbulent sensorial weather that we have struggled to choreograph. Although visual art openings normally consist of the classic “distracted observer” that Walter Benjamin ascribed to the cinema visitor almost a century before the contemporary addiction to cell phones and incessant twittering, something utterly strange happens during this evening.43 The visitors enter the gallery with a weird hush as if they were crossing a border to another zone: a church, a Zen temple, some distant, sacred space. They gather in clusters on both sides of the room, their focus transfixed on the floating planes of shifting colored light suspended before them, as if the screens functioned as both a membrane bisecting the group and a frame for perceiving a world beyond the room (figure 3.5). The painted wall behind the hanging light screens is more misleading. Visitors in search of objects to affix their gaze onto find nothing. At first glance, the eye only lands on a black, flat plane that occasionally turns white with the sporadic bursts of light from the two strobes mounted in the grid at each end of the gallery. It sees nothing, and then, suddenly, it sees something—the appearance and disappearance of thin white lines. The lines seem to come and go like zoetic entities that are faintly there. The room begins to fill with haze, diminishing vision. The lines become even more precarious to the eye. At times, they synchronize, forming a single 6 m long thin strip stretching the length of the black wall. At other times, the lines appear at different rates, one after the other, or in small groupings, the incessant temporal sequencing of patterns giving the impression of an infinitely slow, modulating surface. Despite the apparent visuality inscribed in this scene, the shifting thermal air generated by the heaters switching on and off, the vibratory frequencies of the sound, and the smell of the haze capture the bodies of these gallery occupants in a cross fire alternating between peaked sensorial awareness and overwhelmed hypnosis. They stare

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Figure 3.5 Atmosphere, FoFA Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. January 2011. Photos by Anke Burger.

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into the empty frames of color, occasionally attempting to reach forward and touch the intangible, but most of the time they stand and watch in a slightly bewildered manner those on the other side of the planes. An atmosphere of waiting for something to come? The cell phones remain off. I turn to David Howes and whisper to him that this is really weird; gallery openings rarely seed such an intense level of concentration in a usually restless crowd. More astoundingly, the viewers remain in the space. They stand, watch, listen, and feel throughout the entire cycle of collapse and renewal that we have sequenced through the media. Outside in the busy hallway and atrium, they carry unsettled expressions of elation and loss in their faces and bodies, the questions slowly manifested in talking with others. What was that? What experience was I undergoing? What was I supposed to see or feel? What was happening to me, to others, to the room? Several weeks later. A series of requisite panel outreach events to broaden the context and let the public in on the secrets: Howes describing the project and its relationship to sensory anthropology; Shannon and Harry discussing their research; a presentation by our long-distance collaborator TeZ on his work; a dialogue between myself and the philosopher Brian Massumi on thresholds of experience. In week two, David sets the stage for a direct integration between Atmosphere and MoS. Rather than just giving a talk, he plans a special event to take place within the exhibition space. With the installation running and a bemused crowd wandering, attendants suddenly appear, dressed in black with silver trays bearing tiny rectangular bits of carefully arranged crumbly chocolate (figure 3.6). We watch the audience’s reactions as they mill about the room. Some visitors sit down on the floor with their backs to the white wall, seeking to witness the somewhat perplexed behavior of their fellow spectators within the impending spectacle. Others stop in their tracks under the suspended IR heaters, turning around as if something were touching them on the back. The attendants nonchalantly approach the visitors and hold the trays out, presenting their offerings. Some in the crowd warily pick up a piece of the dark chocolate, placing it gingerly in their mouths only to violently grimace from the extreme bitterness and spiciness of the chili flavoring it. Others flatly refuse, while still others eagerly take two or three pieces. Disgust followed by discretely spitting the contents into a tissue; fear; surprise; anger; a smile. A few leave the room immediately, somewhat disturbed or pissed off from having their expectations of pleasurable taste rudely halted. I observe one person who, frozen under the heater, stares intently at the black wall with the slowly materializing white lines all the while seeming to desire more chocolate to enhance the experience. David seems to follow several of those who move to the exit, asking them about their experience. The debriefing to make sense of this will have to wait.

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Figure 3.6 Attendant serving bitter chocolate, Atmosphere, FOFA Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. January 2011. Photo by Chris Salter.

7 Technologies of the Senses TeZ comes to Montreal to meet the team and begin brainstorming. We gather with David for sushi, because neither of them have met the other, except virtually. As the sushi arrives, which enthralls David in its vegetarian bounty, a conversation ensues. TeZ sums up the goal of MoS as 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. Consequently, senses that seem “ordinary” will become extraordinary. Such a sacralization could be achieved by multiple strategies: architectural choices; using media to shape the way people behave in the room; creating the sense of “nonhuman forces,” like endowing ordinary objects with unusual behaviors such as emitting sound, light, or heat. These are “technologies of the senses,” as I cut into the discussion, paraphrasing and modifying Foucault’s notion of “technologies of the self.”44 In order to remove vision, TeZ suggests that darkness is one of the fundamental “technologies” we need to work with. David is curious as to why this would be the case.

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“Because the deprivation of sight will systematically enhance the other senses—this is the principle of sensory substitution—that the loss of one sense may be compensated for by the others.”45 David describes his interest in working toward a “modeling of sensoria.” The German anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, perhaps the expert on the Desana of Northern Colombia, “gives us the descriptions of the Desana’s ‘way of sensing’”—for example, how the different chromatic or “color energies” that are watched over by the shaman convey meaning or sense across multiple cosmological layers. Yellow, for instance, is connected with male reproductive power, red with feminine fertility, but “the cosmos is also composed of layers of colors; on top is the creative yellow light of the sun, then the blue transitional region of the Milky Way, followed by red, fertile earth . . .”46 Later that evening, TeZ and I continue the earlier train of thought of how one creates a zone of experience with David’s notion of “modeling.” What strategies would allow a translation of the ethnographic accounts of extraordinary sensing into our own context? Chris: “One idea would be to take a strong sensory experience that you know and imagine how to either exaggerate it or, also, diminish its intensity.” “How would you do this?” “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.” The strategizing segues into brainstorming architectural ideas—corridors, passageways, surfaces that employ inaudible but tactile vibrations to confuse the sense of space. We also debate sound’s relationship to the body; how acoustic pressure conveys tactile sensations by changing from frequencies that one hears to infrasonic frequencies that one feels. A day later, we continue the discussion with Harry, who agrees with the general concept of the modeling of sensoria but is confused with how exactly to translate the ethnographic accounts into material experimentation. This translation could involve preparing the environment through a series of ritualistic actions that do not convey meaning beyond themselves but, over time, would take on significance for those who would repeatedly experience such actions. I muse: “If we continually work with red and yellow and perform certain actions that are continually associated with these colors, then the visitors may start to connect the colors to specific actions and hence specific meaning.” Harry suggests thinking about how to organize color in sequences so that it begins to create its own symbolic associations. TeZ picks up the train of thought, arguing that this needs to go further in order to “make color be perceived throughout the different senses, like synesthesia.” The notion of sequencing color energies in association with other sensory modes strikes us as a potentially fruitful direction to explore. This ignites the fires of artistic

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reference points. TeZ describes an incredible work entitled Chromosaturation by the Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez that he saw in a Caracas museum. We quickly look up the work online. The installation is simple in its design: a series of three rooms connected to each other by a hallway. Each is outfitted with a large number of colored T5 fluorescent tubes that line the ceiling and a soft, white carpet on the floor.47 As the visitors remove their shoes and don covers over their socks, each room presents them with a different color temperature and mood. These spaces are just filled with light, but TeZ claims that in the red room something extraordinary happened. “When I walked into that red room, I really felt a sense of heat, as if the temperature changed on the surface of my skin. I couldn’t almost believe it but I had to .  .  . also in the passage between one room and the other, where the gradients of color mixed, I could really feel the changes from hot to cold on my skin.” “Were there sources of heat in the room or just that the tubes created a lot of heat?” “No, because the other rooms were cool. It was just like, this room gave the feeling of warmth, of heat of some sort. It was subtle, really strange. Maybe something to do with the color of red . . . but also the tactile experience of the carpet . . . that was also unusual.” “Were you under the influence of something?” I joke, trying at the same time to make a serious argument that the Desana experience we’ve been exploring is indeed one that describes the influence of plant-based psychedelics on the consciousness of the participants. I wonder: If ethnographies are descriptions of normative structures pervading a culture, then what is the norm when hallucinogens take over, influencing perception, producing affect? 8 Seeding Alter Months pass as many other projects temporarily supersede and suspend MoS: Xenakis, Emerge, JND China tour, SymbioticA planning simultaneously with personal fragmentation and upheaval. Mom in hospital—suspected TIA, out of the hospital, recovering, wants to move from her apartment. Too much work. More unknowns. Atmosphere provided a test, but now the project drifts. As always with such projects. Where does the research end and the art begin? I’m impatient. I can only experiment so long without knowing where the experiment will lead. There has to be something in the end; otherwise it’s just ideas that never gel or lead to fruition. Attribute this to the theater. The thing has to leave the rehearsal room and enter the world. Showtime. In search of a deadline . . . While David carries on with the group in Montreal, I leave for six weeks to Amsterdam, Australia, Germany. In this period, a weird opportunity presents itself. The American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) annual meeting, which is the largest academic gathering of anthropologists in North America, will take place in Montreal in

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November 2011. An experimental, immersive media environment held at an academic anthropology conference? Must be some kind of a joke. David proposes a series of panels concerning the senses that he asks me, among many others, to participate in. To accompany this, I suggest a more radical proposal—a showing of two installations that deal with sensory extremes: JND on the one side and something new that will be developed out of the MoS work on the other. In other words, use this world-renowned (at least to anthropologists) conference as a test bed, a laboratory to play out our sensory experiments on the delegates. It seems something of an irony: a work informed by anthropology presented at an anthropology conference aiming to make anthropologists the subject and object of the experiment. We submit the unorthodox proposal (entitled Mediations of Sensation: Threshold and Saturation) to the conference’s peer reviewed “Inno-vents” program involving special events that aim to “add sight, sound, taste, and smell to our [the anthropologists] usual fare of text and talk.”48 If the proposal is accepted, then we’ll have to know what we are doing fast—by the end of the summer. As I tell David, it always helps to have a deadline. Brainstorming Displacement I arrive at TeZ’s place in Amsterdam on my way to SymbioticA in Perth. An intense day and evening of discussion and brainstorming ensues before I fly off to Dubai and the other end of the world the next day. As I enter his small but immaculate apartment on the Albert Cuypstraat, dragging my always too heavy suitcase up the ladder-like flights of stairs, I glance at the eclectic bookshelves: Italian translations of Gurdijieff, books by Sheldrake and Feynman next to Apocalypse Culture, volumes on energy technologies entitled Infinite Energy Technologies and the Energy Revolution, along with dozens of electronic and ambient CDs, exhibition catalogs, and other objects and trinkets that I affectionately label “dust collectors.” We engage in an intense discussion of MoS. Where is this research heading? What is the purpose? How do we translate these dense, sometimes impenetrable ethnographies into something that is multisensorial and experienced as such? What are the senses as material to shape? Rainforest Shamans, Reichel-Dolmatoff’s ethnography of the Tukano Indians, lies open in front of us. TeZ pages through the text and images: anacondas; hexagonal matrices that are supposedly the structure of the brain; forms drawn in the sand, produced by men after a long night of psychedelic experience with banisteropsis caapi. We write down key words, themes, inspirations in a kind of stream of consciousness; sources in an attempt to assemble a basic model: Stanislav Grof—Beyond the Brain Passage

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Build—modulation of the senses Mix up sensorial experience Reduce—by reducing you amplify I go into a room—compare to Turrell—overwhelms the body Surrounded by light Gradually introduce light over time Path to the unknown Communal versus individual experience Communal—individual—communal—Turner communitas Ganzfeld Atmosphere—undefined space Phosphenes to true hallucinations Reinforce symbols Baptized with balm. Smell—haptic. Have an object with a symbol. Object gives energy to one sound element Sound modulation over time—crescendo Symbol visualized on a door—only one person at a time has to go through the passage Heat—ambisonic sound/modulation—strong coupling—smell that gets more intense in time; smell that becomes hot Giving the visitors a headband with smell that has some kind of symbolic forms sensor in the band for the movement of the head Actuators in the band Ritualized movement into the space Symbols should be luminescent; symbol appears on the ground Flickering UV—pulsate A repetition of sound Reichel-Dolmatoff describes how the shamans of the Desana distinguish brain functions by varying images: the human brain seen as an interlocking series of rock crystals divided into an almost infinite amount of hexagonal prisms of varying color energies; bundles of hexagonal crystals each with a different color and sensibility; layers of hexagonal honeycombs, each hexagon a container that holds scent, color, flavor; a brain divided into hexagonal columns with those on the left hemisphere as the radiators of color and the right yellow, red, blue. One commentator states that the left “contains colours we don’t even know the names of.”49 We sketch while reading and drinking one cup of green tea after the other. The hexagon as brain, as sacred geometric shape, continually surfaces in our discussion until suddenly a hastily drawn hexagonal-shaped platform somehow appears in TeZ’s sketchbook. “I have an idea.” He switches from pen and notebook to Sketch Up,

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quickly mocking up a hexagonal shaped form with three human figures atop, each standing on smaller circular shapes embedded into the larger hexagonal platform. The image remains half complete. We do not know how to visualize the shifting forces of the Desana color energies. “Tez, why not create the color energies as shifting walls around the periphery of the hexagon with the LEDs, like in Atmosphere?” I imagine walls of light, abruptly shifting and flashing with the most extreme colors—colors we don’t yet know the names of. The broader wall of light could travel around the hexagonal shape, and smaller walls of light could surround the individual bodies on the platform. TeZ turns the computer toward me. The sketch looks like some kind of Star Trek teleportation setup with cylinders of light surrounding three figures that seem somehow stranded in this immense hexagonal landscape (figure 3.7). But we slowly get the sense that this image could be the key to unlocking the still elusive secret of MoS. Reflection from Afar In Perth. Between sessions of learning tissue culture from a distance, I think about MoS from close up—the hexagonal platform and what such a shape means to the project’s overall symbolic landscape. How to set this into temporal motion in sound and light?

Figure 3.7 Alter, first 3D rendering. May 2011. Sketch by TeZ.

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Swirling color from the six walls along with a color wash from above—a sudden burst more intense than the LEDs are capable of, perhaps provided by the color changer on the Atomic 3000. The color should engulf the visitors who, three at a time, will rotate on the platform within a cylindrically shaped haze of a different color. Here, color bursts will follow in waves, alternating with periods of intense blackness. Each standing person can rotate around in a 360-degree circle. 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. Aspects of Reichel-Dolmatoff’s ethnography meld together in my brain as I rewrite: • Give the audience a sensor object—acts as a kind of totem/ way finder through the environment. • Could be enclosed spaces as well as open objects/totems. • The desire to play with color and heat. • Power to have visions. Can we set up a series of intense but self-contained environments that probe intersensoriality in a visually compelling (object-based) manner? • Work with phosphenic images. • Black wall with the thermochromic line or photochromic images. • Intense vibration on the wall and in the floor—white floor, black wall, color blasters from above that reflect off the surface. Floor heats up. • Floor vibrates over time window so intensely that you lose balance. • Dark room with changing smell. The floor and walls vibrate intensely. • Passing by a radiating object that exerts force. • Wind room—the first phase of the hallucination is that the person feels and hears a violent current of air, as if a strong wind were pulling him or her along (ReichelDolmatoff). Ventilator below in floor—walls white but then bathed in complementary colors. Swivel chair so that spectator can rotate themselves (à la Artaud). • Vibration on walls that increases and decreases. • Circular tube-like room—white walls, color blaster in the top. Strobe. Vibration. One person at a time. Saturate walls with color-ganzfeld affect—no seams. I look at my notes. A statement that I must have scrawled during my visit to TeZ’s: “How to invoke the cosmos.” Boiling Rocks I return to Amsterdam from down under, now initiated into the cultish ways of tissue culturing. I am supposed to remain there for the next ten days for a residency at the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM) on another project. The urgency looms

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to come up with concrete ideas for MoS; TeZ and I will return to Montreal together and then spend ten days workshopping out ideas along with the rest of the team, who is currently buried in volumes of Chinese history that David has thrust upon them, pursuing his interest in modeling the synesthesia of the five Chinese elements. TeZ and I try to imagine less grandiose ideas: a surface that one walks by that beckons through its emanation of heat and intense vibration; seamless walls of changing color that the visitors walk in between. Whatever it is, it shouldn’t have the look of typical “media art”; there should be relics, totemic objects that seem to have their own stories, histories that last beyond the ephemeral event of a performance or technosheen screen images. But it’s clear that we have to structure the architecture and the objects to enable the various elements of this ever growing puzzle to have their own set of symbolic codes that are coupled with the sensorial affects. TeZ suddenly blurts out during our brainstorming: “We have to go to Colombia, to experience what we are reading.” “TeZ, you can’t just go to the jungle. You can’t just walk into another culture like a tourist in order to participate in something that is so interwoven in the spiritual fabric, fieldwork is a long process of—” He cuts me off, having anticipated this argument. “You cannot just read these accounts as a substitute for experience. You have to experience it; otherwise, it’s just an abstraction.” I acknowledge this as true. It brings to mind writer and thinker Stewart Brand’s quote about his days traveling around California with Ken Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters: “If you don’t boil rocks and drink the water, how do you know it won’t make you drunk?” I also acknowledge the complexities of entering other cultures without guides; one remains on the outside such that the only strategy becomes one of exoticism, representation, alienation, and intellectual tourism. “But is not every ethnographer something of a surrealist—a reinventor and reshuffler of realities?”50 Is this what we are up to—reshuffling a set of realities—the Desana as gleaned from the words of a long-dead German ethnographer; the experiences of an audience we don’t know yet; our own realities and set habits of doing things? I still instantiate the classical mind-body split. Reading but not experiencing. Affect doesn’t come from books. This is all still theory. The perceptual distortions grow in a kind of ecstatic but, at first, muted intensity. After what seems like hours afloat, we disembark the boat in the middle of the city, near the Damrak. Walking in the midst of the summer crush, the pathway in front continually ascends upwards while bending and twisting. The street impressions are more than vivid; buildings we pass by yield like twisted shapes; the laughs of American college students transformed into bullroarers; the sense that my legs and feet keep elongating in order to move forwards. Mixing, undefined borders erupt between sight and sound; a synesthesia manufactured by natural chemicals that approximate the structure and actions of serotonin.

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With the onset of temporal blurring, one of the core side effects of the mushrooms, duration abandons us with a fury. With loss of the sense of time setting into full motion, I panic, paranoid of the fact that time doesn’t move anymore. The room stretches as I glance at the dayglow phosphor shapes that have been taped out on the walls—shapes that appear to be leaking. The experience will last longer. Lying in bed in the attic apartment of the STEIM guesthouse after this psilocybin-fueled, eight-hour trip with a splitting headache. Boiling the rocks and drinking the water, according to Brand. The sensations are more than palpable. This was not the key to MoS, but it has done something to the project that I don’t yet know. The effects wear off, but I’m just physically exhausted. Altered experience. Time’s flow returns to normal. 9 How to Invoke the Cosmos Hexagonal Preparations Between June 15 and June 30, MoS operations take place against the backdrop of a sweltering hot Montreal summer, during which an intensive work period unfolds in the cool darkness of the Hexagram Centre for Research-Creation in Media Art and Technology’s black box research space. If TeZ and I enter the scene brimming with ideas and fresh energy, the other team members seem lugubriously stuck in the vast literature of Chinese history and cosmology, from the symbolism of the five elements and the yin and yang to the sacred books of Confucius. They futilely try and decipher the sensual clues in these texts and to think of experiments to explore them. Already, one of our new team members, a PhD student from Argentina named Florencia Marchetti, who is trained in both anthropology and documentary filmmaking, undertakes extensive research on the Chinese system of correspondences. All of this seems interesting, yielding new insights for the group, but at the same time, somehow distracting, unfocused, and somewhat forced. We have our hands full trying to realize the hexagon idea and need all of the support to go in that direction. Narrowing. After all, a deadline approaches in the fall for the first version of whatever this is we are working on. Delegate to the team: TeZ, Harry, Matt, and I will work to develop a prototype of the hexagon idea, while Shannon will investigate another side effect of the drug rituals: the strange shapes and images that appear called phosphenes. Florencia begins to investigate scent. The complexity of constructing the hexagon prototype is, as usual, underestimated and consequently consumes the duration and focus of the entire workshop. So much for the original idea of making tiny small experiments to test ideas out. Instead, we work to create one large environment that can be used as an instrument for testing multiple phenomena that appear to take place within Desana cosmology: the appearance of entopic images; geometric color patterns; the production of a sonic

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vocabulary of huge noises, chants, and unearthly timbres; and rituals of smelling and eating. TeZ and I work on what Reichel-Dolmatoff labels a “synthesis of opposites,” but Matt calls “Atmosphere on acid” to describe the all-consuming five-day construction process of the hexagon prototype. Another behemoth project, I think. We order bushels of CAT 3 cable, LED controllers, power supplies, speakers, sound cards, a Crayola laser pen and phosphor pad set to play with ideas of phosphenic images, photochromic powders to test out creating images on the ground, all of which transform the black box into a cross between an electronics shop, a theater, and an alchemical lab (figure 3.8). In the act of laying out all of the lighting gear and wiring on the floor, the complexity of the task dawns on us: We are building essentially an entire room out of the haze-based LED “screens” that we used in Atmosphere—a hexagonally shaped space of color-changing light on all sides. This is what TeZ calls “a kind of nondescriptive environment.” Days and pads of paper are consumed with agglomerations of technical maps, figures, and numbers: DMX channel maps that correspond to each LED fixture, enabling control of 12 separate channels of LEDs, six at the top of the structure and six at the bottom; speaker channels in software for the eight loudspeakers that we will use to develop an Ambisonics-based sound score that corresponds to the movement of light around the hexagon; notes on the speed and torque of a turntable that we have had specially commissioned to see what happens if one stands in the center of the hexagon prototype and slowly rotates around. While all of the endless building, wiring, and testing takes place, TeZ and I map out the dramaturgy for the temporal shape and animation of this hexagonal room. ReichelDolmatoff’s vivid accounts of hallucinatory experience from the ingesting of yajé in The Shaman and the Jaguar and Rainforest Shamans guide technical choices. After ingesting the sixth cup of the brewed yajé and undergoing a spate of vomiting and diarrhea like the other men, with half-closed eyes the visions begin to occur. At first, sudden flashes of intense light. Streaks and blasts of color. Sometimes red, sometimes white. Then, kaleidoscopic patterns—stars, lines, flowers, zigzags, curves, vibrating lines, flickering geometries. “Rapid lateral vibrations in the field of vision.” Within the second stage, however, these abstract forms shift to more pictorial visions—people and sacred animals like anacondas, mythological creatures, spirit beings. “Essential truth of the Indians’ religious beliefs.” In the third stage, which happens some hours later, all images vanish, leaving only “soft music and wandering clouds.”51 Reichel-Dolmatoff’s account deals with the progression of the drugs fully entering the bloodstreams of the users (“digesting the drug to help it explode”)—a shift from atmospheres claimed to be “dull, murky” to the increasingly phantasmagoric. But what is most striking is the fact that “the sphere of hallucinations” that the anthropologist

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Figure 3.8 Alter, June workshop, Hexagram Concordia. June 2011. Photos by Chris Salter and David Jhave Johnston.

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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.”52 All of this unbelievable effort to create, what . . . a simulated drug trip? Wouldn’t it have just been easier to go to the desert like Foucault at Zabriskie Point, drop acid, listen to Stockhausen, gaze at the stars exploding . . . Is this the point of MoS?53 Why don’t we just hand out drugs and let people sit in an empty room? More translation work. With the physical structure almost built after many frayed nerves, the real work begins in order to articulate and compress the full-night duration of the Desana yajé rituals into an abstract, visceral performance of shifting color, vibration, and sound in which our audiences will project their own “subjective interpretations.” This proves to be no easy task. It’s impossible to control the sequencing of light at the same time as running TeZ’s computationally heavy, generative sound processes without resorting to writing the Max patch control in JavaScript, something that he embarks on. TeZ sits at his laptop in the darkened corner of the black box, surrounded by gear, notes, charts, images taped to the black walls: drawings of the top and bottom of the hexagon, a score-like ream of paper on which we have mapped out the dramaturgical shape of the event and jotted down bits of code that articulate the strings and call functions for the vast arrays of lighting channels. The dramaturgy alternates between a structured score and a generative one. The composition has three movements. At the start, only tactile sound will fill the floor of the not yet present platform. The visitors who enter the platform will be surrounded on all sides at first by dimmed shades of yellow and orange in the LEDs (what we dub “malaria light”). The intensity of these colors has a set of generative envelopes that cause their brightness to rise and fall in an almost stochastic manner. This quality will suggest a kind of holding state that the environment maintains. Movement two will begin with a slow acceleration through a kind of pulsing, rattle like sound as the light begins to cycle in a rotating sequence around the hexagon, changing colors from red to yellow. TeZ develops a physical model of a distorted, flutelike timbre that, when its pitch changes, invokes the unsettling sound of a subterranean wailing. The sequence continues to speed up, with both sets of LEDs (top and bottom) more rapidly changing color. The idea is to create a fast-moving wall of light that spins

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around the hexagon, turning it into a centrifuge (without throwing the visitors on it into space) and sending those sitting in its center into vertigo. Movement three opens with a sudden transition; all light goes to black, and a slow but ever growing rumble that is both sonic and haptic vibrates through the platform. There is a brief burst of violent white noise, and then an intense flicker sequence starts, increasing and decreasing the LEDs’ frequency, continually shifting color while a roaring, wind-like timbre is modulated according to the shifting frequencies of the light. It is in this climactic sequence that we aim to achieve those “rapid lateral vibrations in the field of vision” that Reichel-Dolmatoff so vividly described of his own yajé trip in the jungle. A Story In the afternoon of one of these endless days, David Jhave Johnston, a PhD student and gifted artist and programmer, stops by the black box to document the work process and record video of our tests. Jhave enters the room with his Canon camera, taking video of the minutest details: the flashing of an individual LED; TeZ’s hands typing furiously away on the keyboard; a tangle of wire descending from the top LED blinders, precariously suspended by monofilament from the black box trampoline grid (figure 3.9). Having Jhave in the room provides a good opportunity for me to explain the dramaturgy and, at the same time, have TeZ run what he has been developing, which even I haven’t yet fully seen. Due to Jhave’s deadpan style, a most bizarre discussion ensues between the two of us. “So, we don’t really know what the project is yet.” Jhave looks intrigued by the prospect of documenting something that escapes our knowledge and control. “But it’s been informed by sensory anthropology, so—” Jhave interrupts, with a bit of skeptical look: “Okay . . . how?” “Well, because one thing we are looking at are the hallucinogenic rituals of the Desana.” Quickly, without missing a beat: “Ohmygod . . .” “So, the idea is that um . . .I mean, it’s more like a piece of theater, more and more . . . TeZ, would you agree?” Jhave moves the camera closer to capture my voice better while becoming more intrigued by our experimenting. “Do people go inside?” referring to the hexagon. “Yeah, but there will be some kind of guide that welcomes people, and we’re thinking about having twelve people on the platform at a time but also putting pillows around the thing [the hexagon] so people from outside can also watch the spectacle.” Jhave laughs. “And they are also kind of ‘anointed’ as they go on .  .  . giving them something on their head, on their forehead that actually has something like Tiger Balm or camphor in it so when it touches the skin over time it starts to get hot.”

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Figure 3.9 Alter details, June workshop, Hexagram Concordia. June 2011. Photos by David Jhave Johnston.

“I see.” Jhave continues to listen to my ramblings. “Then it goes through this cycle the way in which you would have the same experience if you were taking the ayahuasca or the yajé vine . . . of course, that’s a much longer time span. The first is this kind of sense of the world being alive around you. So, this kind of strange energy around you . . . it’s very ambient but generative. And then what TeZ is playing now, the shaking pulse of the rattle like sound that accompanies this color of yellow in the beginning and the second color is red and that starts to have this rattle you hear now shaking . . . starts to kind of swarm.” Jhave begins to move the camera about for a second, all the while recording me. “More polyrhythms start and it feels like it’s accelerating. So the first movement is a preparation, the second movement is acceleration, and then it goes totally dark and under the platform are heavy vibrotactile actuators that vibrate the whole thing so people’s bodies shake in the darkness. And then there is this hurricane of sound and

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force which arises um . . . from the floor and around . . .with the Ambisonic system we can spin sound around in 360 degrees. Then the last movement is multicolored flicker, which is really uh . . . the apex of the trip.” “Digesting the Drug to Help it Explode” Last day of the workshop. Shannon has delved into the concept of entopic images, images derived from the stimulation of the optic nerve itself.54 Grouped in various categories (Purkinje trees, floaters, blue-field arc phenomena), the most common type of entopic image is that of a phosphene, “subjective images, independent of an external light source.” In other words, images produced internally as a kind of “self-illumination of the visual sense.”55 The phosphenes seem like universal shapes or what the German psychologist Heinrich Klüver in his research on mescaline labeled “form constants”: elementary features of the nervous system that we may be hardwired to perceive.56 Lattices, circles, crossedout squares, undulating lines, curly cues, zigzags, fork-like shapes, matrices of points, and rows of dots (figure 3.10). These phenomena are critical to our work, because they are the same type of images reported by Reichel-Dolmatoff in his discussion of the extensive geometric imagery in Tukano and Desana art based on their hallucinatory experiences. ReichelDolmatoff not only analyzed artworks existing in Desana culture, such as weaving, home decoration, and so on, in which such phosphene-like patterns continually appeared, but also solicited drawings from eight Tukanos specifically of their visions seen in yajé trance.57 The ground itself around the maloca, the long house where the men gather for the ritual, is covered by such figures drawn in the sand at the end of the rituals (figure 3.11). Automatic drawing. Indeed, all of this art is filled with geometric patterns resembling the phosphenes that appear to us in everyday life when we glance into utter darkness, experience the repeated flash of a strobe, or press our palms on our eyes, seeing lines and stars that seem to appear from nowhere. If the Tukano and Desana draw these strange forms into the earth, we wonder if we can experiment with the same thing—as traces created by stencils of shapes made by photochromic paint onto the ground around the hexagon that only appear if charged by a certain wavelength of light, most likely ultraviolet. TeZ and I have worked fervently to get a compositional shape for the hexagon sequence, and the team’s anticipation of experiencing what we have been developing builds. The prototype hexagon consists of a hexagonal outline on the floor and a similar one hanging some 3 m above, in direct parallel. We all walk into the center of the hexagon outline, and I step up onto the rotating turntable as TeZ starts the sequence on his laptop. The LEDs ringing the hexagon are bathed in a murky yellowish light accompanied by a low pulse and a jagged, stochastic, percussive-like rhythm.

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Figure 3.10 Form constants. Sketches by Heinrich Klüver.

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Figure 3.11 Desana man tracing in the sand after yajé ritual. Photo by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff.

On particular accents, a large adaptive reverb opens up, shifting the acoustic shape of the space around the hexagon and causing the lighting to bump a level or two in brightness. We are somewhat taken aback by the ways in which the LEDs respond. As the audio level drops down, strange things seem to happen with the color mix such that the whole environment behaves in a not necessarily predictable manner. Standing on the turntable and rotating slowly around 360 degrees, the acceleration of the light and the circular movement of the sound around my body generate such an overwhelming vertiginous feeling that I begin to feel physically overwhelmed (figure 3.12). This slight experience of disequilibrium is nothing compared to the onset of the intense flicker sequence, in which the LEDs are pulsed at varying intensities of brightness and frequency/duration of flashing. With the sound spinning around us, the flicker patterns produce intense phosphenes based on the hexagonal shape of the structure—the floating blinders that form the hanging hexagon from the top and the lines on the platform that outline its shape. Closing one’s eyes yields potent images of crossing light and patterns—vibrant matter generated in the meld between physical architecture and the brain, eye and body being saturated by throbbing light. Sound and

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Figure 3.12 Alter test, Hexagram Concordia. June 2011. Photo by David Jhave Johnston.

image smeared by synchresis—“the forging of an immediate and necessary relationship between something one sees and something one hears.”58 After ten chimeric minutes, it is over. Are these the techniques for invoking the cosmos? 10 Experience Near-Far In his classic 1974 essay “From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously cites a distinction made by the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut between “experience-near” and “experiencedistant.” Experience-near is that of the “native” or insider’s subjective experience of a situation. Experience-distant is that of the classical Malinowskian participant observer—a concept that, as Geertz states, is employed by specialists to forward their own scientific, analytic, or technical lens on the world. This is the tension, expressed so perfectly by Trinh T. Minh-ha, between “outsiders input” and “insiders output.”59 As an outsider, as anthropologist, ethnographer, or, in this case artist, one can really never know the native or insider’s point of view. “Confinement to experience-near concepts leaves an ethnographer awash in immediacies” because, after all, “experience-near

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means that ideas and the realities they inform are naturally and indissolubly bound up together.”60 Experience-distant, however, leaves one “stranded in abstractions and smothered in jargon.” The ethnographer can thus never really know the insider’s point of view, their corporeal embeddedness in the world and their reciprocity with the world’s material affects and transformations—at least not “as” or “in” but perhaps “by way of” or “through” someone else’s lived experience. But the tension inherent in developing MoS doubly reverses Geertz’s argument. We are creating an experience-near event through or by way of experience-distant accounts and then subsequently reporting, analyzing, telling the story of the formulation and enacting of that event. “A crack in the Western sensorium,” as Howes calls it. This is not mimesis but a doubling process of translation, transmutation, and retranslation. And yet, it is not so easy. What is, after all, this “Western sensorium?” Artaud, Kandinsky, Scriabin, Kubrick, Ligeti, and dozens of other artists and creators emerged from Europe and North America whose writings, paintings, symphonies, operas, and films go far beyond the ocular-centrism that sensory anthropology aims its vehemence against. Moreover, what do we make of Reichel-Dolmatoff’s vivid description of the violent, hallucinogenic transformations of his own body during the process of Desana psychedelic rituals? The nausea, fever, vomiting, vertigo, syncretic bursts of colors, smells, and tastes that occur when he, the classic German ethnographer, partakes of the banisteriopsis caapi vines in the thick, wet jungles of northern Colombia? 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? 11 The Missing Sense AAA acceptance. It helps to have a deadline. We plan on using the entire black box at Hexagram for the AAA “Inno-vent” staging. Not gallery, theater, or conference room,

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the black box is the ideal site for our investigation into the technological sensorium. I hope that by building an environment at such a scale we can bypass the tokenism of artistic work at academic conferences that normally serves as a kind of window dressing and pleasant distraction but is in no way taken as real scholarship or research. We’ve given the project the working title Alter. As we begin gearing up for the AAA event in November 2011, two core elements are missing from our material experiments and investigations: taste and smell. Although our anthropologist and documentary filmmaker PhD student Florencia researched some basic sociocultural studies of smell, there has been no active exploration or integration of that modality yet into our work. Taste has also continually cropped up in conversations as necessary to Alter, particularly given its continual exclusion in sensory hierarchies as the “lowest” sense.61 It is indeed one of those “sensuous technologies,” the term historian of science Lissa Roberts uses to describe “the way natural investigators used their bodies as part of a dynamic interactive network,” linking material, social, and inscriptive technologies.62 Along with touch, taste is one of the most intimate senses, for to put something in the mouth, as food-studies researcher David Szanto argues, is to penetrate the body. Perhaps this is also why Aristotle, in his alignment of the five senses to the four elements, groups taste with touch. Taste is altogether important for our work on Alter for another reason. Such a sense demonstrates the permeability of our bodies and the resulting transformative effects due to a world of active, moving stuff. If smells reach our nostrils and brains through airborne molecules, tastes can only be produced by the entangling of our chemical receptors with those molecules. A phase change ensues, as gaseous molecules undergo liquefaction by way of the tongue, the teeth, and salivary glands. There is no taste without a receptor, and there is no sensation of taste from that receptor without the matter; its form, gestalt, composition, texture. In essence, taste is one of those senses, as the eighteenth-century lawyer and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin described, “by which man places himself in connexion with exterior objects.”63 Now these exterior objects are big business; the food industries globally spend billions of dollars each year to construct chemical, olfactory, and textural artifice that is designed to transform through and in us.64 Like the corporeal-physiological-material interplay found in other acts of sensing, we cannot divorce the notion of taste from its social-cultural frame: food, pleasure, status, sensitivity to particular sensations due to upbringing and socioeconomic status. Debates about the number of tastes rage from antiquity across different cultural frameworks. Yet, the four tastes of sweet, bitter, salty, and sour arise only as recently as the early part of the twentieth century, when psychophysics and psychology research posited that we can only sense four basic tastes because they are distributed across different parts of the tongue and that the tongue itself is of finite shape, size, and receptivity to such difference.65

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Given that taste needs to be part of our altering experience, I contact David Szanto, a PhD researcher who has a background in physics and is an expert on gastronomic sciences, to see if he would be willing to collaborate with us on this risky and complex part of Alter. My email to him is cryptic; I only describe that the work “involves designing/conjuring exotic food and eating as part of a larger performance ritual.” I meet Szanto a few days later and lay out the project to him, and he accepts. Later, after the conclusion of Alter, during a dinner of merguez and ferinata, he articulates what he was interested in pursuing at the time and why. From my initial email invitation, Szanto wondered whether or not he would have any connection to “sense work,” because he “knew David Howes was interested in the senses and I always thought that my work was very far from taste and smell and all that sort of stuff. So, I was interested but also wary. I began ready to challenge notions of taste and food.” Szanto describes food as a kind of oscillating performative entity. Just like the tension on stage between an actor and his representing a role, between enaction and representation, “with food, you have a substance in front of you and it’s also got this incredible discourse, there is this meaning and history and language and stuff .  .  . ” Food both works as signification and signified, a “thing” that also carries with it all of its meaning baggage. He points to the piece of farinata, a Ligurian chickpea flour pancake that I am putting into my mouth. “That piece of farinata is absolutely material and absolutely symbolic . . . but the other thing that is going on is process . . . the temporal doing which is always present. Someone made that food, so it had to have process involved. This is why food is performative. It involves the entangling of matter, meaning, and doing; material, discourse, and process. This is why the challenge of working on MoS was so appealing.” He goes on to argue that the actions one performs on a kind of material produce a certain kind of experience; “because I cook it this way, it tastes this way. What you do produces what you taste.” He tells me that we have, in fact, a gap, particularly in certain cultures, such as North America, where food has been subjected to design and techniques of Photoshopping and air brushing between the doing and the material results. “The main thing that I initially attached to was to think about things that had the capacity to produce sensory stimulus that would not be immediately linkable by most people to an obvious cultural referent. In other words, we are not trying to symbolize the Desana experience in this room (god knows what that is) and we are not trying to represent a specific Western association with taste, with these edible things we are making.” What David Szanto suggests is that we instead construct the conditions to enable the audience to undergo sensory experiences that are strong but still disassociated from most cultural references; a perceptual destabilization strategy to fracture and

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dislocate the relationship between the look, texture, and smell of something and its eventual taste or what Szanto called “gusting”: the sensations that take place in the mouth. Of course, the idea of trying to “deculturize” food is already a kind of impossibility because any object intended for gustation is already embedded in a complex set of cultural signs and assumptions. I ask what kind of strategies could be used in Alter, given this impossibility of completely breaking the link between the material and the cultural discourse contained within the project. Szanto’s strategy involves the creation of enough “white noise or white taste or, at the very least, contradictory tastes, tastes that blur, that create a chaos, noisy, static [like electrical static as he demonstrates]—so much stuff that it would confuse.” At the end of the conversation, David takes as his challenge the idea of making something that is consumable and edible without seeming like food. He tells me that in his early experimentation he quickly reached for the techniques of molecular gastronomy, because in such a process “there are all of these substrates that carry taste, like agar, that, at the same time, are not food.”66 That molecular gastronomy, the term used to describe the “science of cooking,” which embraces “sensory and food science, borrowing tools from the science lab and ingredients from the food industry and concocting surprise after surprise for diners,” will play a central role in the sensorial event we are slowly building is unknown at the start of August, but it will also quickly become a surprise—not only for those who will arrive in November for our AAA event but also for us creating the experimental setup for a laboratory of sensory experience. 12 The Conditions of Sensory Assemblage From the summer workshop to mid-fall, we generate an endless slew of outlandish ideas that never see the light of day but are part of the process of thinking through the assemblage of materials and sensations that we want to bring forth: a phosphorescent “rain room” in which luminous liquid substances rain down in sheets around the visitors encased in glass or clear Plexiglas walls; incense clocks that tell time by smell; pathways made of ball bearings that the audience walks over, reminiscent of the rock paths in the Japanese tea ceremony; sculptures filled with bitter honey that the audience can lick; photochromic powders arrayed as shapes on the floor that resemble the phosphenes produced in the drug trips. The ideas end up only as material traces in notes and on papers. They resemble what a former colleague of mine called “bamboo curtains”—things you add in the development of a work to disguise the fact that you don’t know what you are really doing. We also go through one floor plan, model, and schematic after the other: how people enter, how different sensorial experiences will be sequenced, what the audience configurations are (figure 3.13).

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Figure 3.13 Displace floor plan #1. July 2011. Sketch by Chris Salter and TeZ.

Schema 1 Schema 1 stages the classic van Gennep dramaturgy of rites of passage. Entrance-crisis, passage, resolution-reintegration.67 Audience members enter into the environment, are asked to take off their shoes and place shoe covers over their socks, something that I am sure will draw rebellion from the crowd as people hate to take off their shoes in exhibitions. Each audience member is first anointed with something resembling Tiger Balm ointment on his or her forehead. This will cause a contradictory burning/cool sensation that will carry through the event and also, in a strange way, direct the eyes’ focus toward the center of the forehead. This last thing we learn only from testing multiple types of Tiger Balm: a super strong one bought in India which rapidly burns like crazy and which we mix with peppermint oil (this makes a sticky, stinking mess) as well as a regular Chinese Tiger Balm. The audience then enters a second space (curtain between the small entrance area and the rest of the environment?). They walk across a long path similar to the garden path of stones that attendees to the Japanese tea ceremony cross on their way to the inner tea house. They see a mysterious, glowing, hexagonal structure in the distance. An alien form that has landed, beckoning and drawing them irresistibly closer. On September 11, a new sequence and plan is proposed:

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I. Entry II. Waiting III. Tunnel—Passage—10’, Slowly sloped floor →Sensed so we can amplify the footsteps—Dark—In the middle→NOISE—Suggestion IV. At the end of the tunnel→there is a space→ V. Liquid Space—Individual Experience—Scent→Fluid→Ceiling Space→ VI. Gathering—Places assigned based on the marker —WAIT FOR EVERYONE TO COME THROUGH—Meditation Area VII. Everyone has gathered→Taste—Preparation for the Hexagon VIII. Hexagon→10–15 Minutes IX. Reentry (figure 3.14) Five Taste Tests TeZ arrives mid-October in Montreal for final development. Work is intense over the following ten days. The Hexagram black box is booked by other researchers, so we set

Figure 3.14 Displace floor plan #2. September 2011. Sketch by Chris Salter.

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up a mock hexagon upstairs in the horrid acoustics of the video production room on the tenth floor of Concordia’s EV Building, where the Hexagram Centre is located. The setup is again belabored and overly complicated. Matt almost has a nervous breakdown dealing once more with the installation of the LEDs; 24 different DMX channels, each with a separate RGB channel, leads to a wiring mess (figure 3.15, top). Parallel to our schematic/floor plan development, we arrange to meet David Szanto to get a sense of what he is up to. Steadily, he has been working on his “liquids and solids,” or “gustables,” as he calls them, since early August, already testing the first batch of experiments. “Something unknown without being exotic or having immediate cultural references” (figure 3.16, bottom). He first describes these tests to us in a narrative that sounds like a cross between a deranged Graham Kerr and Ferran Adria.68 The setting for all of this, “my clumsy kitchen with lack of surface area, an easily stained double sink, a fussy refrigerator, no kick space under the lower cabinet doors, and a wonky stove” (figure 3.16, top left). Test 1 An attempt to produce a gustible base that “tastes green.” Blend two cups of washed and drained watercress, 1.5 cups of washed and drained parsley, 500 mg of ascorbic acid (dissolved in 2 tbsp. water), three medium tomatillos, 1 tbsp. water, and 1 tbsp. agave syrup. Strain the purée, re-strain it without pressing on the solids, and add 1/4 tsp. salt. One cup of liquid. Bright, mildly tannic, intense, peppery, humid. Boiling with 2 g of agar-agar in a saucepan causes the liquid to oxidize, lose color, turn brownish into the flavor of overboiled vegetables. Green will therefore have to be a liquid, not a solid. I make another batch and put it in the fridge. The next day it has frozen solid (figure 3.16, top right). Test 2 Something a little crunchy in the gels? Trying to work texture into them, because the agar is a little blah, proves to be challenging, to say the least. Decide to create something akin to krupuk; how hard can it be? Purée raw shrimp, caraway seeds, tapioca starch, granulated sugar, and nam pla, rolled into a doughy, fishy, pink cylinder, twist it into a plastic-wrap “torchon,” and steam it for thirty minutes. Cool, slice, dry on oven racks. Try to fry, but in the hot oil they do not puff up like commercial krupuk but burn to hell before expanding. Still, a few are good: umami, pungent, and crunchy (figure 3.16, center left). I enjoy them with a cold beer. That night, serious indigestion. Drop this idea. Test 3 Gel samples composed of multiple layers of flavored agar: boiled black tea, agua de jamaica (hibiscus flower infusion), kombu (dried kelp) and Thai chilies, grapefruit-mushroom purée, and the cooked “green” (figure 3.16, center right). Test session with David Howes and Shannon. Howes finds them delightfully weird and wants to set up a series of “tasting stations,” illuminated from above with pencil beams of light around which participants can gather and prepare snacks in a

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Figure 3.15 October tests: Hexagon and taste tests. October 2011. Photos by Chris Salter.

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Figure 3.16 Gusting experiments, David Szanto. Summer–Fall 2011. Photos by David Szanto.

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socially interactive way. Shannon finds the texture upsetting, and, moreover, she doesn’t want to take a large piece because of her discomfort with eating unknown food. Other colleagues are also unnerved by the slippery/crumbly agar texture and dissociated/overloaded flavors. Test 4 An early prototype for one of the gel bases, “sweet dirt.” Made from grapefruit peel and diced mushrooms that were boiled, puréed, and squeezed through a thick tea towel, it only produced a small quantity of a rather delicately flavored liquid (figure 3.16, bottom left). Impossible scale for an art event that will be attended by hundreds. Test 5 More attempts at another batch of “green.” I take three bunches of watercress and three of flat-leaf parsley, as well some Laziza “lemon seasoning” (really acrid, cheap, bottled lemon juice with citric acid). I wash my white, plastic dishpan twice, fill it with cold water, and dump in the cress (figure 3.16, bottom right). The water comes alive with hundreds and hundreds of tiny flies and spiders and at least twenty-five miniature snails. Rinse and drain more than three times. The “non-antiseptic parsley” from the local Frères Sakaris grocery is so loaded with soil that it also gets washed three times. The greens are now bruised, as is my enthusiasm for making green juice.”69

“You Can’t Tune Food” Taste-testing David S’s work reveals the strategy that he originally described of creating a gap or split between the experience and the cultural object. He brings a box of various bottles and other paraphernalia to the production studio and sets up things while we take a break from programming and sound designing the hexagon. When we return to the room, he has converted one part of the studio into what looks like a small laboratory of plastic bottles filled with various colored liquids, plastic containers with cornstarch-dusted forms, spoons, assorted glassware, and rubber muffin tins filled with dark black substances (figure 3.15, bottom). We sample various pale-colored liquids and then an intense, red-colored one, unfiltered and completely unsweetened, lip numbing and taste bending—a powerful hibiscus water that produces an extremely sour taste in the mouth despite its welcoming dark, magenta-like shade. Szanto then proceeds to scoop out the black things in the muffin tins while simultaneously unveiling a series of gels in plastic wrap. The gels are different color gradations of brown and burnt orange, cut and layered in multiple shapes and sizes: hexagons, squares, stacked circles. These are even more revolting in their taste than the liquids, consisting of a wicked combination of something sweet (like blueberry juice) and something approaching the extreme end of bitter. Chewing one of these agar-based things and experiencing its slowly shifting pallet of sensations from sweet to oniony/garlicky to the almost limit of bitterness like a

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concentrated shot of quinine reminds me of the similar experience of eating durian in Thailand. This Southeast Asian “king of fruits” invokes a remarkable experience that has a transformative olfactory and gustatory spectrum as one eats it, ranging from sweet vanilla pudding to a sudden, almost noxious quality of the taste of rotten onions crossed with the stench of sewage. TeZ seems also a bit overwhelmed by the “gustatories” of David S. “Wow . . . uhh. . . this one (pointing to the bitter black gel) . . . this one is really . . . uh. . . ” I butt in: “David, this is great (referring to the gel), but would it be possible to increase the intensity of, say, the capsicum in this green liquid? I assume there is some kind of chili inside or . . . ?” TeZ concurs somewhat, nodding his head. “Yes, maybe you can tweak this one so it’s not so bitter . . .” “I think these are really great, David (referring to the different intensities of liquids), but again, you might think about trying to shift the feeling of menthol in this one liquid and . . . ” David halfway smiles and makes notes, saying he will by all means try to make the changes we suggest, all the while having a certain look of consternation on his face. In our later discussions, he reveals what he learned from trying to “tune” the taste structures. “When we did the taste test with you and TeZ at Hexagram, where you had the prototype set up and said, ‘well, why don’t we make this a little more acidic and this a little bit stronger and can we push that?’ I thought, well, I can try but you can’t tune food .  .  . With digital sound or with light, it’s eminently tunable. We can change it by ‘that frequency, adjust it .  .  . we want the wavelength a little warmer,’ or similar .  .  . all those things are more tunable with electronics. You guys were in a computery [sic] lab with lots of light and sound and you had absolute control over these sensory things. I thought, well, if you give me a cryovacuum unit yes, I can make it more intense, but if I cook it down we’ll lose all of the flavor, it will oxidize, it will be more concentrated . . . ” David S. uses the term gustation, a catch-all word for him that links taste, texture, and the “trigeminal” sensations—piquancy, astringency, and metallic, but also menthol or cooling.70 Tasting is a cloud of events, in the thing itself, in the mouth and body and in the environment in which the tasting occurs. “It’s not like a thing comes in and pushes a button and bang, it’s identified. The great quote is ‘we don’t taste molecules.’ Molecules come into contact with various receptors and all sorts of shit happens in terms of transmitting signals to the brain and the brain matching it with historical references and other sensory environmental stimuli. A cloud of stuff happens and then we think ‘oh, cassis.’ This is the direction we are looking for. That’s why I thought separating taste from all of these other sensory possibilities was difficult and I knew in this environment, it would be pretty well impossible

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to produce. Because we were also talking about merging senses and synesthesia and putting things together and seeing how they combined. And this is why I thought that using the word gustation would be useful because it would help us get away from the word and hence the idea of food entering the body.” Schema 3 Back to dramaturgy. A new floor plan. This one finally functions better by creating a series of smaller chambers or rooms through which the visitors move with the aid of guides or attendants. The layout will help us in staging the sequencing of different sensations over time as well as work to disorient the visitors, because they will not know what space they are in (figure 3.17). One week before the AAA showing. We’ve changed the title to Displace, because Alter invoked too much religious signification and displacement seems to be the order of the day. Does Displace refer to the audience’s experience or to our own making this monster of a work? The install of the project lasts five brutal days and well into each night. Because TeZ is in Amsterdam and due to travel to another upcoming exhibition in Slovenia, he

Figure 3.17 Displace floor plan #3. October 2011. Sketch by Chris Salter.

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works nightly and into his morning with us, remotely programming the complex and unstable Max/MSP patches that control all of the light and sound in the environment. He sends the cues to us so that we can mark them out on paper and have a similar nomenclature in which to address the complex sequence.71 The scale of the project has gone out of proportion. What was once thought to be a small set of sensory “models” or “probes” has metamorphosed into a gargantuan production that sprawls over every inch of the 15 × 17 m black box and outside of it in the adjacent rooms and stairwell, where a makeshift kitchen is erected to handle the gustables (figure 3.18, top left). Parallel activity from the growing team boggles the mind: online reservation systems set up for the AAA delegates; training attendants to lead visitors through the installation; consent forms and waivers; ordering glasses, cups, refrigerators, curtains and rods, and electronics; making speaker stands and painting walls and surfaces; setting up remote desktop software so that TeZ can program the hexagon sequences from far away in Amsterdam. The solid wood platform we’ve commissioned from Thomas Beguin, a local artist/ carpenter, is well made but unbelievably cumbersome—a massive wood structure that we barely get out of his workshop (figure 3.18, second row, left). The top part of the structure is too heavy, and Matt and Harry both have near nervous breakdowns again as the weighty MDF blinders installed with the LED strips like in Atmosphere buckle and shift while trying to fly the entire structure into the air so that it directly hovers above the platform below. The wiring of the LEDs, which now takes place on extension ladders, takes even longer than before. Szanto obsesses almost neurotically over every minute detail of the gustables, from the size of the parchment paper we serve the slippery, glibbery, hexagonal-shaped gels on to the type of glassware for the liquids. He also works on the olfactory dimensions as well, devising a system in which Tupperware containers filled with combinations of smells, such as sauerkraut juice and lemongrass, are attached to the other side of the wall, diffusing their scents into the tunnel through small holes cut into the structure (figure 3.18, third row, right). More floor plans. Spiking and taping out where things will be situated in the black box. The tunnel/corridor now leads straight toward the main wall so that when the visitors emerge they don’t immediately see the glowing hexagon. We’ve shifted the entire exit plan as well, replacing the phosphenes on the floor with a series of towering, swinging, black-painted Sonotubes that resemble a kind of darkened, swaying forest with light pouring through them. Moreover, because the overall event is so complex, with many things occurring simultaneously, TeZ, Harry, Matt, and I organize the dramaturgy into a score on paper that includes room environment, what activity takes place in what room, what senses

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Figure 3.18 Displace buildup/install. November 2011. Photos by Chris Salter and Anke Burger.

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are being explored, what is going on with light, audio, sensing, and temperature in each sequence. Although it ironically and unfathomably runs almost without a hitch, the remotedesktop programming of the Hexagram sequence by TeZ from Amsterdam certainly borders on the absurd. TeZ programs the Max patch on our local Mac Pro computers in the black box, and then we run the sequence with the desktop camera feeding him the visual information from the hexagon whether the sequence works or not. We finish around midnight or 1:00 a.m. each night Montreal time (6:00 a.m. in Amsterdam), carrying on this way of working until we open to the AAA delegates and public on November 16, 2011. Needless to say, TeZ doesn’t sleep for a few days. 13 Displace I gather with the crowd outside the black box. AAA delegates, prominent anthropologists, mix with students, curators, artists, and a curious general public. The waiting area feels more like the basement of a science laboratory than some kind of site for an artistic experience “to expand the senses.” Skeptical . . . consent form and waiver. Avoid the environment if you have “photosensitivity and photoepilepsy, claustrophobia, respiratory or circulatory problems, pregnancy, food allergies, or intolerances.” I glance down at the bottom of the form where it states “benefits for participation,” wondering .  .  . “The chief benefit is tools to help further participant sensation research and user experience evaluation and the integration of new technologies in artistic contexts with ethnographic methods.” What is this? We are called. Through heavy double doors into a curtained-off area of approximately 3 × 3 m. The soft but quite dim wash of amber light in the space momentarily left alone. Faint acoustic presence of some kind of sound—a jerky, staccato-like musical phrase produced by a blown, flute-like object. Next space, slightly larger than the first. Difficult to see due to a blaring white, circular-shaped light emitted from some kind of low table positioned dead center with a series of glasses set on it. We can barely see the features of the room. The sound in the background seems to grow occasionally in volume and then, just as soon, dissipates. I take a seat around the glowing table with others. The room is clad in utter blackness, the faces of the other five in the group with me barely visible due to the pitch and the blaring light. Nervous expectations . . . why are we here, what is expected of us? The attendant returns. Gently but firmly touches the center of each our foreheads with her thumb. The quick stroke against the skin. A sudden sense of coldness and numbing above the eyes. The smell of camphor and peppermint. The host is gone again into the crepuscule shadows. We all stare blankly, curiously at the six low glasses on the table before us. Palettes of colored liquids: deep magenta, forest green, beige.

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The contents beckon, drawing us toward them. Images, memories, fantasies, impressions flash through my mind—a setup at Burning Man that looks like a Berlin bar with glowing Plexiglas light tables, a séance around magical elixirs—a scene from a science fiction film. Break the spell. One of the members of our group reaches for the red elixir and downs its contents in one gulp. The trigger. Several others boldly drink. Some begin to laugh. We bond. Groans, lip smacking, the cry of despair of having drunk something unknown. “Ughh . . . what is that . . . so incredibly bitter . . .” “What do we do now?” “Tastes like parsley with chili juice. Nice.” One person in the group refuses to drink. A lone filled glass remains, untouched by human hands. The attendant returns. A gentle tap on the shoulder, motions for me to stand and come with her. A shudder down my spine. Separation. Departure. The others almost lurch up out of their chairs to help me. The attendant tells the others to wait: “Only you.” In another space, darker than the first. Pitch black. An eternal tenebrosity, continuously accompanied by the rising and falling flute-like sound far away. The fear of falling through space, not knowing where I will end up. I sit. Vibrations appear, seem to travel from my feet up into my stomach and then into the chest. They intensify while the darkness increases. They stop as I feel the slightest touch on my back. I’m being pushed forward, motioned to stand and walk into the dense obscurity. In front more blackness, far off some kind of reddish light. No concept of size and dimensions. I feel contradictory things—a blast of hot air from above, incredibly close walls pulsing, tingling on the hard surface. Another flash of thoughts. Where is everyone? The tingling gets more intense as does the heat. Brushing, feeling my way against the continuing surface. Imprisoned in a walkway no wider than my body. Slight odors—a delicate yet intense mix of ferment and citrus. The thermal wind becomes more vivid, the surface quakes, the floor feels like it moves, the sound grows progressively louder, more percussive and timbrally complex. Suddenly, in a larger space. A new attendant leads me to an enormous, hexagonal platform, some 5 m in diameter; it stands before me, brilliantly white colored but only dimly apparent in a burnished orange fluctuating haze. An equivalent hexagonal frame hangs in the air above the platform. The orange light occasionally bumps in its brightness and color as the sound swells into short percussive bursts. I approach the platform. This almost floating object evokes the image of a crashed rocket ship on a foreign planet devoid of people. I take my place on a cushion. Synchresis between the rising and falling sound and the quietly shifting colors of the vibrant light quickly becomes hypnotic. My eyes slightly close and open as the sense of time begins to stretch. Slowly losing where I am. Without warning, a new person appears out of the shadows. I immediately recognize her as someone from our group. She nervously sits on another cushion, eyes darting around the room.

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An eternity seems to pass. I reopen my eyes. The platform is now filled with those from my original group. Reunited on this spaceship that has fallen out of the sky. Nervous smiles, swaying while sitting cross-legged, eyes closing. Attendant returns holding a gleaming white Plexiglas tray upon which are carefully placed tiny, orange, hexagonally shaped objects. As the tray nears me, I notice that the objects are set atop only slightly larger slices of parchment paper. I take one as the tray passes from one person to the next. In my hands, the gelatinous quality thwarts the ability to place the object into my mouth. I grasp it with two fingers. Its slick surface defies my grip, almost falling to the platform floor. I grab it with my other hand and quickly pop it into my mouth. A flood of sensations. A hint of sweetness and rush of extreme bitterness coats my tongue. The taste seems first overwhelmed by the mucilaginous texture and feel that slowly converts from jellied to liquid as the hexagon dissolves. Grimaces of gustatory horror on the others’ faces. The person next to me doesn’t stick the object in her mouth but daintily places it back onto its piece of parchment and on the ground next to her. After handing out the gels, the attendant briefly steps onto the rotating center of the platform; it seems that one can sit there as well for an even more extreme experience. A new sound enters the environment—a steady, shaking, rattle-like sound paralleling a change in the platform’s lighting. On each side of the hexagon, scored into the platform and hanging above, sit two strips of colored LEDs directly next to each other so that they create a full strip of light that runs around the circumference of the platform and the hanging structure above us. Each light strip goes on and off in a steady, clockwise sequence, following the shape of the hexagon. The sound and light seem to rotate behind us, synchronized precisely so that with each shake of the rattle, the next LED strip turns on in sequence. Once the sequence reaches the start, however, the color of the LEDs change as they begin to circle again. Billows of thick, whitish haze. The rattle and light sequence accelerates. A solidcolored wall moving around the periphery of the hexagon. The sustaining tone continues to build, but now a long groaning crescendo rapidly enters, evoking a blown horn. Light and sound accelerates further—the light walls changing from red to orange to white. The rattle is now shaking at a violent speed, the horn sound overwhelms the environment. Other visitors have gone into a trance. One stares at the floor. Another is smiling—projecting her body into another space. Dizziness begins to set in. A burst of fierce noise. Everything goes black. Darkness. Someone pulled the plug. The platform starts to vibrate—a vibration of an intensity that I have rarely felt. It shakes my legs that were falling asleep back to life. I feel the earth opening up. Falling. Being swallowed up in the gap. A growing noise: helicopters. Soon, more roaring machines, descending from above and ascending from below.

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Everything starts to flicker and pulse. At first, steady and ordered patterns. The brightness begins to modulate as the frequency of flashes shifts. I see fragments, bursts of color and geometric lines, dozens of hexagons that seem to snap on and off in appearance. Moving my head produces smears. The palpitating planes of light seem to merge with each other. The helicopter sounds become a rushing, cascading, somewhat undefined field of pink noise. The cacophony turbulently crescendos and decrescendos in wave-like fashion. More erupting blasts of color across the entire hexagon: blue, then red, then yellow, then crazed white. The flicker starts to assault my skin, blur my vision. Shutting out the throbbing stroboscopic light doesn’t help. I see the faint pulsing on the inside of my retina. The flickering tempest becomes even more intense, the fulminating sound dissolving into microtextures, cluster chords, vast, dense blocks of sonancy. Each flash of color sears through the haze, like the bursts of supernovas or the explosions of stars. Someone sitting and slowly rotating on the turntable with a scarf over her head leaves, and I decide to take her place. The eye of the hurricane. Eyes closed, but the flicker continues to permeate the thin flesh of my eyelids. When I open my eyes, however, I feel that I’ve been frozen in motion. The flow of time ceases. Slowly, ever so slowly, the flickering light seems to be residing, its luminous blasts growing dimmer along with the sound’s slowing in its tempestuous roar. The machine grinds down, on its last legs. And then, like the stuttering end of a symphony, with gigantic szforzando accents and swoops, the entire flickering dream machine through which I’ve lost all sense of space and time stops. Stunned silence. A new sound—a low, steadily oscillating deep drone accompanied by the sound of microrain hitting an amplified ocean. The attendant again appears. As the others in the group stand, they appear dazed, in states of disarray and disorientation. Losing balance, gently falling back onto the cushions. We follow the attendant away from the platform. Before us seemingly emerge hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny points of light, like swaying stars. Fragile and ephemeral. We move through this luminous pointillist landscape, trying to grasp what we see. Huge, swinging black cylinders with tiny, dot-like perforations somehow sway in the air. The cylinders, which must be 5 m tall, have conical channels of light pulsing through them. The beams appear to go through the entire length of the cylinders, exiting out the bottoms and creating circular pools of luminosity on the floor below. The sonorous drone continues to build. I feel cocooned by this infinite, expanding field of stars and the cosmos. A harsh fluorescent light and an attendant summon us at the end of this forest of forms through an open door. I exit the world (figure 3.19). 14 “Death, Limbo, and then Heaven down the Hall” The collective gathering of experience. Florencia Marchetti, Natalie Doonan (another PhD student working with David H.), and Howes himself take turns over the course of

Figure 3.19 Displace performance, AAA. November 2011. Photos by David Jhave Johnston and Anke Burger.

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the five-day Displace run during the AAA to orchestrate group interview sessions with the participants. Once the visitors leave Displace, they wind their way up a neon-lit, industrial stairwell and enter a rather antiseptic room. Sitting on makeshift risers, the group is served Szanto’s final gustible: a mild concoction of water infused with cucumber and mint. The interviews are recorded with different cameras and last between twenty (the shortest) and forty to fifty minutes (the longest). They take several different tactics, depending on the group and the interviewer. Keeping in mind the idea that “the anthropologists and the process of anthropological experience itself is the research object,” the questions asked of our somewhat still stunned participants are performative; their descriptions reenact the traces of the just occurred experience. We trace themes and questions that have obsessed us since the start of the project: bodily sensations and the “felt experience” of Displace; the project as a “training space for the senses”; experience-distant and experience-near; the engineered sociality of the event in terms of its dramaturgy; expectations in relationship to the interplay of sensorial modalities. These interviews are also a research process for us. What method can we use or develop to capture the assemblage of sensations and consequent affects that have circulated through Displace? Anthropologist Sarah Pink suggests that “ethnographic interviewing might be rethought in a sensory paradigm . . . an emplaced activity that engages not only the performative body but the sensing body in relation to its total environment.”72 But to collectively describe forces, affects that are nonlocal goes beyond the single interviewer/interviewee model of sensory ethnography. We set out to pay particular attention to how our audience articulates thresholds, gaps in sense, minute differentials, and repetitive motifs, imaginaries that haunt description’s powers. These affects are collective and shared, continually revealing what Thomas Csordas called “somatic modes of attention.”73 Despite the variability of experiences, however, certain categories and patterns continually resurface in the days that follow. Bodily Sensations “How do you feel right now?” Woman with glasses: Tired. Q: You were saying that you’d need a massage right now? W: Well, I felt that with that sequence of sensory experiences, it would only be fair. Q: Well, we’ll think about that in the next version! W: It’s sort of the sequence you get in a spa. Q: Aha.

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W: Of taste, and light, and sound, and change of sound . . . Q: Did it differ from that experience as well? W: Oh, of course! Q: How? W: Well, we’re dressed [smiles, giggles], there are no towels, there’s no hot steam, there was a kind of fuzzy light, but temperature was not involved. Q: Mhm, not at all? W: Not as far as I can tell; that was one of the dimensions not touched. Man in the back: There were heat lamps on the corridor . . . Man in yellow: [Talking about the first chamber] It’s like in Alice in wonderland; drink this and you’ll get inside the ballroom . . . Felt sensations are generated by some of our most “theatrical” choices, like anointing the head with the Tiger Balm—a “constant, unchanging” throughout the entire experience. “The third eye.” Still other choices, such as sending people through the corridor in almost total darkness (what one anthropologist visitor called “the most manipulative part of the journey, a threshold that works in relationship to authority”) and the intensity produced through the combination of vibration and flicker coupled with the synchronization and desynchronization of sound, also elicit response. These events result in vividly described feelings of disorientation, pleasure, “blindness,” vertigo, and even sometimes sensation of the limits of the body. Small man in sweater, on the left: In the hexagon, what happened that was interesting was that I was hearing the sound but also feeling the vibration, through the body and also the location of the sounds. I kind of narrowed focus on the sounds, so there was, you know, from drumming to kind of boat sounds or port or industrial sounds with the tabla drums coming in and then it switched to a train and the train kept speeding up and then it turned into a helicopter, you know, filmic references like Apocalypse Now but very, very distanced because it was that intense .  .  . and the flashing of the lights I experimented a little bit different in closing my eyes and having my eyes open and . . . you know, it wasn’t a whole . . . it was different, it would have been easier to go on and meditate with your eyes closed cause you had patterns forming on the inside of your lids, eyelids . . . just the color of the lights, it was not unpleasant . . .

One well-known cultural anthropologist asks her group members if “anyone else had a kind of altering of images?” “Well, I don’t know if it was just ‘cause I am wearing glasses but I was getting kind of lines, multiple lines.” Man 1: “Yes, they formed this depth when it opened; it was like being inside a trial chamber . . . it was great.” Perceptual Rearrangement Partially disoriented, confused, ecstatic, or bored, the visitors describe sequences, narratives in order to attempt to explain the experience. In articulating simultaneous affects,

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the descriptions most of the time become sequential in nature. “And to me the senses came together [my italics] when there were moments of darkness, as soon as the pulsating effect came . . . and then there were cool moments; like there would be this sharp sound and then the lights would disappear and I really felt the space contracting and expanding . . . I really like that.” Sound, vibration, and taste continually crop up in the discussions. As sound escapes the representation and boundaries of language, the participants struggle to identify the sounds as images, the acoustic landscape invoking both cinematic references (The Thin Man, Apocalypse Now, the films of Jodorowsky, the 1970s science fiction film The Ipcress File) as well as things and processes: “a sound that seemed like it was coming from steam machines, kind of jarring too, before the breaking glass,” a “dichotomy between artificial and real, and nature and culture .  .  . like the ocean, trees, and then trains and industrial sounds . . . ,” or “a rotating sound [that] would be less helicoptery or crane-like . . .” If the sounds invoke machines, trains, helicopters, however, the construction and ordering of taste leaves the audiences more perplexed, as David Szanto’s aim to defamiliarize the act of “gusting” from the object of food appears to work as an experiential strategy. For one visitor, taste is “the most intense sensation,” for another “the most evocative,” and for yet another, “deeply confusing.” Man in black shirt, right-hand side of screen: The bottom of the aftertaste of the drinks, especially since we exchanged, had a pretty basic foundation; it smelled like roots or something like plants in a way, but in terms of the actual tasting, especially combined with the extrasensory lights and also the smoke, and like you mentioned, the awkwardness . . . actually made the taste feel more natural, I mean .  .  . it felt .  .  . it didn’t taste like red, like you asked her, it tasted more like this foreign substance but not something that was . . . unknown to the body.

Taste evolves, doesn’t remain static. It moves through thresholds; one sensation segues into the next. “The gels. I found the taste had kind of an evolution to it, like it developed in different ways, so it was spicy and bitter, or tomatoey, and all these different kind of tastes . . .” “The jello in my mouth separated in two planes and that tripped me out cause there were two planes at the bottom and the top and wow .  .  . [laughs in the room] but then the whole artificial engagement with the thing broke when the material in my mouth broke because it was some . . . at all levels things were breaking down and this in my mouth like [gestures an explosion, expansive motion] so then I lost the sci-fi feeling there and it became something I couldn’t describe . . . ” M: Taste grabbed my attention more, sound in background, loop. Then when entering the hexagon, there was more like a structure to the sound so it was more in the foreground. Taste was unfamiliar, I don’t know this, what is it? I think that there is certain kind of work that went into figuring out what kind of taste this was that didn’t happen with the sound.

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This rearrangement of sensory affects continues, overlapping and mixing together the supposedly separated “modalities” of sense. Q: Did you try the gels? W in front, left: Yes. Q: How did that affect your experience? M1: You mean the . . . [Everyone starts commenting at the same time; it’s hard to understand. Laughs. They thought it was chocolate.] Q: It’s the color? Or the shape? W in back: The color, the shape, in the dark you know, I guess I was hoping it would be . . . Q: Aha. What happened when you tasted it, then? W in back: Mine tasted like coriander, but it had like a sharpness to it .  .  . almost like the peppermint kind of sharpness on my forehead but on my tongue . . . Q: Mhm . . . and did that do something to your other senses? W in back: Well, yeah, it kind of matched the sense of smell that would linger with me and this [with finger on forehead] was kind of burning . . . somebody said cool but also a little burning sensation there too, and yeah, jello, gelatinous things are not my favorite so a crashing disappointment [everyone laughs]. Amodal Blurring The participants’ attempts to hold onto unimodal experience quickly dissolves. Amodal affect, no fixed sense modality, sets in. “I was focusing on one sense at a time, hearing the air, the noise of the air of the speakers, then it’s not the sounds anymore but my eyes and the lights . . . so it was divided . . . sort of.” “With the accumulation of light patterns, some things started to appear . . . that was sort of the epiphany of the thing because you could see something that wasn’t there and that started appearing around you . . . the sense of something that accumulated and built over time . . . I think I had a sonic experience and also a vibratory one . . .” The more interviews we conduct, the more amodal affects arise. At times, the “planes of light were synchronized with the sound,” the most “integrated moment.” For another visitor, the almost hallucinatory fusing of light and sound is a trick.“What is different between this and taking drugs?” Finally, another visitor articulates the ongoing tension of the project between hierarchy and fusion of sensory experience. W: I think there’s a hierarchy of the senses and when you start with, let’s say, your stronger one. Me, I would say that my favorite senses are view (sic) but my second is maybe the taste, so to traumatize my taste at the beginning it kind of . . . I don’t know how to say it .  .  . it wasn’t as fun but I would say maybe at some point like I was “oh

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no, they are gonna give me something to drink or eat . . .” So it kind of took me off for a bit . . . M: You were scared? W: No, not scared but it took me off. I was waiting to see something beautiful .  .  . all the rest, I didn’t notice the heat, I didn’t smell anything. M: Did you notice the shaking? W: Yeah, the shaking yeah, but my other senses were kind of . . . I was just waiting to . . . recuperate with my view, which is my number one sense . . . Q: It’s interesting what you’re saying but, tell me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like you’re talking about your senses being reordered a little bit because the taste that you had in the beginning kind of sensitized you and you were expecting more tastes and you were waiting for your vision to come back . . . W: Yeah, kind of . . . but your question was “do you feel like you didn’t explore enough?” and I was yeah, because I didn’t wanna taste the candy, I didn’t have a sip from the drink, so . . . Q: Because you didn’t like that first? W: It’s not that I did not like it, it’s just that my body is like “yuck.” Q: Can’t take anymore. W: But the vision was very interesting for the patterns it created . . . beautiful . . . “More Dramaturgy than Experiment” Given the differentiated, sometimes antagonistic responses to the interplay or separation of the senses, David Howes’s underlying idea of the “gymnasium of the senses” does not pass by unproblematically with the 200 or so participants who brave Displace during the AAA. The gymnasium is too controlled, too ordered, too sequenced—the flow of the experience overloaded with “too many signals and meanings.” At other times, the overall event is too restrictive, too much of an “experiment” in which, ironically, the social games that we have set up between group and individual, social unity, crisis, passage, and reunification push the sensory experience for some into the background. Woman wearing glasses in front: This was more a dramaturgy than an experiment, in the sense that there is this closeness to a stage set, which often reveals itself, cause you can see some of the rigging and stuff, whereas in the distance you wouldn’t feel that . . . so there’s this notion of these different imperatives, and the procedures, but to me it didn’t feel like an experimental protocol, it felt more like a ‘dare’ . . . in fact I don’t care if I think or not whether there was a precise object, in the sense that I did not set myself up to decipher what somebody was going to do to me . . . I was going through the experience.

Q: You know, one of the directors of the project has been thinking of this as a gymnasium of the senses. And he is, of course, an anthropologist of the senses, and one of the

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things that is important for him is to sensitize the perceiving of things differently, so do you think that something like this could work in training anthropologists in training to perceive with all their senses? W in back: It might be something where you’re asked to write five sentences about something and then going through this and then challenging yourself to go back through that outside experience and do more . . . rewrite it or try again or . . . W2: I don’t actually see how it would be better than actually going into the field, it’s an exercise somehow, I mean .  .  . you know, as a training, the kind of thing that you are talking about (to the woman in the back) seems perhaps more useful . . . I don’t know. W in front, left: It wasn’t entirely abstract either, because obviously some of the settings and images and sounds were familiar, for example, the club scene . . . even sometimes the elements of the décor, like the first table really did look like something you would see at a bar in the 1990s, so it was also .  .  . it was not for me totally abstract .  .  . you know, if it were a gymnasium for the senses with an idea that you would have some kind of pure experience, that is not set with a very particular sociocultural constraint .  .  . it wasn’t that for me, it didn’t really reach that level of abstraction. And aside of even willfully narrativizing it, like with filmic references, etc., but just the textures, the sounds, some of the devices were familiar from other kinds of . . . experiences. The interviews continue for days, their endless contents eluding quick summary. But within the hours of trying to understand what these visitors were attempting to grasp in the sensory onslaught, there is a short, singular comment gleaned from one anthropologist that somehow encapsulates, epitomizes the almost two long years of preparation, testing, experimentation, fruitless paths, reinvigoration, and, finally, pragmatic attention to putting this thing called Displace out in the world: DH: Were there physical sensations at the end of the work as you exited that indeed brought you down? M: Oh yes. [The experience of] death, limbo, and then heaven down the hall. 15 Is Sense in Culture? Postmortem. What works and what doesn’t. After Displace concludes, the entire team gathers in a small Persian restaurant in Montreal to evaluate the efforts. A newspaper review in one of the French papers entitled “Écoute et goûte, c’est la Redoute” describes Displace as a “smart anthropological dig through an immersive exhibition including interviews”; an interesting but “unfinished” experiment in which the uncertainty of what social role the visitors (“guinea pigs”) were supposed to play within the mechanics of our complex dramaturgy somewhat undermines the preference and desire to focus on sensory experience. One tension.

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At the table, Harry Smoak emphatically underscores another issue. Displace was professionally executed and impressive, perhaps slightly overwhelming in terms of its scale and ambitions, but many of our choices were based on what we knew “would work” rather than keeping an experimental process of continuous inquiry, of pushing toward that border between the known and unknown that marks experimental life. The inevitable reaching into the bag of well-worn “tricks” in the formulation of the dramaturgy slightly defangs the curiosity of the experimental system we’ve set up for ourselves. These comments give us pause to think. A further sketch of visitor feedback from Florencia and both Howes and Szanto. Visitors struggled with their roles, not only in sensory orientation but also their schizophrenic position as both creators and observers of their own experience. Displacement. Some of the anthropologists projected their own experience of fieldwork: “Also, because it involved the rituality, for me, sitting on a cushion like that I’ve done it hundreds of times at Thai temples, so to me it was ‘oh, sitting in a temple,’ and then things go on and you’re supposed to sit there, so I was like ‘I can do that.’” More descriptions of visitor frustrations: being held back from a sensorial odyssey through panoptic guidance and surveillance of the attendants and the team behind the scenes—as subjects in an experiment. Some speak of pleasure, confusion, boredom, or even ecstasy. All of these interviews unearth questions, expose failures, gaps in expectations that we foolishly imagined. Are the reactions the result of the visitors’ pure experience of sensorial otherness, not of a cultural kind but of the encounter with a sensorial assemblage that none of us really could grasp? A nonbounded self? A deculturalized notion of sense? A dissolution of a sensing subject encountering a sensing object? An intertwining of human sentience and the flow of the electromagnetic, chemical, and magnetic inputs? A year later, I send a video of the project to Jennifer Biddle, an Australian visual anthropologist specializing in questions of sensorial difference and aboriginal affect who is fascinated with the entire MoS project and wants to collaborate on a continuation of its research. It seems like a joke to send something that is a paltry audiovisual representation of a work that is about bodily immersion and sensation, but the email response I receive back still haunts my thinking about the project. I wanted to write an equally quick response to what watching this [video] is/does as performative itself. While I appreciate that the experience of watching the exhibition here is not the same as for the participants—not the immersive experience—but my being outside gives me a different sense of the thing—a kind of ‘making of’ perspectivalism. There is a ‘third sense’ that I think is really important. What I love is the sense of how these subjects (spectators) to the exhibition appear to be made subject to the onslaught of your environment—caught, captive, contained, their bodies/ senses to the loudness, the sensory impact . . . a rendering of passive inert bodies that must, have to, give over to . . . an empirical literalization, from my perspective, of the violent work really of cultural practices themselves in making subjects compliant, supplicant, self-same; a violence and

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machinic rhythmic regime both as it were, so rarely ‘seen’ or experienced as the totalizing determinative no choice hit that it, culture, really is. Extraordinary really, just this.74

Biddle’s comment about the entrapment of the Displace spectators within the grip of culture profoundly strikes a nerve. Displace was, after all, designed as a vehicle for “materializing questions”; research aimed at exploring cultural understandings of sense making and sense experience. But now I find something else operating. Culture itself seems to be a moving target. The visitors to Displace have encountered a bricolage of cultural practices, symbols, and sensations; a deculturalized space that only refers to itself; a bloc of sensations and affects partially human and partially not. What have we as artists done then? The skill, the techne, lies in setting up the conditions for the assemblage to come together—a bundle of sensations that catalyzes what we thought we could call “sense experience.” The rituals of Japanese tea sensations; the synesthesia of drug-induced practice; the hexagonal shape of the brain and the cosmos. The world that is Displace makes only reference to itself. This is the “artifice” part of art. It is a closed system, sealed, and yet it is not an impostor, a stand in for life. It is, like the SymbioticA tissue cultured organoid: a semblance. It still does something to us in the flow of experience. Is the notion of culture itself the real alien here? I circle back, again caught between Brecht and Artaud. The gymnasium of the senses aims to increase sensory acuity; to demonstrate difference; to heighten subjective experience of individual modalities of sense; to reify and instantiate a sensing subject. It creates a training ground for perception, much like Brecht’s theater creates a training ground for sharpening the ability to make decisions, criticize, look behind what one encounters. Artaud goes the other direction. As he says, “the spectacle we are watching must be unique, it must give the impression that it is as unprecedented, as incapable of repeating itself as any action in life, any event brought on by circumstances.”75 This is Displace for me as a threshold, as a process of destabilizing sense and habit, of problematizing the localization of sense and perception and, with it, the very notion that culture contains fixed senses and a fixed sensing subject. Our failure at modeling specific cultural understandings of sense is the proof of the pudding. David Howes’s sensory culture and David Szanto’s deculturalized sensation rub up against each other, producing fruitful friction. 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.

Conclusion Is the World a Laboratory?

At the end of the journey we expect a resolution, a conclusion, a “what have we learned” from these works in the making. Such questions are rooted in epistemological frameworks, but the encounters I’ve described circumvent easy knowing. There is no tidy bow that wraps them up, neatly resolving the thorny question we began with: How in the act of making something are humans and materials coproduced, and what does this do to the world in the process? The ending is beyond knowing. The works, the experiences met along the way seem to make the question even thornier. Instead, the three stories continue. After a complicated and stressful technical development period and setup, O+A open Hearing View, Rheinau in October 2013 and are overwhelmed by the response. The clinic offers them the possibility of another installation in a not yet built area of the grounds to continue further with their research. What did O+A do so that a patient sitting on that blue cube who has not talked for months suddenly bursts forth with a flurry of words due to his encounter with their alphabet of healing sounds? But O+A are onto the next project. As makers whose drive is to use the world as a test ground for experiences, we don’t look back. “I keep moving forward. The coolest thing about theater is that when it’s over, it’s over” (Peter Sellars).1 After almost three years, TEMA, “this tormented project” as Ionat labels it, is still in development. After more failed prototypes in Perth, Ionat and Oron travel to Helsinki for six months to set up a new biolab at Aalto University. There they find a mechanical engineer who is intrigued with the complex issues of muscle actuation and measurement that TEMA asks for. One year later, a working device is completed. A new Masters student (this one in design) joins the project to begin work with the new device. Another prototype, yet this time it seems to work. Ionat and I go back to art in our discussions. One year from now, TEMA will meet its public interlopers. To avoid the clinical, technical look of bioart, the installation environment will most likely go intensely “Japanese”—an ascetic, aesthetic route featuring shoji-like screens that divide up the environment. Four separate spaces, but in the middle will be the elusive machine-organism—the bioreactor that will produce affects in the other spaces: vibrations, touch, smell, and shadows on the participants.

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The audience will continually sense our muscle machine, that “seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken for granted realities,” but won’t have access to it.2 This event still lies in the future. More waiting . . . Displace morphs. It moves from the anthropological site in the black box to new environments. But the question of limits, thresholds, sensory registers that shift and meld so that bodies and selves fluctuate like flickering light and dissolve into the environment they are immersed in continues. Meanwhile, a new project emerges from Displace’s still touring remains, which is codenamed Ilinx, the term sociologist and Man, Play, and Games author Roger Caillois appropriates from the Greek word for whirlpool to describe games “which are based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind.”3 Ilinx, which will involve audience members wearing specially designed clothing embedded with many small actuators that produce patterns and trajectories on and across the body, relentlessly continues the pursuit of the other question we began with: 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? This question brings up a quandary that has haunted the pages of this book since the start. I began by staking out a position that 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.”5 Artists or other makers are not the only ones who have experimented on the world. There is a long and tangled history of social scientists and humanists treating the world too as a laboratory: marketing surveys; the rise of behaviorism; focus groups; anthropological entanglements with postwar sites of weapons testing; drug experiments for subjects to obtain new experiences of consciousness and self.6 As historian of science Rebecca Lemov writes in World as Laboratory, “the drive to experiment—adapted from the laboratory, loosed in the public sphere, handed out free in the streets” was forever in transformation. “With [Stanley] Milgram and [Timothy] Leary, human experiments were in a real sense operationalized. Every department store, every classroom, every enclosed social situation, every personal encounter has become a potential laboratory. Or, an actual one, as witnessed by the presence of social science techniques in your neighborhood Gap and Starbucks.”7 In Lemov’s own comparison between two sets of experiments, Stanley Milgram’s notorious 1961 Yale study exploring the relationship between authority and obedience, and Timothy Leary’s psilocybin tests with prisoners at Harvard aimed at “experimenting with rather than experimenting on” humans by “dismantling the wall between

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scientist and subject,” she unearths a rather unsettling but ultimately profound conclusion: the laboratory “replicates its own conditions in the form of results.” Scientists work within an experimental world of their own design, but, at the same time, “they alter the world in the process.” Outside and inside blur. The researcher may stand back but also know they are part of the reality “that they are altering.”8 Lemov opens a crack that returns us to alienness—something that has remained as elusive as the material agencies that we as artists have tried to work with throughout the accounts that have been told in these pages. The alien here is not simply the expected modernist notion of estrangement, ostraenie as Viktor Shklovsky termed it, or the Freudian “uncanny.”9 The alien is the assemblage of contingent conditions, interactions, and affects that change us but, at the same time, escape us. It exemplifies our inability to, in fact, ultimately control the results of the experiment and, more importantly, to account for the effects and affects that the experiment generates. “We pass from the region of the real where we hold ourselves at a distance from things the better to order and use them into that other region where the distance holds us—the distance which then is a lifeless deep, an unimaginable, unappreciable remoteness which has become something like the sovereign power behind all things.”10 The model doesn’t always work; the experience that opens up goes beyond what has been imagined; the hoped for results metamorphose into something else that cracks our expectations, defies our hand and expertise. The alien lands us at the precipice where, in fact, epistemology, knowing, fails. This is why the French term expérience with its dual meanings is so useful: that of experiment or speculation and that of experience, of something that happens to us. Alien agency is thus another in a series of entanglements. We cannot know the results of the experience without doing it, living in it. Histories of scientific practice tell us this as well, but science seeks to stabilize its agencies—make them predictable, reproducible, repeatable. Somewhere, someone else can do the same experiment with the same conditions to (hopefully) achieve the same results. It’s done enough times. A fact emerges. Indisputable. A new reality. Artistic expérience, the affective and improvisatory assemblage of conditions that operates on and transforms us, does something else. It destabilizes both the phenomena and its perception/affection—keeping things moving, unsettled. What better way to achieve this than to work with stuff that has a life, an operability of its own— unwieldy and yet productive. The alien doesn’t rid us of the human and imagine a world of objects without us. Quite the contrary: It makes us realize that to be human today is to be mutable, transforming, alive with the possibilities of technoscientific delineation and determination but warns us that we will be thwarted in our attempts to harness and control it. There is finally another alien—that of the method for depicting these things. What the alienness of the struggle to make something with and in a more than human world

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does is also ask us to rethink the project of ethnography with this more than human world itself. The usual ethnographic account that documents a situation does not, indeed, cannot give us the total picture. 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.12 It seems to be there within my grasp. Just some more tuning—a little bit more solder in the joints—adjust the code, shift the volume, tweak the parameters, change the light. And then, suddenly, it materializes. I observe it and feel its sensations; standing at a distance I finally know it. Success? The sweat drips from my chin. Heart races. I feel its presence—assured—it works—but then breakdown. It starts to slip from my grasp. I try and hold on to it, but it defies me. Fading until I no longer sense its presence. And then, in an instant, it’s gone. A dim memory. Nothing left but the tingling on my skin, and then even that dissolves. Exhausted. No success this time. Turn out the lights. Close the door. Experiment over.

Afterword

Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is. —Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde

Things are happening in the world, of which this book is both a symptom and a landmark, but what? Salter’s way with words can help us. Alien agency—agency that is not necessarily human, a performative sense of agency as manifest everywhere—is at the center of an interdisciplinary implosion. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences (some scholars, an important but still marginal minority, by no means all) are converging on a new vision of the world, a new paradigm, a new ontology, in which a recognition of the agency of the alien levels the playing field and humanity no longer occupies center stage. This is an immensely productive way out of the Cartesian dualism that still haunts the disciplines. What Salter adds to this conjunction is art, artworks that function as ontological theater, which show us, nonverbally, the active and lively world into which we are plunged whether we like it or not. And, almost paradoxically, this is art that drags science and technology along with it: low-tech resonating tubes, high-tech electronics, cell biology. Alien Agency throws us into this antidisciplinary firestorm, the bonfire of the vanities. It is a very rich book, and many scholars, artists, and artist/scholars will find their own tracks through it and into the future. Science and technology studies, performance studies, sound studies, religious studies, philosophers, art historians, and anthropologists will all find themselves mangled here and come away with new grist for their mills. My only option is to point to some of the openings that suggest themselves to me. Someone has to state the obvious: The projects and artworks that feature here are profoundly weird. Are they really art? They have no place in the Western artistic canon. And this observation is more interesting if we stand it on its head. The Western tradition is profoundly human-centric and anti-alien-agency. Paintings just hang there, doing nothing, waiting for human viewers to supply them with meaning. Upstream, artistic genius has spilled its meaning into them. The great composers and sculptors

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likewise. Western art is ontological theater for a principled Cartesian split between active, controlling human agents and a passive, machine-like, and dominated world. And the works that Salter discusses erode this dichotomy from both sides. On the one hand, the works themselves are lively; on the other, the artists are no longer in control, more like explorers of what the world has to offer, creating openings for undesigned effects and affects to appear. And on yet another hand (if I might be allowed such a thing, which might be appropriate; think of Stelarc) the audience is changed too, into something more like a participant, no longer a distanced evaluator, no longer in control and self-possessed. Think of O+A’s soundworks as evoking new sensitivities to ambient sounds and as psychiatric therapy, or think of Salter’s own wilder constructions and assemblages (multimedia happenings, as we used to call them). These are technologies of the self that show us, in Artaudian fashion, that our senses are not just information channels and that we are not the stable, detached (and boring) selves we so readily imagine. Anthropologists, sociologists, art historians, philosophers, and psychiatrists should take these works seriously. They problematize the taken-for-granted modern self that haunts the disciplines. And here things can get as weird as you like. We should take seriously Salter and David Howes’s attempt to fabricate the experience of taking ayahuasca and Salter’s sundry references to magic and alchemy. The selves elicited by these works are nonmodern ones in which boundaries between self and other are no longer so apparent; recognition of alien agency means just that—an openness and curiosity about what the world can do, unconstrained by scientific representations of what exists and what does not. This openness points east: Buddhism and the modern self as an unfortunate illusion; zen, the tao, and humanity as caught up in the endless flux of becoming. Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is. A sense of danger and of shame. Drugs, visions, altered states, madness, the loss of control, surrender—everything we’ve been taught to feel bad about. Modernity has its defenses in place, and the police are inside us. To map this nonmodern, multifaceted paradigm, it might pay to recognize that the works discussed here are not one-offs. They do not exist in a historical vacuum. Many histories intersect in them. John Cage is a major historical presence in performative experimentation in art, once again looking east for philosophical inspiration. The stroboscopic flicker effects that are central to Salter’s own work are everywhere on the alternative artscene and belong to a genre that can trace its ancestry back at least as far as Grey Walter’s experiments on epilepsy in the 1940s:1 science again. John Geiger has tracked flicker’s progress through the Beats and the counterculture of the 1960s, and the resonances between the counterculture and today’s art are well worth pondering.2 Walter’s other claim to fame resides in the little robot “tortoises” he built in the late 1940s, an engineering tour de force that lies at the origins of another artistic genre, now in interactive robotics. Gordon Pask, another cybernetician, is almost the patron saint

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for this sort of work, which, in fact, thematizes angles on alien agency not covered in this book. Pask’s 1968 “Colloquy of Mobiles” was an array of electromechanical entities interacting with one another via light rays and sounds—staging, as I would say, openended and performative dances of agency with one another. For me, this makes a key link back to science studies; I argued years ago that one should understand scientific research as a dance of agency within the lab.3 Many evocatively stumbling dances feature in Salter and Ionat Zurr’s struggles with muscle tissue in their TEMA project. Continuing the Paskian trajectory, Simon Penny’s Petit Mal improvises dances with human viewers/participants (see http://simonpenny.net), Ruairi Glynn’s Performative Ecologies stages evolving dances again between robots (see www.ruairiglynn.co.uk), and Garnet Hertz’s cockroach-controlled robot puts a novel twist on alien agency by substituting an insect for the usual electronic brain (see www.conceptlab.com/roachbot). Branching off in another direction, Pask’s contribution to the design of the legendary Fun Palace back in the 1960s helped lay the groundwork for contemporary dynamic and interactive architecture.4 In yet another direction lies the east once more: bonsai, for example, as a macroancestor of SymbioticA’s bioart. We could, in fact, speak of a whole wide-ranging canon that I am tempted to call agency-realism, art that centers on alien agency and confronts us with it, reminding us in all sorts of ways of our noncentral place in a lively and emergent world.5 The point of recognizing this canon would be to give it force—to multiply conversations and interactions within it and to multiply its visibility and impact on the world at large—denaturalizing the western canon and its taken-for-granted human supremacy and offering a constructive alternative in its stead. Salter gives us an intimate sampling of this canon. The great strength of his work and writing is that he gets it—the ontology of alien agency as the unifying theme—and shows others how to get it by drawing upon and weaving together so many interdisciplinary threads. An exemplary achievement. “Foams of Life”—one of the book’s subheads that stuck in my mind (for better or for worse). Forms of life. So far, we have a constellation made of artworks and certain strands of philosophy, social theory, anthropology, biology, electronics, psychiatry, and spirituality as well as echoes of countercultures gone by. The nonmodern paradigm that starts to surface in this book is very broad. It begins to look like something one could live—a stance, a specific way of being and acting in the world, one that recognizes the flow of becoming rather than dreaming of mastery. And then, the really important point might be that this paradigm is indefinitely broader still. Salter’s synthesis largely couples the doing of art and the performance of artworks with analytic resources and representations from the academic disciplines. The next step might be to build ontologically inspired bridges to other sorts of practical projects beyond art making. The history of cybernetics shows us how this can go in fields as diverse as brain science, biological computing, design, education, management, and politics. And, for example, the environment is an important topic to weave into the fabric. We can understand much

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agency-realist art as the creation of minienvironments or microworlds inhabited by agencies with which we can interact but that we do not control. These works are laboratories or test beds in which we can learn to experience the real macroenvironment as the same sort of place, which it evidently is. And along with that realization would go a denaturalization of our usual dominating (and increasingly disastrous) ways of acting on the environment and the reinforcement of ways of working with and adapting to whatever emerges at this interface between ourselves and the natural world.6 Alien Agency brings the nonmodern perspective brilliantly into focus and crystallizes it in the art world. It does not make connections between art and, say, nonmodern stances in engineering or management. Such resonances still go unrecognized. But making these sorts of leap would be, I think, the key move in both bringing the whole paradigm to life and exposing its political, in a very general sense, significance.7 Something is happening here. Thanks to Chris Salter and his alien agency, it becomes clearer what it is. Andrew Pickering Thorverton April 24, 2014

Notes

Introduction 1. A peristaltic pump is one in which fluid is forced along by waves of contraction produced mechanically on flexible tubing. 2. Studio-laboratory is a neologism coined by new media scholar and researcher Michael Century to describe the hybrid environments of contemporary technoscientific artistic production. Originally used to denote such settings as György Kepes’s CAVS program at MIT or the EVL (Electronic Visualization Laboratory) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the concept of a studio-lab captures the hybrid nature of new artistic processes involving technical-scientific apparatuses and approaches within different institutional configurations. See Century 1999. 3. See Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 407–409. 4. The concept of affect—the manner in which “prepersonal” forces (whether physical-material, like the weather, or psycho-emotional, like language or passions) modify, operate on, and transform bodies is carried down over a long lineage of thinkers, from Aristotle and Spinoza to Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari, and Massumi, among others. If Henri Bergson describes affect as the manner in which external matter, “images” or perceptions in the world, “influence the image that I call my body in that they ‘transmit movement to it,’” Deleuze and Guattari later pick up this trajectory, modifying it in the sense that affects are not necessarily situated in a subject (like emotions or feelings are) but rather are pre-individual, non-subject-centered forces—“blocs of percepts” or sensations. See Clough 2007 and Gregg and Seigworth 2010. 5. For a small sampling across multiple disciplines, see, for example, Barad 2007; Bennett 2010; Barrett and Bolt 2009; Bogost 2012; Brown 2004; Bryant 2011; Callon 1986, 2009; Casper 1994; Coole and Frost 2010; Harman 2005; Hicks and Beaudry 2010; Ingold 2011; Jones and Boivin 2010; Kirksey and Helmreich 2012; Latour 1993, 2007; Malafouris and Knappett 2008; Morton 2013; Pickering 1992, 1995, 2010, 2011; Salter 2012; and Zurr forthcoming. 6. In particular, see Latour 1993, 1999, 2007; Barad 2007; Bennett 2010; and Pickering 1995, 2011. 7. “Who Are We?” 2008.

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8. A selection of such works include projects from Catts and Zurr (http://tcaproject.org), Domnitch and Gelfand (www.portablepalace.com), HeHe (http://hehe.org.free.fr), Phil Ross (http:// philross.org), Zbigniew Oksiuta (www.oksiuta.de), Wim Delvoye (http://wimdelvoye.be), Mikko Hynninen (www.mikkohynninen.net/mikkohynninen.net/theatre_.html), TeZ (http://tez.it/ works.html), and Kurt Hentschlager (http://kurthentschlager.com). The postanthropocentric rhetoric has also been taken up by curators. For example, the large-scale 2011 exhibition called Translife that took place at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing and of which I also took part in is described by curator Zhang Ga as “an exhibition that strives to reassess the historical roots and epistemological foundation of the current ecological and environmental predicament, interrogating the notion of subjectivity inherent in the project of modernity and the anthropocentrism derived from that tradition.” Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, artistic director and chief curator of the most prestigious international visual arts exhibition, Documenta, in its thirteenth edition in 2013, waxed in her curatorial statement: “Documenta 13 is dedicated to artistic research and forms of imagination that explore commitment, matter, things, embodiment, and active living in connection with, yet not subordinated to, theory .  .  . driven by a holistic and nonlogocentric vision that is skeptical of the persisting belief in economic growth. This vision is shared with, and recognizes, the shapes and practices of knowing of all the animate and inanimate makers of the world, including people.” See Zhang Ga 2011 and Christov-Bakargiev 2012. 9. In contrast to concepts such as “practice-based research” and “art research,” the Canadian context has set an international example with its notion of “research-creation.” Here, the term signifies that artistic processes under the heading of “research” must ask clear questions, offer theoretical contextualization within the relevant field or fields of literary/artistic inquiry, and present a well-considered methodological approach as well as meet peer standards of excellence for publication, public performance, or exhibition. See Bruneau and Burns 2007, Chapman and Sawchuk 2012, Fourmentraux 2011, Gosselin and Le Coguiec 2006, and Poissant 2014. 10. Guattari 1999, 20. 11. For an ethnomethodological approach to this question of shoptalk and technical work, see Lynch 1985. 12. Hottois 1984, 60–61. 13. Stiegler 1994, 95. The split between the human and the technical that Stiegler describes and that is propagated through Western thought has been rigorously debated within the so-called French cultural technology school of anthropology and ethnology, beginning with the French paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan. In Language and Gesture, Leroi-Gourhan, who developed significant concepts around the manner in which technology coevolved in relationship to human evolution, argues that technicity—the ability for humans to orchestrate or wield tools— was an early anthropoid concept. It was bipedal posture (“bipedalism”), the human’s ability to stand on two feet, that Leroi-Gourhan argues not only freed the hands from the necessity of locomotion (like other mammals) to instead hold and manipulate tools but also resulted in the expanded development of the skull and, consequently, the cortical area of the brain, which enabled its connection to centers of language. Tools are thus a “‘secretion’ of the anthropoid’s body and brain”; techniques are inseparable from the human (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 89–91). More

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recent work from the French ethnologist Pierre Lemonnier pushes this argument for originary technicity further, proposing that objects are not “merely technical” in that their material use and action “can be a key component in a system of thought and action that is not particularly ‘technical’ in and of itself.” Techniques are constituted by different components: the material being acted upon and transformed by way of the object-tool system, the object itself, and finally the implied actions that the object could be said to perform. What is critical from Lemonnier’s argument is what he calls the “arbitrariness” of techniques—the fact that the technology itself can be shaped by socio-politico-cultural-economic interference that can have little to do with the initial purpose or goal of the tool, apparatus, or process. See Leroi-Gourhan 1993; Lemonnier 1992, 2002, 2012; and Hansen 2000. 14. Bennett 2010, xvi. 15. I thank Thomas LaMarre for this articulation. 16. The current focus on nonhuman entities, objects, and things is rooted in deep arguments across a range of cultural and philosophical traditions. As philosopher David Skrbina’s 2005 Panpsychism in the West demonstrates, philosophical debates about whether things outside of human life, such as plants, animals, or brute matter, have consciousness or sentience inherent in them have squarely occupied centuries of both Western and Eastern thought. Panpsychism, writes Skrbina, is the concept that “all objects or systems of objects, possess a singular inner experience of the world around them” (2005, 16). Such objects could be said to harbor “mind or mind-like qualities,” that is, singular experience inherent to them, without entailing anthropocentric notions such as consciousness, life, thought or cognition, perception, or soul. From the monism of pre-Socratic philosophers such as Thales (all is water), Anaximenes (all is air), Anaximander (all is a boundless, infinite substance called the apeiron), and, most well-known, Heraclitus of Ephesus (all is fire and flux), to Spinoza and Leibniz, the late twentieth century “process philosophies” of pragmatists such as William James and A. N. Whitehead, the “process theologist” Charles Hartshorne, and biologist John Scott Haldane, Skrbina articulates a continuum across Western thought revealing that “the universal quality of physical things” finds its expression both in the realms of human consciousness and in “inanimate mentality” (2005, 17). Moreover, panpsychism itself is not the only philosophical movement whose ontological premise states, as Thales describes, “all things are full of gods.” Skrbina articulates a host of competing yet similar philosophical movements going by names such as animism, hylozoism, panbiotism, panexperimentalism, and others. See Skrbina 2005. 17. This includes four separate traditions: (1) the role of material objects and material culture in anthropology and archeology; (2) the “new materialism” (see n. 18 below) originating out of a range of traditions, including feminist theory, affect theory, and ecological discussions; (3) the current philosophical movements dubbed object-oriented philosophy (OOP), object-oriented ontology (OOO), and the already outmoded term “speculative realism” that seek to footnote a long history in Western philosophy that has battled with the positions of human subjects in relation to inert objects; and last but certainly not least, (4) epistemological battles fought in the trenches of philosophy of science and later STS starting from the mid-1970s. For overviews, see Dudley 2012, 2014 (anthropological); Spyer 1998; Hicks and Beaudry 2010; Coole and Frost 2010

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(new materialism, feminist studies, and affect); Haraway 1991, 1997; Bryant 2011; and Bryant and Smicek 2011 (philosophy; OOO and OOP). 18. In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Coole and Frost argue the following: “Everywhere we look, it seems to us, we are witnessing scattered but insistent demands for more materialist modes of analysis and for new ways of thinking about matter and processes of materialization . . . this means returning to the most fundamental questions about the nature of matter and the place of embodied humans within a material world; it means taking heed of developments in the natural sciences as well as attending to transformations in the ways we currently produce, reproduce and consume our material environment. It entails sensitivity to contemporary shifts in bio and eco spheres as well as to changes in global economic structures and technologies.” See Coole and Frost 2010. 19. See Lenoir in Salter 2012. 20. See Fleck 1981. 21. For a more detailed description of ANT, see Latour 2007 and Callon 2009. For an ironic take, see Ingold 2011. 22. Latour and Woolgar [1979] 1986, 28. 23. Ibid., 243. 24. See Biagioli 1999 and Sismondo 2003 for an overview. 25. For an overview of practice theory in anthropology, see Ortner 2006. 26. As Karin Knorr-Cetina argued, “The study of laboratories has brought to the fore the full spectrum of activities involved in the production of knowledge. It showed that scientific objects are not only ‘technically manipulated’ in laboratories but are also inextricably symbolically or politically construed.” Knorr-Cetina 1992, 113. See Pickering 1992 for further discussion. 27. Galison 1997, 2–3. 28. See Salter 2010a for an overview. 29. Pickering 2010. In discussions with Pickering, it is clear that not only is representation problematic (which is connected to a long, ongoing debate in philosophy of science about the nature of what constitutes the real) but so also is the linguistic baggage that goes with it, primarily derived from the linguistic turn in the humanities that Pickering as both a (former) physicist and a science-studies expert is strongly critical of. See Pickering 1995 and 2010 for further discussion. 30. In an article that stands as one of the few attempts to disentangle different disciplines’ use of the word performance, science-studies scholar Rebecca Herzig writes: “Given the heightened recognition of contingency, temporality, and reflexivity made possible by performative analyses, it is perhaps not surprising that a number of recent studies of science reveal a quiet but steady turn toward this useful analytical tool. Accounts which bear striking differences in disciplinary trajectory, methodology, and object of study converge in their invocation of performance.” See Herzig 2004.

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31. Latour [1979] 1986, 285. This sense of performance pervades one strand of science studies in the work of figures such as Shapin and Lawrence (1998), Mol (1998), and Law and Singleton (2002). Sociologist Michel Callon also echoes this sentiment when he discusses the context of economics. Callon (2007) asks the provocative question, “is it reasonable to consider that a scientific theory can alter the nature of the object that it describes?” (Callon 2007, 5). The discourse of “performativity” implies that any discourse “acts on its object.” Callon points out the distinction that John Austin (1962) makes between the constative use of language (language used to describe something like “the structure of DNA has a double helix”) and its performative use (language that enacts its object of reference such as “I do”). “Austin’s work is interesting precisely because he starts with the distinction between those statements that describe the worlds to which they refer, and those that act on those worlds and help to make them exist” (10). 32. Callon (2007) describes the manner in which a self-fulfilling prophecy enacts a world change. “If everyone is persuaded that Bank X is on the verge of bankruptcy, then to avoid being ruined, all of its clients will rush to withdraw their money before everyone else does and bankruptcy will inevitably ensue. Likewise, if we are convinced that women do not have the capacities required to practice certain occupations, those occupations will effectively be closed to women and the assertion will be verified. The concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy seems to apply to economics.” Yet, the problem is that the self-fulfilling prophecy or the prescription still remains on linguistic territory. The introduction of the agencement brings a material force into play that goes beyond language. See Callon 2007, 15–16. 33. See Deleuze and Guattari 1987. The English translators Paul Foss and Paul Patton in their 1981 article “Rhizome” and later A Thousand Plateau’s translator Brian Massumi use the English word assemblage as a translation for agencement. 34. In her controversial 1993 work Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, Butler explicitly claims that her notion of “performativity” (derived from both Austin’s speech act and Derrida’s notion of iteration and citation) does not describe actions arising from a willing (or willed) free subject but rather a series of temporal acts that are iteratively cited and then repeated—“a citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (1993, 2). In contrast to readings that suggest that Butler’s notion of performance describes a way of freely acting out and changing one’s gender, “performativity” is normative and “regulatory,” installing regimes of power by way of its continual repetition and thus producing specific kinds of subjects. “Performativity is thus not a singular ‘act,’ for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition” (Butler 1993, 12). What is particularly critical in Butler’s analysis in Bodies That Matter is the emphasis she places not only on the temporal dimensions of performative acts through iteration and repetition but also on the way in which the materiality of the body doing the performance is also temporally shaped through such acts. Rather than view the materiality of the gendered, sexed body and, indeed, matter itself as a kind of static tabula rasa or blank canvas upon which social construction “writes,” Butler opens up the possibility that materiality itself is a temporally shaped process. “What I would propose in place of these conceptions of construction is a return to the notion of matter, not as site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface we call

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matter” (Butler 1993, 9). Yet, again, however, the “matter” that is produced is itself shaped by the very regulatory norms that get continually instantiated by the continued performances— “construction not only takes place in time but is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms; sex is produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration” (10). Butler justifies this dynamic concept of matter by invoking Aristotle’s famous comment in De Anima that substantial being is composed of both matter (hyle), which is potentiality (dynamis), and form, which is “being full itself” or what becomes actualized (Butler [Aristotle 2010, 52]). See also Hollywood 2002 for a critique. 35. As Hacking (1998) claims, Pickering, “the most materialistic of people who engage in SSK or STS .  .  . has always insisted that material things are not only the objects of much research, but also have active powers of their own which resist research projects, and to which the projects must accommodate themselves .  .  . Histories of science and technology should be histories of couplings between the human and the artefact. The artefact, in the world, interacting with the people in the world, is not to be thought of as strictly inanimate. When laboratory workers swear at their apparatus for not working, they are not making a category mistake, confusing the animate with the wholly inanimate.” 36. Callon and Latour 1992. “Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Colins and Yearley,” 359. This emphasis on the nonhuman has led to criticism of Latour from within science studies itself that his ploy resorts to a kind of contemporary hylozoism. See Schaffer 1991 and, more recently, Sayes 2013. 37. There is a larger problem with Latour’s symmetrical strategy of putting the human and nonhuman on the same ontological plane—namely, it is less a material focus than a semiotic one. If semiotics, as Pickering explains, as the science of syntactical combinations of signs and their meanings enables in texts the easy switching of entities—“in texts, agents (actors, actants) are continually coming into being, fading away, moving around, changing places with one another, and so on”—then ANT’s ontological strategy of bringing humans and nonhumans together in networks appears to be a syntactical ploy enabled by the games one can play with language and meaning. As Latour writes, “ANT is engaged in a semiotic [my emphasis] definition of entity building . . . [developing] a method to describe the deployment of associations like semiotics is a method to describe the generative path of any narration. It does not say anything about the shape of entities and actions, but only what the recording device should be that would allow entities to be described in all their details.” For more on this debate, see Latour 1999 and Latour in Pickering 1992. For a critical take, see Schmidgen 2012. 38. See Callon 1986. There is a long-standing argument in science studies between the so-called Bath School of Harry Collins and Steve Yearley and the French school represented by Callon and Latour. 39. See Callon and Latour 1992, 347. 40. See Latour 1993. 41. Fischer 2003, 11.

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42. Although Pickering and others discuss a kind of posthumanist STS, Pickering is quick to admit that the nonhuman agency only makes sense in relationship to human agency in the loop. Dialogue between humans and non—I see this more like a mixing paradigm—in which different strengths of enrollment take place at different times. See Pickering 2010 and Barad 2007. 43. See Latour 1993 and Mauss 1972. 44. Rabinow argues: “Fieldwork is a dialectic between reflection and immediacy. Both are cultural constructs. Our scientific categories help us to recognize, describe and develop areas of inquiry. But one cannot engage in questioning and redefining twenty-four hours a day. The scientific perspective on the world is hard to sustain. In the field there is less to fall back on; the world of everyday life changes more rapidly and dramatically than it would at home.” See Rabinow 2007, 38. 45. The literature in the area of ethnography and its history of critique of subject/object relations is voluminous. A good place to start is the famous essay from Clifford (1983) on ethnographic authority. Other sources include Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus 1995, 1998; Marcus and Fischer 1999; Tedlock 1991; and Denzin 1996. 46. One such challenge comes from Pierre Bourdieu, who has extensively discussed the “distorted” relationship between anthropologists (or other academicians) to their objects of study, because the anthropologist/scholar normally has no place in the system observed and no need to make her place there, instead resorting to hermeneutic representations of experience by which social relations and actions are reduced to decoding “communicative relationships and meaning.” See Bourdieu 1977. 47. Clifford 1983, 120. 48. See Tedlock 1991 for an extensive discussion of this; also see Wacquant 2004. 49. Marcus and Fischer 1999, 18. 50. There are literally hundreds of examples of experimental ethnographies and, in particular, what have been labeled “first-person experiential accounts” or “polyvocal,” “dialogic,” and performative forms in anthropology and sociology. A few include Yang 1945; Crapanzano 1980; Shostak 1981; Rabinow 2007; Minh-ha 1989; Wacquant 2004; Taussig 1987, 2004; and Orr 2006. See Tedlock 1991 for further references. 51. Marcus 1998, 90. 52. Ibid., 98. 53. “Autoethnography is an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural. Back and forth autoethnographers gaze, first through an ethnographic wide-angle lens, focusing outwards on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then, they look inwards, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract and resist cultural interpretations. As they zoom backwards and forwards, inward and outward, distinctions between the personal and cultural become blurred, sometimes beyond distinct recognition. Usually written in first-person voice,

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autoethnographic texts appear in a variety of forms—short stories, poetry, fiction, novels, photographic essays, personal essays, journals, fragmented and layered writing, and social science prose. In these texts, concrete action, dialogue, emotion, embodiment, spirituality and self-consciousness are featured, appearing as relational and institutional stories affected by history, social structure and culture, which themselves are dialectically revealed through action, feeling, thought and language.” See Ellis and Bochner 2000, 739. 54. Anthropologist Barbara Tedlock usefully distinguishes between two different forms of what she calls the “observation of participation” that have drawn increasing interest in anthropology: the ethnographic memoir and narrative ethnography. Whereas the ethnographic memoir (which has usually been written under pseudonyms so as not to damage the anthropologist’s academic reputation) usually refers to an almost novelistic account of the ethnographer’s personal experience in the field, narrative ethnography frames the ethnographer’s own experience with “ethnographic data, epistemological reflections on fieldwork participation, and cultural analysis” Tedlock 1991, 77. For more on autoethnography, see Reed-Danahay 1997; Ellis 1991, 2004; Ellis and Bochner 1999, 2000; Hayano 1979; Deck 1990; and Callaway and Okely 1992. 55. In STS parlance, the “social researcher partaking in the unfolding of the research object” is known as an “intervener” and their act an “intervention.” See Millerand 2012. 56. The “stranger” position refers to a comment by ethnomethodologist Michael Lynch in a 1982 article in which he claims that Latour and Woolgar employ phenomenologist Alfred Schutz’s perspective of the “stranger” in which “the problems of making sense of an alien culture provide insights into those aspects of culture taken for granted by its members.” Lynch, however, criticizes Latour and Woolgar’s position, because the ethnographic assessment of what is going on in the laboratory may not be accessible or rely on “approved social science methods.” Hence, the “stranger” position results in a “disengaged” analysis that splits “the transitivity of technical practices to their real-worldly objects of study.” See Latour and Woolgar 1986, 278; also see Lynch 1982. 57. I thank Orit Halpern for this formulation. 58. For other perspectives on the question of artistic, practice-based or practice-led research see Barrett and Bolt 2009; Barry and Born 2010, 2013; Bauer and Dumbois 2012; Biggs and Karlsson 2010 Borgdorff 2012; Butler-Kisber 2010; Cole and Knowles 2008; Dean and Smith 2009; Denzin 2000; Elkins 2009; Farber and Makela 2010; Fels and Irwin 2008; Fourmentraux 2007, 2010, 2011; Haseman 2007; Holdridge and Macleod 2006; Liamputtong and Rumbold 2008; Leavy 2009; and Sullivan 2005. 59. See Rheinberger 1997, 32. 60. Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 167. 61. See Rheinberger 1997. 62. See Myers and Dumit 2011, 241–243. 63. The installation Displace has several lives, including a 2012 showing in The Hague at the annual TodaysArt festival for new visual and performing arts, but the empirical work here traces only the initial prototype during the AAA meeting.

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64. This description of the sensory gymnasium was formulated independently by both Howes (2011) and by Fischer (2004), who refers to Walter Benjamin’s argument in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that the cinema represents a gymnasium for the senses. See Benjamin 1968.

I Resonances 1. Near and wide or far field are terms from acoustics describing the distance between a sound source and a listener. The near field is the area closest to the sound source, where the soundpressure level may vary significantly with small changes in position of the listener. The listener in the near field hears a larger portion of the direct sound without environmental acoustics distorting the sound. The far field is the larger ambient space through which sound waves propagate and interact with the larger surroundings. 2. Chion 2002, 5. 3. Cage 1961, 14. 4. Ibid. For another take, see Born 1995, 19. 5. As Jonathan Sterne states, “Sound studies is a name for the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival.” See Sterne 2012 for a complete overview. 6. Pinch and Bijsterveld 2004, 636. 7. See Erlmann 2010, 17. 8. See Kahn 2013. 9. Cage 1961, 10. 10. Hacking 1998, 213. 11. Program copy for the Duchess of Malfi. Webster 1993, 24. 12. See Salter 2010b for further elaboration on the concept of acoustic scenography. 13. Grundmann 2013. 14. In an important paper written in 1960 entitled “The Problem of Social Cost,” the Nobel Prize winning economist Ronald Coase discussed the economic problem of externalities—the cost (or benefit) of an unintended action that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit. If the “transaction cost” (the cost of participating in an economic exchange) is sufficiently low or zero, the parties can engage in negotiations without the interference of external parties. The externalities are thus factored into the cost of doing business, given a price (for example, the cost of replacing damaged property), and dealt with. If the transaction costs are sufficiently high, however, it may be too expensive to negotiate, and hence other parties (lawyers, the state) might have to enter into the situation to remedy it, leading to potential economic inefficiency. Although externalities are usually defined in legal terms in relationship to tort (i.e.,

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injury) law, there is little attention to sonic externalities—one issue that Odland and Auinger are focused on. See Coase 1960. 15. Murray Schafer 2011, 96. 16. Helmholtz 1954, 8. 17. According to Barry Truax’s Handbook of Acoustic Ecology, acoustic ecology denotes “the study of the effects of the acoustic environment, or soundscape on the physical responses or behavioural characteristics of those living within it. Its particular aim is to draw attention to imbalances which may have unhealthy or inimical effects.” See Truax 2001. 18. Auinger and Odland 2009, 63. 19. Founded in 1979 by Hannes Leopoldseder from the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF), electronic musician Hubert Bogenmayr, and physicist Herbert Franke and originally part of the International Bruckner Festival, Ars Electronica is an annual festival examining the intersection of art, technology, and society. It is one of the most important festivals of technologically based art worldwide. See http://archive.aec.at/print/#7. 20. See www.wwf.hu/media/file/1180874146_Danube_socio-economic.pdf. 21. In basic music theory, a harmonic series consists of integer relationships to a fundamental frequency. See Pierce 1992 and Loy 2006–2007 for basic information. For O+A’s use of these principles, see www.o-a.info/tuning/tuningtube.html. 22. “A method of real-time ambient sound transformation is disclosed for an environment where an architectural barrier is positioned between a sound source and a protected area to be screened from the sound source. According to the method, a harmonic tuning device is placed on the sound source side of a barrier wall so as to create an overtone series of sound resonances and to generate an output signal in response to the source. The output signal is electronically processes [sic] such as by filtering and amplifying and thereafter the filtered and amplified output signal is played on the opposite side of the barrier to the protected area. Thereby the sounds in the protected area included untreated sounds from the sound source and harmonically tuned sounds from the harmonic tuning device.” Auinger and Odland 1999. 23. “The speaker element is a normal 10–12 inch speaker, weatherproofed, pointing downwards beneath the heavy cube to activate a zone of pressure which then radiates in all directions from the tuned gap between the cube and the plane of cement on which it stands. It is the same principle as the omnidirectional PZM or pressure zone microphone, which receives pressure waves from all directions, including directly above. It is just much larger in scale and instead of a small microphone diaphragm generating small electrical signals as it passes a magnetic coil, it is the opposite. When you sit directly on top of the cube you are within its hemispheric dome of sound. The main deal is that the phase response is the same from all sides, so it couples with architecture with much greater coherency and phase simplicity, unlike the spotlight effect of most loudspeakers.” Bruce Odland, email message to author, November 13, 2012.

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24. “Sympathetic resonance is found in those bodies which when once set in motion by any impulse, continue to perform a long series of vibrations before they come to rest.” Helmholtz 1954, 36. 25. See Erlmann 2010. 26. See Sterne 2002, 43–44, for a description. 27. Helmholtz 1954, 42. 28. Ibid., 40–45. 29. See Sterne 2002, 65, for a discussion of the mechanical extension of hearing. 30. Helmholtz specifically discusses resonators of various materials designed by the instrument maker R. Koenig in Paris. He also describes an even more curious resonator in which vibrations in the air could be mapped to gas flames to make them visible—the so-called manometric flame. This technique has also been exploited by sound artists, notably the American Paul DeMarinis. See DeMarinis 2011. 31. Auinger and Odland 2009, 63. 32. See Kahn 2009. 33. This and subsequent quotes about the Sonic Vista project are taken from personal conversations with the artists as well as a transcription of an artist presentation done in Berlin at the General Public gallery in February 2012. 34. Because the ear is not equally sensitive to all frequencies, particularly in the low- and highfrequency ranges, equal loudness contours or Fletcher-Munson curves represent a set of curves that relate the frequency of a sound with its intensity, demonstrating the different levels of sensitivity in relationship to frequency and amplitude across the entire hearing spectrum. Bastyr’s engineering using diffraction modeling attempts to create the same intensity of sound pressure (the perceived loudness) over different spatial locations on the bridge. 35. In music theory, cantus firmus (literally “fixed song”) is a “given melody” in a polyphonic composition in which one or more additional contrapuntal melodic lines are added. See Fux 1971, 27–30. 36. The reason for this delay is the fact that there is a given delay for a sound traveling in the air from the point of origin to the destination (in this case, the ear). 37. “With respect to agency there is nothing to be found outside of the tension of mediated activity and this is precisely the area to which we should look for its manifestations—human or material. Agency is a property or a possession neither of humans nor of nonhumans. Agency is the relation and emergent product of material engagement. It is not something given but something to become realized . . .” See Malafouris 2008, 34 and Malafouris 2013. 38. See Barad 2007, 170–172, for a similar take through her concept of intraaction.

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39. Malafouris 2008, 35. 40. Sterne (2002) critiques what he calls “the audio-visual litany,” in which vision is contrasted with audition. Although the litany “is rhetorically powerful, but not very accurate,” there is one very strong physiological difference between the two sense modalities: namely, that vision is indeed slower than the speed of hearing. See Sterne 2011 for further discussion of the aural/visual binary and Horowitz 2012, 97–100, for a discussion of the speed differences in hearing versus seeing. 41. Horowitz 2012, 4–5. 42. In a 1988 public sculpture symposium at the Walker, commissioned artist Siah Armajani ironically claimed “there is a limitation to art as there is a limitation to science, as there is a limitation to philosophy and sociology. That art by itself cannot bring about social changes but that art in contact with other forces can make a difference. That we are out there as public artists because socially and culturally we are needed, that there is a structure for need now . . . ” According to Odland, this public art commission seemingly amplifies the cognitive dissonance of the visual world with the aural. See www.walkerart.org/art-on-call/stops/1053. 43. At the time considered the site of the world’s first urban green belt, the Frankfurt City government thus issued a Green Belt Constitution in which Behrens argued: “This Green Belt should be developed and protected for future generations. As a green open space, it should remain protected. In case parcels of forest should be removed from it, a comparable substitution of land from another location should be made . . . The green free space is important as a relaxation area for humans, a living space for animals and plants, a space for the protection of the natural order, a healthy city climate and for sustainable urban development. It is part of a network of network of green links and connections that cut through the city and lead out into the regions beyond. The Green Belt should be further developed so that its green connections will be optimized, its ecological qualities improved and its social functions supported. Over the long run, all of the areas of the Green Belt should be freely accessible for all people at all times.” See L’Association Européenne de Parcs Périurbains. www.fedenatur.org/docs/docs/571.pdf. 44. McLuhan 1964, 33. 45. Although the notion of “loud” in psychoacoustic terms is a strictly subjective judgment that measures the relationship between sound pressure (intensity) and duration of a sound and is often confused with amplitude (the sound pressure or physical strength of a sound), the perception of loudness in relationship to architectural structures is also related to the absorption (how much energy is absorbed by the material) capacities of material found in such environments. Materials such as metal, glass, steel, tile, and so on have low absorption coefficients, meaning that they reflect more sound than they absorb. The overall effect on the perception of loudness is thus based on the amount of direct sound (nonreflected) with reflected sound. Although reflected sound is always perceived as “less loud” due to the increasing loss of energy at each reflection, the buildup of reflected sound in an environment with low absorption coefficients results in the sense that the environment grows louder over time. See Everest and Pohlmann 1981.

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46. See Murray Schafer 2011, Ingold 2007, and Helmreich 2010. 47. See Augoyard and Torgue 2006, 9. 48. GRM Tools is a series of audio software plug-ins originally developed by Hughes Vinet at the Group de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris. The tools enable real-time processing of audio and include a series of filters (including resonance), delays, Doppler effects, EQ, and other audiosignal processers. 49. See Deleuze 1986, 61–66. 50. See http://vasulka.org and http://courchel.net. 51. See http://milwaukeemakerspace.org/2011/10/sonic-vista. 52. Personal interview with Werner Lorke on the occasion of the opening of Sonic Vista, October 11, 2011. 53. Heraclitus 1979. 54. See Rheinberger 2010, 23–25. 55. Ibid., 23. 56. See Thompson 2004, 190. 57. Hacking 1983, 146. 58. See Winner 1980. 59. See Galison 1997, 19–31. 60. Although the term nonplaces was coined by anthropologist Marc Augé, Werner uses this without the reference to Augé’s work. See Augé 1995. 61. Binaural recording is made by using two microphones placed in the ear canals of an anatomically accurate “dummy head,” such that all the normal spatial attributes of the human head are present as they would be in real listening situations when the recording is made. 62. DAT is an acronym for Digital Audio Tape, an early digital recording medium developed by Sony in 1987. 63. See Baalman 2010 for further description of spatial audio systems. 64. A filter is a frequency-dependent amplifier that increases the amplitude of some of a signal’s frequency components while attenuating others. A comb filter accentuates and attenuates an input signal at regularly spaced frequency intervals. In other words, at integer multiples of a fundamental frequency. See Roads 1996, 397–419, for technical detail. 65. Clipping is a “term used to describe the result of an amplifier running into power supply limitation. The maximum output voltage that any amplifier can produce is limited by its power supply. Attempting to output a voltage (or current) level that exceeds the power supply results in a flat-toping effect on the signal, making it look cut off or ‘clipped.’ A clipped waveform exhibits

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extreme harmonic distortion, dominated by large amplitude odd-ordered harmonics making it sound harsh or dissonant.” See www.rane.com/par-c.html. 66. “By vitality affect, I mean the subjectively experienced shifts in internal feeling states that accompany the temporal contour of the stimulus.” See Stern 2004, 64. 67. See www.transmediale.de/past/2012/conference. 68. Created by noted UK producer Hugh Padgham during recording sessions for musician Peter Gabriel’s third solo album in 1980, Padgham’s “gated drum” effect was originally created by adding heavily compressed room ambience to an original drum sound and then feeding that reverb signal through a noise gate. The noise gate is programmed to cut off any signal fed through it, either after a specified time interval (in this case, some tens of milliseconds) or when the incoming signal falls below a preset gain threshold. The result is a gated reverb effect, in which the reverberation cuts off abruptly rather than fading away. 69. See Libera and Klein 2012 and Zumthor 2006. 70. See Blesser and Salter 2006. 71. See Rasmussen 1964 and Bagenal 1931. 72. See Diller and Scofidio 2002. The translation of New Atlantis is to be found in Libera and Klein 2012, 52–53. 73. Libera and Klein 2012. 74. Augoyard and Torgue 2006, 4. 75. See rie.

www.pukzh.ch/diagnose-behandlung/stationaeres-spezialangebot/forensische-psychiat-

76. See http://psychiatry.ubc.ca/programs/forensic-psychiatry. 77. Auinger and Odland 1995. 78. See Trower 2012 for a longer discussion of vibration in the environment in which she relates vibration to Samuel Coleridge’s famous poem dedicated to the Aeolian Harp. Also see Morton 2008 for a further commentary on how the environment plays the instrument. 79. See www.benthos.com/index.php/product_dashboard/hydrophones. 80. A siren produces a parabolic-shaped curve as its amplitude rises and falls. See von Helmholtz 1954, 12–13. 81. Schizophonia is a term coined by R. Murray Schafer to describe the split between the sound source and the sound that is recurrent in contemporary industrial noisescapes. See Lopez 1998 for a response. 82. See www.jungfrau.ch/en/tourism/experiences/children-families/#alpine-sensation_247. 83. Pynchon 1973, 2.

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84. Tellenbach 1981, 227. 85. Mazzarella 2009, 291–309. 86. Guattari 1996, 66–81. 87. Stewart 2007, 2. 88. See Murray Schafer 1977. 89. Lopez 1998. 90. Pickering 1995, 14.

II Cellular Vitality 1. See Catts and Zurr 2002. 2. This and all subsequent quotations come from Catts and Zurr during the period of March to May 2012. 3. Of course, this already marks an anthropocentric bias; cells are continually transforming without the need to be perceived by humans; but then again, we are making art for humans and not for other cells. 4. Zurr, personal conversation, May 2011. See also www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/activities/ symposiums#agency. 5. Bilodeau and Mantovani 2006. 6. A syncytium is a multinucleate cell resulting from multiple cell fusions of uninuclear cells. 7. Gumbrecht 2004, xiv. 8. Mitchell 2010, 28. 9. See Riegl 1893 and also Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 492–493, for further discussion of haptic vision. 10. See www.wbdg.org/design/lab_wet.php. 11. See Hauser 2008, 102–105. 12. This appropriation of wetness also has a similar context as Roy Ascott’s notion of “Moist Media.” See Ascott 2004. See also the work of Boulboullé 2012 in terms of the hands on tension. 13. See Landecker 2007. 14. Ibid., 66. 15. See Landecker 2007 and Squier 2004 for further discussion on the cultural implications of tissue culture.

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16. Bergson 1944, 4. 17. Originally funded in part by the Western Australia Lotteries Commission (Lottery West), the University of Western Australia, and the faculty of science of the university, the initial aim was the establishment of a laboratory/studio that would be “used by both local and internationally recognized artists to investigate the boundaries of science and art.” See Catts, Grounds, and Bunt 1999. 18. Ibid. 19. For these early histories of bioart, see Kac 2009, da Costa and Philip 2008, Hauser 2008, Reichle 2009, and Mitchell 2010. 20. Knorr-Cetina 1992, 127. 21. “Historically, the earliest such devices are said to date back to Babylonian times, in which specialized vessels served as fermentation containers for beer and wine as well as for the production of cheese or yeast-based foods like leavened bread. More recently, as early as the 1940s, demands from the pharmaceutical industry for mass production of antibiotics like penicillin pushed forwards advances in bioreactor design, specifically in terms of air transfer, sterilization and temperature and pH control.” See Erickson 2009, 219. 22. See Hauser 2008. 23. This is less the kind of ideology that Marx argues involves “the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness  . . . directly interwoven with the material activity and material intercourse of men” to propagate a hegemonic mode of thought among a ruling class and more one that substantiates the manner in which, as Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger argue, community of practices function. Communities of practices are “social groupings involving the sustained pursuit of a common enterprise and a shared repertoire of communal resources developed by its members over time.” Such groupings develop specific ways of doing things and shared repertoires of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short, similar sets of practices. See Marx 1959, 247, and Lave and Wenger 1999. 24. See Rheinberger 1997, 28. 25. According to Star and Griesemer, boundary objects are abstract or concrete objects that function “to ensure cooperation across divergent social worlds.” The borders between different worlds coincide around a loosely structured object that facilitates discussions and complex negotiations among heterogeneous sets of actors, enabling groups that normally do not communicate to do work together. In other words, boundary objects are bridging elements that are different in different worlds, making possible heterogeneity and cooperation to coexist with each other See Star and Griesemer 1999, 404–414. 26. See Spivak 1988, 271–313, and Latour 1993, 30. 27. Mauss 1972, 176. 28. Stengers 2012, 20–21.

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29. Artaud 1958, 101. 30. www.lifetechnologies.com/ca/en/home/brands/invitrogen.html. 31. See Virchow 1858. 32. Canguilhem 2008a, 29. 33. See Crary 1992. 34. Unlike primary tissue, which has a set limit of between forty and sixty divisions called the Hayflick limit, cell lines can endlessly divide, which is why they have been given the name immortal. 35. See Yaffe and Saxel 1997. 36. See Kaisto 2003. 37. See Sloterdijk 2011. 38. Landecker 2007. 39. Influenced by Roux’s work, Harrison sought to experimentally prove a long-standing debate in neurobiology concerning the formation of nerve fibers. Competing theories argued that fibers (1) were formed from multiple cells (“multicellular theory”); (2) were the result of “protoplasmic bridges” that had at first linked all embryonic cells together in a kind of network and were then retained; or (3) were the result of outgrowth (“outgrowth theory”) from a single nerve cell into the interstitial area of other cells. See Billings 1971 and Keshishian 2004. 40. Harrison 1910, 819. 41. Witowski 1979, 280. 42. See Landecker 2006. 43. Carrel 1912, 516. See also Carrel 1935. 44. Friedman 2007, 14. 45. For example, in the introduction to a definitive 1954 textbook, The Cultivation of Animal and Plant Cells, the American scientist P.R. White, a colleague of Carrel’s at the Rockefeller Institute and one of the major researchers on plant tissue culturing at the time, wrote: “I have sought to strip from the study of this subject its former atmosphere of mystery and complication. The grey walls, black gowns, masks and hoods; the shining twisted glass and pulsating coloured fluids; the gleaming stainless steel, hidden steam jets, enclosed microscopes and huge witches’ cauldrons of the ‘great’ laboratories of ‘tissue culture’ have led far too many persons to consider cell culture too abstruse, recondite and sacrosanct a field to be invaded by mere hoipolloi.” See White 1954. 46. Carrel 1935, 156. An even more stringent critique of Carrel’s methods and moral stance is fully unleashed in biologist Sir Julian Huxley’s strange, cautionary tale entitled “The Tissue Culture King,” originally published in The Yale Review in 1927. Set in a fictional African country, Huxley’s parable depicts Hascombe, a Carrel-like British scientist who has been captured by a

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primitive tribe while on an expedition. In order to save his own life and garner power, Hascombe sets up a remote laboratory for mass-produced tissue culturing of the tribe’s leader—an experiment aimed at extending the power of the king by way of ritualized biotechnical progress, but one that eventually leads to catastrophic mutations and finally, in a glorious bit of surrealism, the design and use of a telepathy instrument to control the thoughts and dreams of the country’s population. It cannot be mistaken that the figure of the scientist Hascombe is Carrel, as Huxley ends his parable with the statement, “Dr. Hascombe attained to an unsurpassed power in a number of applications of science—but to what end did all this power serve?” See Huxley 1946. 47. Conversation with Catts, April 27, 2012. 48. See Canguilhem 2008a, 98–120. 49. In the case of this procedure, the only reason the cells are not sucked out with the media is because they are adherent cells that stick to the bottom of the dish (tissue flask dishes are also treated to “attract” cell adhesion). If you suck the media out, the cells will stay in the dish. Ionat Zurr, email to the author, February 5, 2014. 50. “As opposed to the standard configuration of an upright microscope in which the ocular and objective are located above the specimen stage, the lenses of an inverted microscope are located below a transparent viewing stage, with the light source illuminating the subject from above.” See www.nikoninstruments.com/Information-Center/Inverted-Microscope. 51. See Art Orienté Objet, http://aoo.free.fr. 52. Squier 2004, 66–68. 53. See Kay 2000, xviii. 54. Langer and Vacanti 1993, 920. 55. Forming aligned myotubes is critical for muscle tissue, because its function (the creation of forces) “is intimately linked to its structure from the molecular up to the macroscopic dimensions. Its regular, ordered structure enables force to be generated effectively and transmitted maximally throughout the muscle.” This detail is central in that we are looking to harness the forces derived from the twitching of our fused myoblasts in the artistic work. Lam et al. 2006. 56. http://www.dowcorning.com/applications/search/products/Details.aspx?prod=01064291. PDMS has not only been used as a miracle material in the production of biological substrates but has also been used in food products, most recently McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, as an “antifoaming agent” as well as in cooking oils in processed foods from American fast food corporations like Domino’s Pizza and Wendy’s. See www.naturalnews.com/032820_Chicken_McNuggets _ingredients.html# and http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/01/26/dominos-mcdonaldswendys-are-all-feeding-you-a-chemical-used-in-silly-putty. 57. In what has become a breakthrough paper for cell culturing as well as for Oron and Ionat’s work, a 2009 study from material scientists based at Imperial College in London concluded that substrate stiffness affected cellular differentiation in the course of the development of embryonic stem cells. Although it is clear that cells differentiate based on a huge range of

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chemical signaling between themselves and the protein-based substrate or “glue” in which they grow (the so-called extracellular matrix or ECM), the UK paper also demonstrated that, in the case of mammalian cells, the mechanical properties of the environment, such as the physical forces produced by morphological motion, stress, and strain, also have a critical impact on the evolution of the stem cells through a process known as embryogenesis. Moreover, the scientists concluded that an artificially constructed substrate such as PDMS influenced the strength of cell adherence, the rate of cell proliferation (i.e., division), and how fast the cells spread. See Evans et al. 2009. 58. The operation of the device: The volume of each of the squares is given a formula by which to count the average number of cells falling into one square area, usually, 1 x 104. We estimate that there are around forty-five cells within one square area, thus giving us an average of 4.5 million cells within one drop. 59. See Agamben 1998. 60. See www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/science/13coat.html. 61. See www.media.mit.edu/people/hherr. 62. “Given any object, relatively abstracted from its surroundings for study, the behavioristic approach consists in the examination of the output of the object and of the relations of this output to the input. By output is meant any change produced in the surroundings by the object. By input, conversely, is meant any event external to the object that modifies this object in any manner.” See Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow 1943, 18. 63. In the work of researchers Benjamin Knapp and Hugh Lusted, who in 1987 developed their BioMuse device that enabled EMG signals (among others, such as EEG, EKG, and ECG) to control audio and computer graphics. See Knapp and Lusted 1990. 64. Gordon 1995, 8. 65. Artaud 1958, 13. 66. Such “tacit knowing,” as Michael Polanyi called it, of “knowing more than we can tell,” involves both intellectual as well as practical knowledge but, even more critically, bodily knowledge. “By elucidating the way our bodily processes participate in our perceptions we will throw light on the bodily roots of thought.” See Polanyi 1966, 15–16. 67. Knorr-Cetina 1999, 36–37. 68. “It is through them [technical objects] that the objects of investigation become entrenched and articulate themselves in a wider field of epistemic practices and material cultures, including instruments, inscription devices, model organisms and the floating theorems or boundary concepts attached to them .  .  . the technical conditions determine the realm of possible representations of an epistemic thing and sufficiently stabilized epistemic things turn into the technical repertoire of the experimental arrangement.” See Rheinberger 1997, 29. 69. Catts and Cass 2008, 145.

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70. Latour and Woolgar 1986, 69. 71. Schmidgen 2005. 72. See Baird 2004, 45–47. 73. See part I, “Resonances,” for a description. 74. See Salter 2010, 277–280, and de La Mettrie 1996. 75. See Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow, 1943. 76. Ibid., 1. 77. Crutchfield 2002. 78. Lewis 2009, 459. 79. See Cariani 1991. 80. See Canguilhem 2008b, 90. 81. See Minh-ha 1992. 82. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) is the exception to this rule. See Yee 2010. 83. Helmreich 2009, 6. 84. The decision on how to work with the PDMS refers back to the Imperial college article in which scientists researched how different qualities of stiffness in PDMS substrates affected cell differentiation, as well as the precedents of the Lam et al. 2006 study. 85. See Buxton 2007, 141. 86. Laminin is defined as a critical protein molecule that ironically is in the shape of a cross and is part and parcel of the extracellular matrix, which assists in cell adhesion and binding. 87. Sennett 2008, 152. 88. Agamben 1998, 109. 89. Originally manufactured by the German chemical giant Hoechst AG and the brunt of a number of jokes in the biology department because no one can properly pronounce its German name, Hoechst Stain is a blue nuclear (i.e., used in the nucleus) dye used mainly in fluorescence microscopy and cell imaging. The dye binds to the A-T (Adenine-Thymine) regions of the cell’s DNA in its nucleus, and when excited under UV light it glows in the dark at the wavelength of 350 nM. See www.piercenet.com/product/hoechst-33342-fluorescent-stain. 90. “Development can no longer be explained as combination of translated information from the genes (to make innate features) and information acquired from the environment (to modify, supplement, or complete those features) . . . it is my contention that developmental information does “develop” not by special creation from nothingness but always from the conditional trans-

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formation of prior structure—that is, by ontogenetic processes. Depending on the level of analysis, such transformation can be described as resulting from interaction among entities, such as cells and organisms or from interactions within an entity.” Oyama 2000, 3–4. 91. See Langer 1953 and Massumi 2011. 92. See Combes 2013. 93. Simondon 1992, 300–301. 94. See Stern 2010, 19–31. 95. See Kiesler 1939. 96. See Aristotle 2010, 48.

III Sensorium 1. Serres 2008, 70. 2. These reactions stem from interview sessions for the installation Just Noticeable Difference (JND) that were conducted with test participants in my studio-lab LabXmodal in Montreal, Canada during January 2010, before the official premiere of the installation at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, in March 2010. See Salter 2012 for more information on the project. 3. Deren 1953, 6. 4. See Minh-ha 1989, 73, and Foster 1996, 204. See also Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010, 2013. 5. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, 61. 6. “Intersensoriality refers to the interrelation and/or transmutation of the senses, which may take many forms, such as: a) cooperation/opposition, b) hierarchy/equality, c) fusion/separation, and d) simultaneity/sequentiality, to mention but a few.” See Howes and Classen 2013, Howes 2009, and Gravelle and Rivlin 1984. 7. See Stein and Meredith 1993. 8. See Hiskey 2012. 9. Howes and Classen 2013, 2. 10. See www.david-howes.com/senses and www.centreforsensorystudies.org. 11. Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994, 4. 12. See Howes 2003. 13. See www.indiana.edu/~wanthro/theory_pages/senses.htm for a history and description of the anthropology of the senses. Even among anthropologists, the term is not clear. See Pink and Howes 2010 and Ingold and Howes 2011.

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14. Howes notes that he and Classen take a “relational approach to the study of the senses, using the comparative method to highlight the contrasts between the sensory orders of different cultures, developing the power of language to analyze and express sensory nuances, abjuring phenomenology, and constantly challenging the dictates and assumptions of Western sensory psychology and neuroscience.” See Stoller 2004 and Howes and Classen 2013. 15. Kirksey and Helmreich 2010, 544. 16. As Howes argues, it was possible to go this route precisely due to the sensory turn, which took anthropologists out from under the hegemony of linguistic models and started them sensing the world differently. See Helmreich 2009, Murphy 2006, Kirksey and Helmreich 2010, Schull 2012, Paxson 2013, Scaramelli 2013, Kohn 2013, and Myers 2012. 17. Schull 2012, 46. 18. See Turner 1982, 89–101. 19. See n. 64 (in the introduction) for a discussion of the term “gymnasium of the senses.” 20. Stoller 2009, 71. 21. Desjarlais 2003, 6. 22. Clough 2007, 2. 23. Artaud 1958, 86. Also see Brecht 1964. 24. See Classen 2005, Feld 2005, Kondo 1985, and Grimshaw 2007. For more, see Howes 2003. 25. Classen 2005, 150. 26. See Howes 2011. 27. See Tuzin 1984. 28. Ibid., 579. 29. Goodman 2009, 82. 30. Personal conversation. August 2013. 31. Latour 2006, 105. 32. Ibid., 105. 33. See Weschler and Irwin 2009. Also see www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79227. 34. See www.harrysmoak.com/projects/ypnr. 35. See http://chrissalter.com/projects/air-xy.36. See Viola 1995, 78. 37. A Magic Arm is a small, flexible, articulated joint used for mounting small lighting and camera equipment used in the film industry; it is manufactured by the Italian firm Manfrotto. See www.manfrotto.com/magic-arm-with-bracket.

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38. SenseStage is a wireless sensor/actuator platform developed by LabXmodal and McGill University. In the Atmosphere exhibition, the platform is used to control the thermochromic line on the wall. See http://sensestage.hexagram.ca and http://sensestage.eu for more information. 39. Max/MSP is an interactive graphical programming environment for music, audio, and media originally developed at Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in the 1980s by mathematician Miller Puckett and later by David Zicarelli at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). See http://cycling74.com. 40. Banisteriopsis caapi, also known as yajé or ayahuasca, is a South American liana or jungle vine known for its hallucinogenic properties. Shamans of indigenous western Amazonian tribes in Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia use the plant in religious and healing ceremonies. In addition to its hallucinogenic properties, caapi is used for its healing properties as a purgative, effectively cleansing the body of parasites and helping the digestive tract. 41. See Bell 1992 and Hollywood 2002. 42. Bourdieu 1977, 2 (italics in original). 43. See Benjamin 1968. 44. Technologies of the self “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.” See Foucault 1998. 45. The term “sensory substitution,” as such, denotes the ability of the central nervous system to integrate devices of this sort and to constitute through learning a new “mode” of perception. It is to be noted that action on the part of the subject plays an essential role in this process, a point to which we shall return. In other words, sensory substitution can only be constituted and can only function through an ongoing exploratory activity with the sensors. Finally, the access to a mode of perception that is offered by sensory substitution devices after the requisite learning period can be described as “implicit”; in other words, it makes no call on conscious reasoning concerning the sensations produced by the system of stimulation. See Lenay et al. 2003. 46. Classen 2005, 157. See also Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 1997. 47. See www.cruz-diez.com/work/chromosaturation. 48. See www.aaanet.org/meetings/Inno-vents.cfm. 49. Reichel-Dolmatoff 1997, 222. 50. Clifford 1988, 147. 51. Reichel-Dolmatoff 1997, 222. 52. Ibid., 222. 53. This is a reference to the famous story of Michel Foucault dropping acid in Death Valley told in James Miller’s controversial biography The Passion of Michel Foucault. See Miller 1993, 245.

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54. Entopic images are visual sensations that occur within the visual processing system itself without external stimuli. 55. Reichel-Dolmatoff 1997, 250–259. 56. See Klüver 1966. 57. Reichel-Dolmatoff 1997. 58. Chion 2002, 5. 59. See Minh-ha 1991, 65. 60. Geertz 1983, 58. 61. See Heller-Roazen 2009 and Salter 2011. 62. Roberts 2003, 109. 63. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. The Physiology of Taste. See http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/ brillat/savarin/b85p/part6.html. 64. See Moss 2013. 65. The “tongue map” proposed by Hänig (1901), stating that the four taste structures are spatially localized on different regions of the tongue, has recently been critiqued by psychophysicists. Furthermore, this limited model of experience has been challenged by sensory anthropology by arguing that this Western psychocentric vision is again an incomplete picture of the richness of infrasensorial experience, not only in the number of tastes we experience and the mixing between different senses (taste in relation to the haptic through the texture of foods and, of course, smell) but also in the sensory acts of the molecular structures that enable it to happen in the first place. For example, if Anglo-Saxon cultures have identified four taste sensations (or now five, with the acceptance of umami or savoriness), Howes argues that the “Japanese have five, the language of the Weyewa of Sumba counts seven flavor terms, while that of the Sereer Ndut of Senegal has only three.” More intriguingly, David also describes the idea that foodstuffs in other social-cultural contexts might be seen less as objects and more as bundles of sensory properties and powers—as sentient beings; see Howes 2009, 112. 66. The term “molecular gastronomy” was born in 1992 when an English teacher of cookery, Elizabeth Cawdry Thomas, proposed a workshop in which professional cooks could learn about the physics and chemistry of cooking. This first workshop of what ended up being a series of events until 2004 was called “Workshop on Molecular and Physical Gastronomy.” For further description of this and examples, see www.molecularrecipes.com/molecular-gastronomy and Alicia Foundation and elBullitaller (Ferran Adria) 2009. 67. See van Gennep 1961. 68. Graham Kerr is a British born culinary and television personality and author most famous for his 1970s cooking broadcast the Galloping Gourmet. Ferran Adria is a Spanish born chef and head

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chef of the former (now closed) El Bulli restaurant north of Barcelona. Adria is famous for his contributions to the field of molecular gastronomy. 69. David Szanto, personal interview, October 2013. 70. The trigeminal nerve is a cranial nerve located in the brain responsible for transmitting sensations to the mouth, teeth, face, and nasal cavity. It is also the nerve that controls the muscles used for chewing. 71. TeZ’s structure reads something like computer code: RESET trigger start subpatch DISPLACE_01x / KOMPO / SEQUENZ / KOMP-RESET 0) sound levels at zero and modulated faint yellow/orange light HEX-1 trigger start subpatch DISPLACE_01x / KOMPO / SEQUENZ / KOMPHEX-1 1) line 60 sec. = fade in bowdrums + increase alfa lights. *1 min. HEX-2 trigger start subpatch DISPLACE_01x / KOMPO / SEQUENZ / KOMP-HEX-2 2) line 30 sec. = fade in rattle #1 + fade out bowdrums + fade out lights 3) bang = turn generative gradients on 4) delay 15 sec. = PAUSE IN THE DARK *1 min. 45 sec. 5) line 45 sec. = fade in rattle #2 and flutez, fade in gradient lights, *2 min. 30 sec. auto-start subpatch DISPLACE_01x / KOMPO / SEQUENZ / HEX-2b. 72. Pink 2009, 84. 73. Somatic attention is defined by Csordas as “the culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one’s body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others.” See Csordas 1993, 138. 74. Jennifer Biddle, email to the author, December 27, 2012. 75. Artaud 1958, 157.

Conclusion 1. Lewine 2008. 2. Gordon 1995, 8. 3. See Caillois 2001. 4. See Bennett 2012. 5. Guattari 1999, 18. 6. See Lemov 2006 and Turner 2013. 7. Lemov 2006, 328. 8. Ibid., 320. 9. See Shklovsky 1990. 10. Blanchot 1982, 262.

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11. See Conquergood 1989. 12. A final parable told by the late East German playwright Heiner Müller, the contradictory and controversial twentieth-century playwright and director and heir to the mantle of his mentor, Bertolt Brecht. Success versus impact. “The tension between success and impact, which Brecht spoke of, is important: that one is always overtaken by success before a real impact can occur. As long as a thing works it is not successful, and when success is there then impact is over. This because there can only be an impact as, for example, in the theatre, the audience is split, brought home to its real situation. But that means there will be no agreement, no success. Success happens when everybody is cheering, in other words, when there is nothing more to say.” See Müller 2013, 362.

Afterword 1. See Geiger 2003. 2. Ibid. 3. See Pickering 1995. 4. See Pickering 2010. 5. See Pickering forthcoming a. 6. See Pickering 2013. 7. See Pickering forthcoming b.

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Index

AAA (American Anthropology Association), 195, 211–212, 214, 222–223, 225, 230, 234 Aalto University, 239 Absorption acoustic, 51n45 distance and, 177 Acoustemology (Feld), 174 Acoustic barrier, 25, 75 Acoustic ecology, 73, 256n17 Acoustics in Chaco Canyon, 65 definition of, 52–53 and noise, 27–28 relationship to architecture, 63–64 Acoustic scenography, 26, 255n12 Acoustic shadow, 51 Actant, 5, 14, 82, 103, 252n37 Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), 7, 10 Actuator use in TEMA, 89–91, 105, 125, 135, 140, 206 vibrotactile (Displace), 172, 206, 240 Adam, Ken, 77 Adaptive reverb, 209 Addiction by Design (Schull), 175–176 Adigard, Erik, 183 Adria, Ferran, 217 Aeolian harp, 68 Aeolipile, 137 Aeschylus, 26

Affect. See also Atmosphere and anthropology, 176 in art, 10, 13, and the body, 177 definition of, 47, 247n4 and instruments, 47, 82, 135 through movement, 90 and senses, xi, 195, 200, 233 Affection. See Affect Affective Entanglement (Dumit and Myers), 14 Agar, use of, in Displace, 217, 220–221 Agencement, defined, 9, 251nn32,33 Agency, xi, 4–5, 41, 242. See also Material agency and agencement, 9 and capacity, 140–141, 161 as activity in the world, 51 human, 10 and living systems, 88, 90, 119, 126 Malfouris’s understanding of, 40, 257n37 nonhuman, 7 Pickering on, 243, 253n42 Agency-realism (Pickering), 245. See also Performative ontology “Air” (Latour), 181 Air XY (Adigard+Salter), 183 Alchemy, 46, 92, 106–107, 244 Alienness, 4, 50, 59, 125, 190, 237, 241–242 “Alphabet of Sounds” (O+A), 26, 67 of healing sounds (O+A), 84, 239

298

Alter (installation), 195, 212, 214 title changed to Displace, 222 Ambisonics, 55, 202 Amodal, 179, 233 Amphora, as resonator, 25, 34–35, 46 Amplitude and affect, 22, defined, 51 and loudness, 258n45 Anthropocentrism, 6, 180 Anthropology. See also Sensory anthropology/ anthropology of the senses and AAA conference, 196 and affect, 175 critique of otherness, 171 fieldwork-based, 11 issues of representation of experience, 189–190 practice movement, 7, 250n25 relationship to art, 171, 179 of science, 8 and senses, 16Antidisciplinary, 243 Apocalypse Culture, 196 Apocalypse Now, 80, 232 Apparatus bioreactor as, 138 in Brecht and Artaud, 177 encountered in O+A’s work, 54–56, 61 in experimental setups, 14, 47, 189 resonator as, 15, 29, 47, in scientific laboratory practice, 7–9, 88, 92, 99, 110, 131, 133, 135–136, 150 and sound, 66, 180 Arapesh, 174, 180, 182 Architecture, and sound, 28, 34, 59, 61–65, 72, 256n23 Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Malinowski), 127, 174 Aristotle, 165, 173, 212 Arkeveld, Hans, 95 Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, 174 Ars Electronica (festival), 29, 179 Artaud, Antonin, 107, 127, 177, 199, 211, 237

Index

Artistic research, 13, 132 Artists and affect, xii and reinvention, 240 claims made on, 14 Deleuze and Guattari on, 4, 13 and scientists, 14, 97, 99, 106, 107, 117, 159, 240 and affects, xii, 10, 13, 14, 25, 47, 52, 80–83, 177, 179–180, 231–233, 239–241 Art Orienté Objet, 117 Art-science, 126–127 Assemblage, xi, 9, 82, 176, 211, 230, 236–237, 241, 244. See also Agencement, defined Associated Milieu (Simondon), 164 Atmosphere, 73, 79, 93, 97, 99, 106. See also Affect and affect, 80–82 Guattari on, 81 Tellenbach on, 80–81 sensory, 49, 56, 185–186, 197 Atmosphere (installation) construction of; 181–188 opening response; 190–193 relation to Latour, 181 prototyping session described, 182–186 events around, 192 Atomic 3000 strobe. See also Flicker defined, 183 perceptual effects of, 189–190 use of, in Displace, 183, 185, 199, 207 Audible Past (Stern), 135 Audition, 16, 21, 172, 180, 258n40 Augoyard, Jean-François, 46, 65 Auinger, Sam, 15, 25–26, 28, 34–35, 40–42, 45–46, 84 Australian Research Council (ARC) 105, 127 Ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi or yajé) effects of, 269n40 use of by Desana, 176, 189, 206 Bachelard, Gaston, 8, 51–52 Bacon, Francis, 64–65

Index

Baird, Davis, 135 Barad, Karen, 5, 90 Barthes, Roland, 174 Bastyr, Kevin, 36, 49 Bare life (Agamben), 122, 124, 155–156 Beguin, Thomas, 223 Behavior. See also Agency and goals of living systems, 138–140 of muscle cells, 94, 101, 103, 135–136, 160 and sound waves, 15, 24, 28, 35, 50–52, 66 of stuff, xii Wiener’s definition of, 125 “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology” (Wiener, Rosenblueth, and Bigelow), 125 Behrens, Till, 42–43 Bell, Catherine, 189 Bell Textron, 27 Benjamin, Walter, 190 Bennett, Jane, 6 Bennett, Jill, 240 Bergson, Henri, 94, 114 Bernard, Claude, 116 Biddle, Jennifer, 236–237 Bidinost, Elio, 186 Bigelow, Julian, 125, 138–139 Bijsterveld, Karen, 24 Binaural microphone, 53–54, 259n61 Bioart history of, 99 Mitchell’s definition of, 92 relation to conceptual art, 92 Biodegradable polymers, 120 Biological materials (biomaterials), 5, 93, 102, 120, 128, Biomechanics, 105 Bioreactor definition of, 90 history of, 262n21 as part of art practice, 92 use in TEMA, 15–16, 135 Biotechnique (Kiesler), 165 Biowaste, 108 Blesser, Barry, 63

299

Blue-field arc phenomena, 207. See also Entopic images Body and Emotion (Desjarlais), 192 Born, Georgina, 94 Boundary object defined, 103, 262n25 in relationship to TEMA, 103 Bourdieu, Pierre, 11, 189 Brakhage, Stan, xi Brecht, Bertolt, xi, 177, 237 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, 212 Buddhism, 244 Bunnings, 155 Bunt, Stuart, 95 Burger, Anke, 178 Burrows, Montrose, 114 Burning Man, 226 Butler, Judith, 9 Buxton, Bill, 152 C2C12 (skeletal mouse muscle cell line), 15, 88, 90, 108, 112, 146, 147, 152, 159, 160 Cage, John, 24–25, 35, 47, 244 Caillois, Roger, 240 Callon, Michel, 7, 9–10 CRC (Canada Research Chair), 131 Canalization of Danube, 28 Cane Toad, 155 Canguilhem, Georges, 99, 111, 116 Cantilever Sensor, 159 Cantus Firmus, 37, 257n35 Capacity in living systems, 161, 165 relation to agency, 51 Cariani, Peter, 140, 161 Carnal Sociology (Wacquant), xii Carpenter, Edmund, 174 Carrel, Alexis, 113–115, 165 Cass, Gary, 132 Cassirer, Ernst, 163 CAT 3 Cable, 202 Catts, Oron, 89, 99, 101–102, 121, 128, 132, 141, 144, 239, 264n57

300

CCRMA (Stanford), 26 Cell and cell lines, 15, 88, 90, 124, 159, 160 differentiation and fusion, 116, 129, 142, 160, 264n57 exercising, 105, 129, 131 electrical stimulation of, 88, 90, 94, 135, 136 feeding, 112, 118, 121 history of, 111 immortal, 112, 113, 115 as motor/actuator, 15, 87–91, 105, 124, 135, 136, 140 naming of, 111 and passaging, 115, 116, 118, 128, 142 transplantation of, 159–160 unique properties of muscle, 90–91 CELL Central, 99, 151, 154 Chaco Canyon, 40, 64, 65 Chinese cosmology, 201 Chion, Michel, 23 Chladni, Ernst, 32, 135 Chladni figures, 32, 135 Chromosaturation (Cruz-Diez), 195 Cinema verité, 171 Clash, The, 32 Classen, Constance, 179 Clifford, James, 11 Cocleato (Kircher), 65 Collis, Shannon, 178, 181, 192, 201, 207, 220 Colloquy of Mobiles (Pask), 245 Color in Desana culture, 179, 186, 194, 198, 211 energies, 186, 194, 198 relationship to synesthesia, 58, 172, 181, 211 use of, in Atmosphere, 176, 182–185, 188– 189, 192 use of, in Displace, 2, 195, 197, 199–202, 204–206, 220, 225–228, 233 Comandon, Jean, 114 Combes, Muriel, 164 Comb filter, 26, 46, 57, 59, 62, 172, 259n64. See also Filter (audio) Complexity, Crutchfield’s definition of, 139

Index

Concordia University, 16, 170, 173, 184, 187, 191, 193 Coney Island, 137 Confluence definition of, 116 relationship to passaging, 116 Consent forms, 178, 223, 225 CONSERT (Concordia University Sensoria Research Team), 173 Contextual narrowing (Squier), 119, 156 Couney, Dr. Martin A., 137–138 Courchesne, Luc, 48 Craftsman, The (Sennett), 155 Crary, Jonathan, 112 Cross-modal, 74, 173 Crutchfield, James, 139 Csordas, Thomas, 230 Culture and the Senses (Geurts), 174 Culturing Life (Landecker), 93 Curtin University (Perth), 95 Cybernetics, 138, 245 Cyborg, 10, 124 Danube river, 25, 28, 84 Dawkins, Richard, 160 De Anima (Aristotle), 90, 252 DECRA grant (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award), 127, 137 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 4, 9, 13 Democritus, 172 Deren, Maya, xi, 171 Desana (Colombia), 179, 186, 194, 198, 211 Desjarlais, Robert, 174, 177 Deutsche Bahn, 21, 37 Deutschherrnbrücke (Frankfurt), 20, 23, 36, 41, 45 Developmental-systems theory (DST), 161 Diffraction, 36, 49, 60, 257n34 Digital recorder (and DAT), 52, 54, 55, 57, 59, 70, 82, 142 Disc paintings (Irwin), 181 Disembodied Cuisine (TC&A), 89

Index

Displace description of experience, 225–228 interviews as part of, 230–235 press, 235 schematics and floorplans, 215, 216 Displacement, 16, 51, 90, 94, 103, 133, 136, 222 DMEM (Dulbecco’s Modified Eagle Medium), 108, 109, 110 DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide), 122, 142 DMX, 183, 202, 217 DNA, 117, 135, 157, 159, 160, 161, 251n31 Donders, Franciscus Cornelius, 135 Doonan, Natalie, 228 Doppler shift, 22, 72, 79 Dry biology (defined), 93 Duchamp, Marcel, 92 Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster), 25 Dumit, Joe, 14 Dummy head. See Binaural microphone Durian, 221 Dylan, Bob, 243 Dystoposthesia, 174 Ear, 22, 27, 28, 32, 34, 39, 41, 42, 51–55, 64–65, 78, 165, 170, 257n34 Earth Sound Earth Signal (Kahn), 25 Eavesdropping, 65 Eberling, Arthur, 114 Echo architecture, 62–65 Chaco Canyon, 65 Chichen Itza, 62–63 slapback, 60 Economics, xii and performance, 9, 251n31 Embodiment, 81 EMG (Electromyogram), 125, 265n63 Empire of the Senses (Howes), 174 Energy Revolution, 196 Engineering. See also Mechanical engineering and aesthetics, 163 with cellular systems, 117, 121 relationship to life, 87, 120, 127,

301

Eno, Brian, 36 Entopic images. See also Phosphene defined, 207, 270n54 use of, in Displace, 201 Epistemic Cultures (Knorr-Cetina), 130 Epistemic Thing (Rheinberger), 103, 126, 131, 265n68 Equal loudness contours applied to Sonic Vista, 36, 49 definition of, 257n34 Equilibrioception, 173 Erlmann, Veit, 32 Erskine, Peter, 34 Escher, M. C., 48 Ethnodrama (Turner), 176 Ethnographer. See Ethnography Ethnography auto-, xiii, 12, 254n54 definition of, 12, 242 of Desana, 199 gonzo (Taussig), 12 multi-sited (Marcus), 12–13 multispecies, 7, 175 sensory, 173, 176, 230 Eugenics, Carrel’s interest in, 114–115 European Central Bank, 22, 39, 41 Event, 14, 16, 94, 177, 139, 200, 204, 211, 215, 230, 234, 237, Evernote, 142 Experience, “near and far,” 210–211 Experiment in Displace, 196, 235 and experience, 241 on the world, 240 Experimental life, 236 Experimental effects (Knorr-Cetina), 131 Experimental situation (Rheinberger), 14, 50 Explant tissue, 90, 94 Externality, definition of, 255n14 Far field (acoustics), 41, 68, 71, 255n1 Fast Fourier Transform, 133 Feeling and Form (Langer), 163

302

Feld, Steven, 174, 197 Fell, Honor Bridget, 118 “Felt experience,” 230 Fetal bovine serum (FBS), 110, 112, 146. See also Fetal calf serum Fetal calf serum, 90 Fieldwork definition and use of, xii–xiii, 4, 12, 200 “naturalistic setting” according to Marcus, 16 relation to anthropology, 127, 171, 180, 236, 253n44 FIFO (“Fly In, Fly Out”), 94 Filter (audio) architecture as, 59, 61–62 described and use of, 15, 60, 71 resonator as, 35 Fischer, Michael M. J, 10, 12 Five senses, Aristotle’s understanding of, 172 Flanging, 59–60 Fleck, Ludwik, 7 Flicker phenomenon, 4, 72 use of, in Displace, 4, 197, 205, 207, 209, 228, 231, 244 Floaters. See Phosphene Fludd, Robert, 83 FoFA Gallery (CU), 181, 182, 184, 187, 191, 193 Fondation Française pour l’Etude des Problèmes Humains, 115 Food. See also Taste as cultural object, 213 “deculturizing,” 214 materiality and performativity, 213 and tuning, 220–221 Force and displacement, of engineered muscle, 16, 90, 133, 136 Force load, 156–157 Forensic psychiatry, 67 Form constants (Klüver), 207–208 Forms of life, 150–151

Index

Four Ears (technique), 53–59. See also Binaural microphone Foster, Hal, 171 Foucault, Michel, 193, 204 Fourier, Jean Baptiste, 32 Frequency definition of, 51 in Helmholtz resonators, 27, 32–33 light and flicker, 172, 205, 209, 221, 228 and sound, 21, 24, 53–55, 58, 60–61, 71–72 FRQSC (Fonds de Recherche du Québec— Société et culture), ix, 170 Fujimura, Joan, 8 Fun Palace, 245 Gabriel, Peter, 61 Galison, Peter, 8, 53 Ganzfeld, 197, 199 Gap (store), 240 Garden city movement, 43 Gastronomy. See Molecular gastronomy Geertz, Clifford, 11, 175, 211 Geiger, John, 244 General Theory of Magic (Mauss), 106 Genetic determinism, 160–161 Gessert, George, 99 Geurts, Katherine, 174 Ghostly Matters (Gordon), 126 Glycol fluid (fog), 183 Glynn, Ruairi, 245 Goals and capacity, 161 in living systems, 138–140 Goodman, Steve, 180 GoPro, 57 Gordon, Avery, 126 Göring, Hermann, 28 Gothic cathedrals, and acoustics, 63 Grand Guignol, 1, 93 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 79 Grey Noise (O+A), 43 Grey Walter, W., 9, 244 Grimshaw, Anna, 179

Index

GRM Tools, 259n48 Grounds, Miranda, 95, 163 Grundmann, Heidi, 34 GrünGürtel (Frankfurt), 15, 36, 43, 44, 53, 57 Guattari, Félix, 4–5, 9, 13, 52, 74, 80–81, 240 Guillemin, Roger, 7 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 91 Gustables development tests for Displace, 217–220, 223 gels and liquids created, 220–222 and “gusting,” 214 response from Displace viewers to, 232 Guyer-Zeller, Adolf, 77 “Gymnasium of the Senses” (Howes), 16, 176, 234–235, 237, 255n64 Hacking, Ian, 25, 52 Hallucinations, in Desana drug rituals, 199, 202 Haptic vision (Riegl), 92–93 Haraway, Donna, 6, 10, 124, 160 Harmonics, in urban sounds, 22, 30, 59, 61 Harrison, Ross G., 94, 113–114 Harvard Medical School, 89 Hattinger, Gottfried, 28 Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), 59, 60 Hayano, David, 12 Hazer, 183, 188 Health and safety induction (SymbioticA), 132 Hearing architecture (Rasmussen), 63 “Hearing perspective” (O+A), 15, 26, 52, 78, 82 Hearing View, Rheinau (O+A), 34, 65, 67, 68, 73, 84, 239 HeLa Cell, 112 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 172–173 Helmholtz resonator, 15, 32–35 Helmreich, Stefan, 150 Hemocytometer, 108, 122, 123 Heron of Alexander, 137 Herr, Hugh, 124,

303

Hertz, Garnet, 245 Hexagon as symbol in Desana culture, 196–198 use of, in Displace, 196–199, 201–202, 204– 205, 207, 209, 215–217, 218, 220, 225–228, 231–232, 237 Hexagram Centre for Research-Creation in Media Art and Technology, 201, 217 Histological analysis, 99, 114, Hodgetts, Stuart, 144, 154, 159–162 Hoechst 33342 stain, 157, 266n89 Hooke, Robert, 110–111 hooks, bell, xi Hottois, Gilbert, 6 Howes, David, 16, 170–171, 173–175, 178, 189, 192, 211, 213, 217, 228–229, 234, 236–237, 244 HQP (“highly qualified personnel”), 179 HRTF (head-related transfer function), 54 Hydrogel, 120 Hydrophone, 28, 53, 68, 70, 78 Hylozoism, 249n16 Hypnotism, Carrel’s interest in, 115 Hypodermic needles, 154–155 IFF (International Flavors & Fragrances), 174 Ilinx, as defined by Caillois, 240 Improvisation, 139 Incubator infants exhibited in, 138–139 in PC2 lab, 101, 108, 113, 115–119, 129, 147, 163 Individuation, 164 Infinite Energy Technologies, 196 Information genetic, 161 and noise, 45–46 and Shannon entropy, 59 and sound, 26, 41–42, 43 Infrasonic, 38, 57, 136, 180, 194, Infrastructure, and sound, 53–54, 61, 65 Inner Touch, The (Heller-Roazen), 172

304

Inno-vent (AAA), 16, 196, 211 definition of, 196 proposal for including Displace, 16, 212 Inscription devices in laboratories, 10, 133, 135, 265n68 DNA, 160 and media, 25 Instrument, Baird’s definition of, 135 Instrumentarium Augoyard and Torgue’s understanding of, 41, 46, 164 technical, 52, 82 Intensity, xiii, 1, 22, 40, 63, 80, 81, 169, 180, 194, 200, 204, 221, 221, 227, 231 Intersensoriality, 172, 199, 267n6 Invitrogen, 108 In vitro, 87, 89–90, 93–94, 114, 121, 131, 159–160 definition of, 90, 113, 160 In vivo, 120 iPad, 56–57, 118, 142 iPS cells (induced pluripotent stem cells), 117, 266n82 Ipcress File, The, 232 IR heater (in Atmosphere), 186, 188, 190, 192 Irwin, Robert, 181–182 Japanese tea ceremony, in relation to Displace, 179, 186, 214–215 JavaScript, 204 Jodorowsky, Alexander, 232 Johnston, David Jhave, 203, 205, 229 Jones, Carolyn, 181 Journal of Experimental Zoology, 113 Jungfraubahn (train), 75 Jungfraujoch (Switzerland), 74–75, 77, 82 Just Noticeable Difference (installation), experience of, 169–170 Kaluli, 174 Kahn, Douglas, 24–25, 36 Kandinsky, Wassily, 210

Index

Kay, Lily, 119 Kerr, Graham, 217 Kiesler, Frederick, 165 Kingsley Hall, 74 Kircher, Athanasius, 64–65, 68 Kittler, Friedrich, 25 Klüver, Heinrich, 207, 208 Knorr-Cetina, Karin, 8, 99, 130–131 Kohut, Heinz, 210 Kondo, Dorinne, 179 Kubrick, Stanley, 210 L’Art Biotec (exhibition), 89 Laboratory. See also Wet apparatuses in, 1, 92–93 and experimentation, 50, 126, 132, 150 material culture of and practices, 7–8, 99, 133 and performance, 9 world as, 240–241 Laboratory Life (Latour), 7, 9 La Borde, 74 Lacks, Henrietta, 112 Laminar flow hood, 108 Laminin, 88, 154, 266n86 Lam paper, 121 Landecker, Hannah, 93–94 Langer, Susanne, 163 Las Vegas, and the affect of slot machines, 175 Latour, Bruno, xi, 5, 7–9, 10–11, 133, 135, 181–182, 188 Law, John, 7 Leary, Timothy, 240 LED (light emitting diode), 182, 183, 185, 188, 202 in Displace, 205, 223, 227 Leeuwenhoek, Anton, 110 Lemov, Rebecca, 240–241 Lenoir, Timothy, 7 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 175 Lewis, George, 139 Lewontin, Richard, 160 Ligeti, György, 210

Index

Lindberg, Charles, 115 Longpré, Philomene, 178 Lopez, Francisco, 83, 180–181 Lorke, Werner, 36, 38, 49–50, 53, 56–57 Lotteries Commission of Western Australia, and funding of SymbioticA, 97, 262n17 Loudspeaker. See Speakers (audio) Louis (Tao Wang), 129, 130–132, 152, 155– 156, 157, 159, 161–162 Lower senses, taste and smell as, 170–171 Lucier, Alvin, 35–36 LVDT (linear variable differential transformer), 105 Lynch, Michael, 8 MacBook, 56, 183 Machine. See also Goals and affect, 180 and organism, 89, 102, 124, 139, 239 in TEMA, 15, 92, 94, 130, 135, 137, 240 Magic, 11, 65, 106, 107, 110, 116, 117, 119, 121, 127, 186, 211, 226, 244 Magic Arm (Manfrotto), 184, 268n37 Malafouris, Lambros, 40 Malinowski, Bronislav, 11–12, 127, 175, 210 Maloca (Desana), 207 Man, Play and Games (Caillois), 240 Mann, Thomas, 74 Marchetti, Florencia, 201, 212, 228 Marcus, George, 12, 171 Martenucci, Maurizio (TeZ), 179, 180, 192– 202, 204–207, 215, 216, 221, 223, 225, 271n71 Massumi, Brian, 192 Material agency definition of, xii and material engagement, 40 and matter, 128, 137, 161 ontology of, 6, 25 Material engagement (Malafouris), 40, 257n37 Materiality, xi, 5–6, 24, 36, 53, 64–65, 92, 175. See also New materialism Material practice, 7, 12

305

Mauss, Marcel, 106, 175 Max/MSP, 223, 263n39 Mazzarella, William, 81 McLuhan, Marshall, 45,174 MDF, 223 Mead, Margaret, 127, 174 Mechanical engineering. See also Engineering and biology, 101–103 relationship to magic, 106 Merry Pranksters (Kesey), 200 Mess-up factor (O+A), 42, 45–46, 72, 82 Method, xiii, 13–14, 230, 241 Microcinema (Commondon), 114 Microelectromechanical system (MEMS), 105 Microfabricated surfaces, 120 Microforces, 90, 159 Microphone and ear, 55 O+A’s use of, 47, 82 PZM, 256n23 Micropipette, 123 Microscope experience of using dissecting, 154 invention of, 110 in tissue culture sessions, 116, 142, 146, 150–151 use of inverted, 108, 117–118, 122, 143, 157, 162, 264n50 Microtensiometer, 101, 104 Milgram, Stanley, 240 Milieu internal and external, 116, 159, 164 technological, 4, 137, 163 in technoscience, 6 Mimesis and Alterity (Taussig), 174 Mines school, 7 Minghao Zheng, 129, 132, 152, 155–157 Minh-ha, Trinh T., xi, 141, 210, 171 Mitchell, Robert, 92 Modeling and the laboratory, 49–50, of sensoria, 194, 237

306

Molecular biology, 101, 115 Molecular gastronomy definition of, 270n66 use of, in Displace, 214 MoMA, 42 Monotemporality, 164 Born’s use of, 94 Movement cellular, 16, 87–90, 116, 125, 135–137, 140, 151, 164 of light and sound in Displace, 91, 186, 202, 204, 206 and purpose, 138 and sound, 22, 39–40, 50, 64, 78, 156, 209, Muji, 142 Multimodal, 170, 173, 186, 189 Multisensory integration, 173 Muscle physiology, 133 Myers, Natasha, 14 My Eyes . . . My Ears . . . (O+A), 55 Myoblasts, 88, 90–91, 112, 121, 122, 132, 146, 157, 159 Myogenesis, 90–91, 112, 159 Myotubes, 88–92, 103, 112, 122, 130–31, 142, 144, 159, 163, 164, 264n55 Mysterium tremendum, 182, 189 Ndembu, 176 Near field (acoustics), 21, 45, 71, 255n1 New materialism, 249n17, 250n18. See also Materiality NeXT Computer, 26 Nociception, 173 Noise, 22, 27–28, 34, 39, 42,45–46, 57–59, 73–75, 80, 83, 130, 182, 188, 202, 227–228, 233 Nonhuman, xi, 4–11, 15, 82, 106, 112, 177, 180, 193, 249n16 Nonmodern, 244, 246. See also Latour, Bruno Nova Atlantis (Bacon), 64 Numinous experience, 180

Index

O+A, 15, 20, 25–27, 29, 30–49, 52–61, 64–69, 74–76, 82–84, 164, 239, 244 Observant participation (Wacquant), 12 Observation instruments of, 116–119 protocols of, 111, 112, 116 Odland, Bruce, 15, 27–28, 40 Olfaction, 174 Ong, Walter, 174 Ongee, 179 Ontogenesis definition of, 160 Simondon’s philosophy of, 164 Ontogeny of Information (Oyama), 161 Ontological theater (Pickering), 5, 243–244 Ontology, 5, 51, 245 Organelles, 112 Organism. See Machine Organoid, 91, 94, 105, 125, 131, 139, 163–65, 237 Ostraenie (Shklovsky), 241 Otherness in anthropology, 171 in art, 163 sensorial, xiii, 186, 189, 236 Oury, Jean, 74 Oyama, Susan, 160–161 Paglen, Trevor, xi Panoptic, 236 Panpsychism, 249 Pantone, 183 Parabolic architecture. See Chaco Canyon Participant observation, xii, 11 Pask, Gordon, 244–245 Pasteur, Louis, 10 PBS (phosphate-buffered saline), 116, 154, 157, 162 PC (physical containment) labs, 108 PCB (printed circuit board), 105, 106, 127, 129

Index

PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) characteristics and use of, in TEMA, 131– 132,144, 152–154, 157 definition of, 121 in food, 256n54 use of, in Silly Putty, 121 Pelling, Andrew, 131 Penny, Simon, 245 Pepper, Sean, 101, 103–105, 120 Perception/affection Deleuze and Guattari on, 13 in relationship to alien agency, 165, 241 Perceptual psychology, 174 Performance and agency, 6 nonhuman, 40, 139 and sound, 24, 34, 40 and STS, 8–9, 251n31 Performative Ecologies (Glynn), 245 Performative ontology, 5, 245 Performative science, 8–9 Perfusion system, 105 Peristaltic pump, 1, 247n1 Persians, The (Aeschylus), 26 Perth, Australia, mining boom in, 88, 94–95 Petit Mal (Penny), 245 Petri dish, 90, 103, 105, 121–122, 157, 160, 163 Phase cancellation, 51 and sound, 51, 54, 84, 256n23 Phenomenotechnique (Bachelard), 50–51 Phosphene. See also Entopic images in Desana culture, 197, 199, 207 in Displace, 214, 223 and flicker, 209 phenomena of, 151, 201 Photochromic, 199, 202, 207 Photoepilepsy, 225 Piaget, Jean, 142 Pickering, Andrew, 5, 8–9, 243–246 Piezoelectric transducer, 136

307

Pinch, Trevor, 24 Pink, Sarah, 231 Pinniger, Gavin, 88, 132–136, 159 Pipette, 108–110, 112–113, 116, 123, 146–147, 149, 154, 162, 164 Pipettor, 146 Pitch (audio), 24, 32, 55, 61, 70, 78, 205 Post-anthropocentric, 248n8 Practical aesthetics (Jill Bennett), 240 Practice-based research, 6, 13, 248n9 Practice movement, in anthropology, 7–8 Presence effect (Gumbrecht), 91 Pressure zone. See Microphone Prima materia, 112, 121 Primary tissue, 112, 132, 159, 263n34 Prophet 600 (synthesizer), 188 Proprioception, 16, 173 Protocols, 108, 119, 121–123, 142, 146, 178. See also Observation Psilocybin, 201, 240 Psychedelics, 195 Psychophysics, 180, 212 Purkinje trees, 207. See also Entopic images Pynchon, Thomas, 79 QEII hospital (UWA), 129 Rabinow, Paul, 11, 175 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, 175 Rainforest Shamans (Reichel-Dolmatoff), 196, 202 Rasmussen, Steen Eiler, 63 Realism, in science studies, 52 Reflection acoustic, 21, 27, 41, 48, 51–52, 62–63, 72, 80 and analysis, xiii, 11, 157 image, 48 Refraction, 51 Regenerative medicine, 101 Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo, 196–197, 199, 202, 205, 207, 209, 211

308

Representation acoustic, 55, 232 and anthropology, 171, 189, 236 and image in science, 53, 94, 154 knowledge, 52 versus performative worldview, 213, 250n29 Research. See Research-creation Research-creation, xii, xiii, 5, 170, 190 defined, 13, 248n9 as method, 14, 16, 126, 132 Research Ethics Board (REB), 178 Resonance and affect, 81 as cultural mode, 32, 34 in O+A’s work, 35–37, 46, 58, 66, in sound, 32, 47, 51, 63–65, 72, 180 Resonance (CD), 68 Resonator. See Helmholtz resonator Reverb. See Reverberation time Reverberation time, 51 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 13–14, 103 Rhine river, 67–72 Richter, Gerhard, xi Riegl, Alois, 92 Ritual critique of, 189 in Displace, 236 van Gennep’s description of, 215 Riverworks, 28–29, 68, 84 Roberts, Lissa, 212 Rockefeller Institute (NY), 114 Roland MDX 3D scanner, 152 Rosenblueth, Arturo, 125, 138–139 Ross Ashby, W., 9 Rouch, Jean, 171 Roux, Wilhelm, 113 Sabine, Wallace, 51 Salk Institute, 7 Salzburg Festival, 26 Sarukkai, Sundar, 84 Saxel, Ora, 112 Schafer, R. Murray, 27, 83

Index

Schizophonia, 73, 260n81. See also Acoustic ecology Schlieden, Matthias, 111 Schmidgen, Henning, 133, 135 Schull, Natasha, 175 Schwann, Theodor, 111 Scott Brown, Denise, xi Scott, Nathan, 101 Scriabin, Aleksandr, 210 Secrets of the Sun (installation), 34 Sellars, Peter, 26, 239 Semblance (Langer), 163–164 “Semilivings” (Catts and Zurr), 89 Semi-Living Worry Dolls (TC&A), 90 Sennett, Richard, 155 Senses, Aristotle’s concept of, 172–173, 212 SenseStage, 186, 269n38 Sensor, 4, 67, 155, 158, 186, 197, 199 Sensorium, 14, 16, 173, 174, 177, 211–12 Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (Jones), 181 Sensory anthropology/anthropology of the senses definition of, 173–174 Howes’s use of, 176 Stoller’s distinction of, 174–175 Sensory studies, 173, 179 Sensory substitution, 194, 269n45 Serres, Michel, 165 Shaman, 189, 197, 202, 269n40 Shaman and the Jaguar, The (ReichelDolmatoff), description of hallucinogenic experience in, 202 Sharits, Paul, xi Shklovsky, Viktor, 241 Shoji screen, 239 Sick building syndrome, 175 Signal-to-noise problem, in cells, 160 Simondon, Gilbert, 164 Sine waves, 84 Sketch Up, 197 Skype, 179 Sloterdijk, Peter, 112, 181

Index

Smectic, 113 Smoak, Harry, 178, 181–185, 190, 192, 201, 223, 236 Solaris (Tarkovsky), 151 Somatic modes of attention (Csordas), 230 Sonic Vista (O+A), 15, 20–22, 30, 34, 36–38, 41–42, 46–49, 53, 65 Sostenuto, 63 Sound. See also Acoustics; Architecture, and sound; Externality, definition of; Sound environment and acoustic intensity, 180 characteristics of, 23–25 description of, in Sonic Vista, 39 materiality of, 53, 64–65 as phenomena, 50–53 user experience of, in Displace, 231–232 Sound design, 25, 26 Sound environment, 15, 25, 38, 67 Sound installations from O+A, 15, 34 Soundscape, 27, 34, 46, 83 Sound shapes, 63, 64 Sound studies, 24, 24, 243 Soundscape, 27, 34, 46, 83, 256n17 Spatialization, 54 Speakers (audio), O+A’s design of, 28, 30–31, 36–37, 46, 49, 66, 256n23 Squier, Susan, 118–119, 156 SPL (sound pressure level), definition of, 45 Standing waves, 43, 51, 60 Stanford University, 26, 83, 95 Star Trek, 198 Starbucks, 240 Stelarc, 93, 244 Stengers, Isabelle, 106–107 Sterility Carrel’s obsession with, 115 as laboratory practice, 101–103, 108, 129, 147, 150, 164 Stern, Daniel, 59, 164 Sterne, Jonathan, 135 Stewart, Kathleen, 81

309

Stiegler, Bernard, 6, 248n13 Stimuli, 16, 159, 171 Stoller, Paul, 174 Stretch receptors, 173 STS (science and technology studies/Science, Technology, and Society), xii, 7–9, 12, 24, 243, 249n17, 252n35 Stubbins, Hugh, 60 Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM), 199, 201 Studio-Laboratory (Century), 4, 247n2 Subaltern, 106 Subject-object dichotomy, 81, 83, 237 Subjectivity, Guattari on, 52, 81 Sufi cosmology, 48 Super colliculus, 173 SymbioticA architectural layout, 97 founding of, 95 modus operandi, 99 structure of, 99 Symbol, 163, 175, 197 Sympathetic vibration, 81 Synchronization, 54–55, 231 Syncytium, definition of, 91, 261n6 Synesthesia, 176, 179–180, 186, 194, 200, 222, 237 Synnott, Anthony, 179 Szanto, David, 212–214, 217, 220–221, 223, 230, 232, 236–237 T5 fluorescent tubes, 195 Tacit knowledge, 128, 265n66 Tao, 244 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 53, 151, 156 Taste as cultural construct, 213 in Displace, 232–233 history of, 212 Szanto’s critique of, 213–214 Taussig, Michael, 12, 174 TC&A (Tissue Culture and Art Project), 89, 97, 101, 123

310

Techne, 237 Technoepistemic (Kay), 119 Technologies of the self (Foucault), 193, 244, 269n44 Technologies of the senses, 193 Technology and anthropology, 171, 175, 248n13 McLuhan on, 45 and magic, 106 and phenomenology, 50 Technoscience definition of, 6, 83 relationship to art, 13 Stenger’s discussion of, 106–107 Tedlock, Barbara, xiii, 254n54 Teflon, 102, 122, 127 Telepathy, 114, 115, 263–64n46 Carrel’s interest in, 114–115 described in “The Tissue Culture King,” 264n46 Tellenbach, Hubertus, 80–81 TEMA (Tissue Engineered Muscle Actuators), 15–16, 89, 90–91, 121, 127, 135, 139, 163–164, 239, 245 Temporal shape, 164 Temporality Landecker on, 93 manifested in cell culture, 114–115 and ontogenesis, 164 and repetition in cell culture, 119 in TEMA, 126, 135 Tendoniopathy, 129 Theater of Cruelty (Artaud), 107 Thermoception, 173 Thermochromic ink, 186 Thing Knowledge (Baird), 135 Thin Man, The, 232 Thompson, Emily, 51 Thoreau, Henry David, 179, 186 Tiger Balm, use of, in Displace, 205, 215, 231 Timbre, 1, 24, 204 Time constant, 126 Time profile (Stern), 164

Index

Tissue culture definition of, 90 history of, 113–116 “like cooking,” 107–108 materials used in, 164 “point of view,” 118 TC&A’s use of, in art, 89 and temporality, 93 Tissue culture flask, 87 Carrel’s improvement of, 114 Tissue engineering, 121–120 Tomes, Robert, 186 Torgue, Henry, 46, 65 Traffic Mantra (O+A), 34–35 Trajan’s Forum, 25, 34 Trance, 207, 227 Translation in actor–network theory, 7, 10 in anthropology, 175, 188, 194, 204, 211 Transmediale festival, 59–60 Traweek, Sharon, 8 Tremblay, Matthieu (Matt), 178, 181–184, 187, 201–202, 217, 223, 233 Trigeminal sensations, definition of, 221 Trower, Shelly, 68 Trypsin, 116–118. See also Trypsinization (process) Trypsinization (process), 117, 122 Tukano (Colombia), 196, 179, 204, 207 Tuning Pickering’s definition of, 83–84 and sound, 32, 51, 71, 256n22 tubes in O+A’s work, 15, 29, 36, 65–66 Tuning of the World (Schafer), 83 Tupperware, 223 Turner, Victor, 176, 197 Tuzin, Donald, 180, 182 Tympanic membrane (Sterne), 34 Type 1 collagen definition of, 129 use of, in TEMA, 18, 132, 144, 152, 155, 159, 162 Tzotzil, 179–181

Index

Umeda (New Guinea), 175 Unimodal, 233 University of Western Australia (UWA), 89, 95 Vacanti, Joseph, 89, 120 Van Gennep, Arnold, 215 Vaseline, use of, in PDMS experiments, 154 Vasulka, Steina, 48 Venturi, Robert, xi Verfremdung (Brecht), 177 Vibration in Displace, 172, 179, 194, 200, 226–227, 231, 233 and muscle movement, 89, 91, 164, 239 as nonhuman force, 81, 169–170, 180 relation to numinous experience, 180–181, 205 in sound, 4, 23–24, 27–28, 32, 34, 39, 41, 47, 53, 70, 80, 135 Victimless Leather (TC&A), 89 Viola, Bill, xi, 183 Virchow, Rudolf, 111 Virtuality and art, 14, 163 Simondon’s notion of, 164 Vitality and forms of life, 150 Mitchell’s definition of, in bioart, 92–93 O+A discussion of, 40–41, 62 Vitality affect (Stern), 59, 164, 260n66 Voestalpine, 26, 28 Von Helmholtz, Hermann, 15, 27, 32–34, 135 Wacquant, Loic, xii, 11 Walker Art Center, 42 Water harp, 68, 70–71 Watson and Crick, 135 Ways of Sensing (Howes and Classen), xi, 180 Webster, John, 25 Wet definition of, 93 relationship to laboratories, 99, 112, 127

311

White noise, 24, 28, 52, 55, 67, 72, 79, 205 and taste, 214 Whitney, Irene Hixon, 42 Wiener, Norbert, 125, 138–139 Winner, Langdon, 52 Wirkungzusammenhang (“interdependence of conditions”), 49, 82 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 150 Woodruff, Robert, 25 Woolgar, Steve, 7–8 Writing culture debate, 11 Yaffe, David, 112 Ypres, France, poison gas used in World War I in, 181 Zabriskie Point, Foucault’s drug trip at, 204 Zeitmessungen (“time measurements”), 135 Zellkulturflasche, 109. See also Tissue culture Ziegler, Toby, 183 Zigkrata, Olga, 178 Zumthor, Peter, 62 Zurr, Ionat, 15, 88–89, 95, 99, 176, 245