Introduction
We are required to read the book named Alien agency, by Chris Salter. This book is mainly consisted of three different artistic projects.
‘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?’
This citation seems like the main concept of these three projects. They are mainly focus on the power of nonhuman objects which can affect human actively. Technology was seen as extensions of human body. That was built upon the perspective of human. Alien agency is more like departure from how technology assigned extra abilities to non-human objects. I read the first chapter and tried to answer three questions shown as following.
What are the key themes the chapter discusses?
The chapter one describes an experience, practice about ‘tuning the world’, which explores the actions and behaviours of sounds, and how to transform the sound. The author at first use a lot of adjective word to describe what he saw and what he heard. Furthermore, he present the idea about how the visual part and sonic part were separated with each other. Based on this, he emphasize the independence of sound, which is a independent material.
(picture from alien agency, by Chris Salter. P.20)
How does the artist document his process?
The Author describes the making process similar as a scientific test from first person perspective. What more, The author also departure from the history and culture of the city to describe his feeling about this city.
How does he use ethnography in his work as a methodology?
At first, the author contextualise some relevant theories about sonic/sound, which not only from the technical, physical perspective, but also include the phenomenon technology, which is about the human perception, how human perceive and experience the sounds. After this, when the author starts to describe the experiments, he uses ethnography, where he describe something happened in first person. Like the field research, people always record the personal experience to analyse one kind of phenomenon.
**If sound studies focuses on how we come to know sound through its social-cultural-technical-economic manifestations, what is it about the auditor’s own unique material and energetic propensity that makes it so difficult to describe?**
From the third person perspective, we shouldn’t learn about sound only from the manifestations, but we should consider it as an agency, an entity, a material, a visible material to learn its power and energetic and performative characters
Salter, Chris. Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making. The MIT Press, 2015.
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