Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (review)

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

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

In laying out a horizontal history of technology in performance, proceeding chronologically through each of scenography, architecture, projection, etc., looping back in time to layer these histories atop one another with each successive chapter, Salter attends more to the artists of whom he speaks than the field of which he speaks. He subtly gestures toward ongoing debates in performance studies [i.e., "Does the performer gradually become dematerialized by the electronic fog of the increasingly realistic digital image [. . .] or have the architectonics of the projected image sufficiently overwhelmed the human body so that the screen itself now becomes the new site and body of performance?" (164); "Was the screen simply a surface upon which to cast the results of infinitely complex processes that took place on a stage without actors [. . .]?" (179)], but he refrains from entertaining the questions with which he...